isopede

I am a software engineer, but I've recently joined a hardware startup and we're struggling to do project management across the whole project (hardware, firmware, client PC/cloud stack). I understand the argument against waterfall, but the agile tools seem to have a steep impedance mismatch against the way hardware is designed vs software. In hardware, product and board requirements are set in stone at the beginning, and schedule is determined off of external dates like when certain boards arrive.

At any point in time we have many boards in different stages of design, each with a well defined workflow (design, build, bringup, test, etc). If an error is encountered during the process, everything that depends on that board is delayed, and the schedule needs to reflect that.

I'm having trouble finding the right tools to visualize and plan these dependencies, most of the tools I've used are all software-focused, involving boards and swimlanes and other agile-oriented nonsense that doesn't map particularly well to board design.

Is there a tool that can generate waterfall dependency-style charts (gantt?) while still providing a full featured issue/bug-tracking interface? I don't mind doing an agile-like process, but the tools need to provide me with a high-level picture of things like:

1) When does this board come in? 2) How does this affect schedule?

I trialed Jira+some gantt plugins, clubhouse, and proggio, and none of them seem to have both a good issue tracking interface, and a top-down planning tool.