This is a story about how we were using Google Spreadsheets as a Q&A management tool for a certain development project, but when the number of Q&As reached about 50, it almost collapsed, so we migrated to GitHub issues.

Project Premise

Since the project was being conducted with another company, we needed to introduce a new tool for Q&A exchanges.

While we were using Slack for synchronous communication, we anticipated that Slack wouldn’t work well for asynchronous communication, so we decided to introduce another tool.

Since both our company and the other company managed email addresses with G Suite, we simply started Q&A with Google Spreadsheets, but this was a mistake.

○○ as Ticket Management Tools

I compared “Google Spreadsheets” and “GitHub issue functionality” from a ticket management tool perspective.

Google Spreadsheets

Advantages

• Anyone who has used Excel can use it immediately
• Good from an information management perspective since sharing scope restrictions are guaranteed with G Suite

Disadvantages

• Excel and Google Spreadsheets are spreadsheet software, so the use case is different
• Not suitable for communication involving multiple rounds of Q&A

GitHub Issues

Advantages

• Low barrier to adoption since our company also uses GitHub for development
• Engineers can use it
• Easy to paste code snippets

Disadvantages

• High barrier to adoption for people who haven't used GitHub issues
• Engineers can use it
• English rather than Japanese

Fortunately, the person in charge at the other company quickly agreed to migrate Q&A exchanges from Google Spreadsheets to GitHub issues.

Project Management Tools and Other Options

The other two project management tools we considered as candidates were:

• Asana
• Trello

Since both are free-to-use tools, we planned to propose them as alternatives if GitHub issues were rejected. For now, success means that GitHub issues don’t cause problems for Q&A communication, but if we encounter issues, we might migrate to Asana or Trello.

That’s all from the Gemba where I want to manage projects with other companies successfully.