Lean Project Management tool/defect tracker
January 22, 2014

Lean Project Management tool/defect tracker

Chris Rzepka | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction

We used Asana for a website redesign project. It was used by our entire organization, and it helped track the progress of issues we encountered during testing. We were able to post DEV, QA, and Creative tasks and keep track of each by promoting them through different stages i.e. In progress, done, tested, etc.
  • Large number of tasks slow down the tool.
  • Easier way of tracking progress of individual items (if there were flags to mark items, in progress, done, etc)
  • Sometimes you had to scroll through tiny windows to see the content.
  • Large number of items slows down the UI.
  • It would be great if individual "ticket" could be promoted through multiple stages (i.e. in dev, dev complete, in testing, testing complete) Our team created header tickets and would have to manually move tickets around instead of just flagging them.
  • The way things are displayed sometimes cause it hard to read content, i.e. you have to scroll through tiny windows to read what is inside.
  • Negative - with the ui slowing down due to a large number of tasks sometimes it would crash
  • Positive - we were able to add our own process for using the tool which everyone followed successfully
I would say that Asana compared to a program like Mingle or JIRA is a very lean version of those tools. Mingle and JIRA and very feature heavy and can be configured to meet the needs of a team, I am unsure if the same goes for Asana. I think that with some few minor updates it can be on their level. We chose Asana because our client was able to easily see our progress once we figured out a way and got everyone on board to following a process we put in place.
The employer I am with now needs fully functional systems such as JIRA or VersionOne. They would not switch to Asana just due to the needs.
I think the tool works great for a waterfall process but not so much in an agile environment. I think in an agile environment users would want a little bit more control and an easier way of viewing current progress on a given project. I would recommend Asana to a colleague since it is fairly easy to learn how to use and can be a great tool.

Usability

I would give ASANA a 6 on the usability scale due to it being fairly easy to use once you get the hang of it. The learning curve is not that steep and once you become proficient it is a fast system to navigate around when it works as intended.
ProsCons
Technical support not required
Quick to learn
Not well integrated
Lots to learn
  • Creating new tickets
  • Adding comments
  • adding screenshots.
  • UI broke sometimes it froze
  • Moving tasks under different header tickets proved to be cumbersome when the list grew large