Assembla

We like Assembla for it's collaboration amongst our team members spread all over the world. It provides real time metrics for our developers. We have had several other firms attempt to lure us away from Assembla.

The development team likes the ability to set up quick Sprints, allocate team members to specific tasks, and have all documents contained in one centralized system.

The Kaban and list view are convenient. Being able to add options to tickets are also good for management, and the prioritization set is good too. The way the tickets keep track of the dates and hours of every change in the ticket is really good. And the relationships you can build between tickets is good too.

A don't like many things about this software, the main thing is that Is too hard to plan long-term using it. Also is hard to have access to quantitative reports.

To keep all my information accurate and easy to access I use Airtable to organize the information I have on Assembla. Because Assembla is too slow and too hard to get reports from it. Everyone at my office does the same thing of using another tool to interpret and organize the info we have on Assembla.

I think a Gantt view would help and a view more likely to excel in which you could add and edit tickets faster. It would be great if you could build features for the admins to build their own statistics and reports. And features to automate some actions on tickets.

Ticketing is critical to our process for managing software project. Assembla has a great list view that allow us to have custom fields for each project. This allows us to create views into projects that sort and filter tickets by criteria meaningful to our stakeholders.

Additionally tickets have good support for relationships and some hierarchy.

This is in contrast to GitHub or GitLab issues, which offer limited support for sorting and filtering and require a tedious management of tags for everything not provided by default (which isn't much)

A project with any serious complexity should consider using Assembla for ticket management.

The wiki syntax for tickets is non-standard and clunky. Developers use Markdown for every other tool that requires them to write prose. The lack of support for Markdown seems like a fairly large oversight. This becomes especially egregious when developers refuse to learn yet another syntax and just paste markdown into tickets despite the lack of support. Who can blame them.

A more minor point is that the various features lack a coherent design language and level of quality. The UI/UX can be fairly different between modules, almost like they were written by different teams or at different eras of web development history. Also the level of quality varies wildly. You will find that some modules are rife with bugs and interface quirks while others operate bug free using modern interface idioms.

Overall this makes the product seem lower quality than something more polished like GitHub, despite having a solid core of features needed for real project management.