GitHub: Are there external tools for managing issues list vs. project backlog

Question

Recently I posted one of my the projects¹ on GitHub and as I was exploring capabilities of the site, I noticed they have a rather decent issue tracking section.

I want to use that section as a) other people can report bugs if they'd like and b) other people can see which bugs I'm aware of. However, as others have noted, issues list cannot be prioritized in order to create a project backlog. For now my backlog has been a text file, but I'd like to be able to have it integrated so the same information isn't maintained in different places.

Having a fully ordered list, which is something we also practice at work, has been very useful as I can open one file, start with line 1 and fire off 2 or 3 items in one sitting without having to go back to a full issues/stories bucket. GitHub doesn't offer this.

What GitHub does offer is a very nice and clean API so issues can easily be exported into anything else. I've searched to see if there are other websites (like Trello) that integrate with GitHub issues, but did not find anything.

Does anyone know of such a product, service or offline tool? Those that use GitHub, what is your experience in managing backlog? I kinda hate the idea of manually managing two disconnected lists like some people seem to be doing with Wiki project pages.

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^{1 - are shameless plugs allowed no this site? Searched but didn't find a definite answer. If it's bad practice, STOP and don't read further}

^{As a developer I got sick and tired of navigating to same set of folders 30 times a day, so I wrote a little, auto-collapsible utility that gets stuck to the desktop and allows easy access to the folders you constantly use.}

Answer 1

This is a new space, so there aren't very many tools in it.

• Ryan Rauh's Huboard
• Heroku's issue viewer

Answer 2

I did a little digging around and didn't quite find what I was looking for. So then I looked at GitHub and Trello Web Service APIs and asked myself, how bad can it be to just write a synchronizer utility that would take issues from one place and synchronize it with the other one.

I started another project on GitHub, TrackerSync. It is in rather rough form at the moment, but so far it got me exactly what I was looking for. I can use GitHub's Issues list to have myself or others report issues. When the utility is executed, those issues automagically show up in Trello, where I can add them to a prioritized backlog. When I move the issue in Trello from the backlog into "completed" list, next utility run will go back to GitHub and close the corresponding issue.

If there's any interest in this utility, I'll be more than happy to continue refining it.

Answer 3

I think that if you use Eclipse for development, you can make use of their Mylyn connector for github.