Transition from Asana
Asana is especially popular among startups, tech companies, and other businesses that work on project-based deliverables. Its primary focus is on creating tasks, assigning them to team members, setting due dates, and marking priorities. Compared to other issue tracking systems, its user interface is simpler and more intuitive. It's generally favored by non-technical teams due to its strong project management features, ability to manage workloads, and create a visual roadmap of tasks.
If you or your team have been working with Asana and would like to recreate specific aspects of this experience in YouTrack, consider the strategies described here.
Project Configuration
By default, Asana uses very few fields to manage and organize tasks. This includes fields for storing the Assignee, Due date, Priority, and Status. The project templates provided by default in YouTrack have several more fields. Furthermore, the default fields for storing Priority and Status have more values than those that are initially offered by Asana.
If you're looking to recreate an Asana-style experience, create a project in YouTrack and customize the set of fields and values to match what you would find by default in Asana. Your fields and sets of values could look something like this:
When done, you can convert this project into a custom template that you can use as the basis for all new YouTrack projects.
To learn how to customize the set of fields in your YouTrack project, see Manage Custom Fields.
To learn how to create a project template, see Custom Project Templates.
Terminology
When you first switch from Asana to YouTrack, you may encounter terms that refer to one thing in Asana that mean something slightly different in YouTrack. You'll also discover some new terms that might seem unfamiliar. Use this list of terms to help you figure out where to find what you're looking for in YouTrack.
- Issue
Issues are the basic unit of work in YouTrack. An issue can be anything that needs to be addressed or resolved, such as a bug in the code, operational failures, feature requests, improvements, and other unexpected events. These issues often need to be identified, tracked, addressed, and resolved in a systematic way. This term is commonly used in systems that track various types of work that can be processes faster if categorized in a specific way.
In Asana, the basic unit of work is a task. Each task can be broken down into smaller units of work, which are called subtasks.
If your team is expected to address various problems that impede development or capture ideas for future improvements, it may help to add a Type field to categorize different types of issues as they arise. Otherwise, you can streamline your setup by removing the type field and formulate each issue in your project as a task or subtask.
- Workflows
In YouTrack, a workflow is used to perform actions that are meant to occur in a predictable sequence, automating repetitive manual tasks. Here, a workflow is a collection of rules that can be applied in a specific project. Together, these rules are used to automate the lifecycle of the tasks managed by the project team.
In Asana, a workflow is generally used to move pieces of work through different stages of a pipeline, while rules are used to automate manual procedures.
If you're looking to recreate the functionality supported by a workflow in Asana, this would probably be done using a specific type of workflow in YouTrack, which is called a state-machine. The state-machine would be used to determine how work moves through the pipeline, with other rules that dictate what actions are automated when entering or exiting each stage.
To learn more about state-machine rules in YouTrack, see State-machine Rules.
To learn about other types of workflow rules, see Workflow Rule Types.
- Rules
In Asana, rules are used to streamline routine tasks and establish workflows. Each rule has a trigger that activates it and an action that is performed automatically.
This is very similar to how rules are applied to issues in YouTrack, where rules are triggered by specific events and perform predefined actions.
The main difference here is that rules in YouTrack are added to a package that can be attached and activated in various projects, and this package is called a workflow. In Asana, these rules are created and activated at the project level. The term workflow is used in a slightly different way, as described above.
Your Daily Routine
If you've set everything up in such a way that you can work with issues in YouTrack similar to your previous approach for managing tasks in Asana, you should be able to go about your daily work in YouTrack.
The primary view for managing work in Asana is the My tasks page. This acts as your individual to-do list, automatically gathering tasks assigned to you across all projects.
In YouTrack, this information is displayed in the Issues list. To work with the list effectively, you need to filter it to show information that helps you manage and prioritize your workload. You can filter the list dynamically or using predefined saved searches.
YouTrack provides the following default saved searches out of the box:
Assigned to me
Commented by me
Reported by me
The Assigned to me query shows you the same information that you would find on the My tasks page in Asana. You can even recreate the title for the page by filtering for issues with the query for: me, then saving this search with the name My tasks.
Use the following controls to customize this view:
Open the List Settings menu to choose which fields are displayed in the table.
Click the field labels in the header to dynamically sort each column.
Unfortunately, YouTrack doesn't have any controls that let you sort your tasks into different groups, but you can still use the dynamic sorting for different values to help you prioritize your work.
In addition to the Issues list, here are a few additional views you can use to track your work:
If you prefer to manage your work using the visual Board in Asana, you can create a personal agile board in YouTrack and track your tasks there.
To learn more, see Set up a Personal Board.
If you prefer to work with a Calendar view, you can set up a personal dashboard and track your work using a due date calendar widget.
To learn more, see Due Date Calendar Widgets.