I just saw this post on Stackshare and it really hit home with me. My use case is a software development / app start-up trying to manage all company operations from a Single Source of Truth tool. But development is my biggest need. I have been evaluating everything under the sun in the market for about 2 years, and recently decided to move my team to Asana. Main reason is Flexibility, speed moving around the UI, and some good integrations. But Dev stuff I would not put on that list,. I have been wondering how to manage with Asana being a sort of silo to my development team, and this post really highlights most of my problem. I was a bit surprised to see this kind of candor out of a developer:
As I am just into Asana and getting ready to commit my team to it for some time to come, I would be grateful to find out thinking out there, in particular if any Asana Product folks would be so kind as to weigh in, about the prospect of getting any of this in Asana in say the next 2 years.
I know the Unito integration is good on the 2-way sync, but what I really am hoping is you’d get to a point where Asana could fill the role of a Jira, and you would just directly connect to the Version Control tool, so you could see CI/CD, Test Case, commits, PR’s etc progressing along from inside Asana. I imagine there are thousands of software teams in Asana that have this need, too.
So yes, I was excited to see the new integration, given that it was “hand built” by Asana. I’ve tested it, and I think to the point of this comment on StackShare, it’s missing a lot of the seamless needs developers would have. You have to hand add, as far as I can tell, each Asana task into Jira, so that’s a bunch of work. The visualization of the JIra issue inside the Asana task is nice, but as far as I could tell the sync was not as full-featured as it could be. One thing I like about Unito is that, after you configure, just about everything between the 2 systems syncs up. But it too has an array of issues, like how to map Jira “Epics” and “Stories” into Asana. Is an Epic a project, or a task with subtasks as stories?
What I’m curious about are any futures plans to evolve Asana to take the role of Jira for developers and directly integrate with the dev ops/source control stuff. If you think about it, Jira is actually just a project management tool like Asana. I value Jira most due to its very close integrations with the “real” dev tools like CI/CD, Git Helpers, etc. If you could get that sensibly in Asana, you wouldn’t need to have an integration with Jira, which itself is not actually the “heart” of development, but nothing more than a task/bug tracker, just like Asana.
I am curious if we will hear any more on this. The more I dig into Asana and see how prevalent it is with Dev Teams (including Unito itself from what I hear), I become more curious as to whether there are any plans at all develop Asana’s capabilities here.
