I will take a look at Shortcut and see how it fits.

For context: in almost all project (including side projects) where I am involved we are using ShapeUp.

We start with a general description of what we want to solve and what value will bring to the user. This is mostly shaped as a conversation between multiple people designers, developers, business managers.

Then we (technical) take that and create a kind of technical pitch in a format close to an RFC where we discuss and solve any architectural challenges or we define the API (it depends). Here I need to have something that has a better support for code highlighting as we sometimes use code samples. Basecamp has a very simple code highlighting support and it also does not support per line comments. Thus a discussion around the RFC can have only parent comments and we sometimes hit 20-30 comments (we mostly work async remote).

Then once RFC is agreed we need to do a high level planning of the changes needed to be done per each system.

And from there each team will create one or many PRs where the work is done. Thus from this point on the progress can only be seen in Github (or Gitlab).

So in a way from the moment the first line of code is written you can see the state of the project only in Git. Someone has to manually update Basecamp or we also tried this: create a Todo in Basecamp for each Github issue and linked them together.

Maybe what I want it does not exists!

There's a lot of Atlassian hate out there and it does cost money as you grow as well. They can solve many of these things within their toolchain though. Disclaimer: I do not work for Atlassian.

Confluence allows you to create such an RFC document where everyone has edit access and there's history. You can embed technical drawings easily (e.g. draw.io diagrams directly edited - or externally) in Confluence and showing inline as well. Of course especially if you grew up with the great old editor, the new one sucks, as it's all WYSIWYG now and it has a few bugs and idiosyncrasies - nothing is perfect. Syntax highlighting in Atlassian products supports many languages and I find is totally 'good enough'. You can comment on any string (highlight whatever you want and add an inline comment on it). There's no threading in such comments but you can have a conversation i.e. one long thread on such comments. The comment section on the bottom of each page even has threading.

Of course everyone here hates Confluence and Atlassian.

Jira will help you if you do want to do task tracking after that. That's an if. You don't have to if you are happy w/ just having PRs in Github. But if you want to show progress automatically linked in a tool that is more accessible to business people it can be as simple as opening a mostly empty task in Jira and hooking up Github/Bitbucket to it. It will automatically link your PRs, commits and branches to the ticket, if you just include the ticket number in the branch name/commits/PR. You can even transition tickets through commit message comments if you really really hate Jira and don't mind having those in your commit messages. Of course you will have people that think it's way too much bureaucrazy to include a ticket number in commit messages and such but I find it's a very tiny 'price' to pay for visibility across an org that does not purely consist of technical people.

Of course everyone here hates Jira and Atlassian.

If you want to keep using Github, use that. I found Bitbucket's UI and UX much better with the caveat that this only applies to Bitbucket's Server product not the Cloud version.

So if you can see past the hate for corporate bureaucracy that can be implemented using Atlassian tools and use these tools for good within your organization, you have a pretty neat toolchain at your fingertips.

I wouldn't say that I hate Atlassian but I didn't get on with either Confluence or Jira. I think now that web applications have become so advanced, we are starting to suffer from subtle UX issues that are not necessarily easy to pin-down.

Some issues are oobvious like too many clicks; not putting common operations in the same part of the screen; general latency, especially when you need to use too many clicks.

But the ones I am talking about are more like how does this UI representation match the way I see these things in my head. Trello works because tasks to most people are post-it notes or index cards, as soon as you end up adding a lot of fluff to contain the extra options, it feels jarring even if it is conceptually the same thing. Lots of tools offer the "quick add" function and this can help but unless I feel that I can quickly achieve what I need with a tool, I won't use it even if I can't say exactly why.

Totally agree with things like cards and such. Fun part is that Jira has had this as an add on for much longer than some people realize. Probably because they were in companies that did not let them use that or did not let them use it in an effective way. It started as a plugin called GreenHopper and Atlassian bought them, which is now just "Jira Software".

What I'm talking about is a simple Kanban board, where the cards are the Jira issues. If you use a simple workflow (such as the default "Open, In Progress, Done", which you can transition in any way you want) you are set very quickly. Simply create a Kanban board and you're basically at Trello.

Now I get it, because of Jira's legacy and what it can do, it can be overwhelming how to configure it. I am biased there because I've been using it for such a long time, including as someone w/ admin privileges) that I know what to do to achieve what our team wants/needs almost instantly and if I have admin privileges I can either do it myself really quickly or I can tell someone w/ privileges what to do so that we get what we want - if the hierarchy is flat enough :), so I have no huge friction to achieve these things with the tool.

I have the opposite problem usually with other tools. Things I take for granted I can do with the Atlassian toolchain are impossible or have been requested from other tools for years and not been implemented. An easy example is Github. They had no "File Explorer" view in PRs. All just a big page you scroll through. It's impossible to do a proper PR that way if you ask me. We've had this since Crucible days in the Atlassian toolchain. And yes, finally Github does have it too now and I can easily navigate back and forth between files while cross referencing things. Github Actions vs. Bamboo. Just so rudimentary in comparison. It has some really nice features out of the box that Atlassian only added later on but is lacking in many other areas. Awesome to have the ability to specify actions directly in your repo (in `.github/`) but I can't easily see old failed builds through my PR (this is important, yes builds fail and I need to cross reference them and I don't want to go to a filter UI somewhere outside my PR). This seems to basic. While I can define workflows through code, I can't properly introduce one on a branch. I have to cheat to get it onto `master` first.

+1 for Shortcut/Clubhouse. Simple. Uncluttered. Made our planning really easy to visualise.