Project Management Software for Software

The board and the code, telling two different stories

Most sprint boards run on trust: an engineer opens a task, works on it, and is supposed to remember to drag the card across the board as they go. In practice the card update is the first thing that slips under deadline pressure, which means the board that's supposed to show reality is showing whatever someone last had time to update, usually stale by a day or two, sometimes by a sprint.

The result is a standup where the honest answer to "what's the status" is whatever's in someone's head that morning, not what's on the board. Burndown charts, if anyone bothers, get built from that same unreliable input, which means the chart a manager takes into a planning meeting reflects what people remembered to update, not what actually shipped.

Sprint planning suffers the same way. Without real cycle-time data, a team estimates the next sprint on gut feel about how long similar tickets took last time: a number that's really just whoever's most confident in the planning meeting remembering it a little optimistically. The team commits to eight tickets, closes five, and nobody has hard numbers to explain the gap or correct the estimate next time around.

ShipSprint closes that gap by watching the codebase instead of asking engineers to narrate it. Open a branch named after a card and the card moves to in-progress on its own. Merge the pull request and the card closes itself. The board stops being a second copy of what's already true in Git and starts being a live view of it.

Because that activity is already flowing in, burndown and cycle-time analytics build themselves from real merge history rather than manually logged status. A burndown chart reflects delivered pull requests, and cycle time shows how long a card genuinely sat between branch and merge, not between two status updates someone remembered to make.

A sprint review that doesn't start with "let me check"

Most sprint reviews open with someone scrolling through a board trying to remember which cards are actually done, because "done" has meant different things depending on who last touched a card and how carefully. Half the meeting is spent reconciling the board with reality before anyone can talk about what reality means for next sprint.

When branches move cards and merges close them, that reconciliation step doesn't need to happen. A card marked done is done because its pull request merged, not because someone remembered to drag it. The burndown chart walking into that review is built from the same merge history, so the conversation can start at "here's what shipped and here's the trend" instead of "let me check what's actually finished." Cycle time, the gap between opening a branch and merging it, surfaces the tickets that quietly took three times longer than planned, which is usually more useful for the next planning session than the burndown chart alone.

Everything Git doesn't know

Decisions that would otherwise live in a merged pull request's description, or a Slack thread that scrolled away, sit on a wiki page next to the work instead, with page history intact, and any sentence there can become a task. That's useful for the "why did we do it this way" question that shows up eighteen months later during a rewrite.

It's still one subscription for the whole company, not just engineering: HR, marketing and operations get their own templates on the same account. But for a software company the center of gravity is understandably the sprint board, which is why it's the one board here that reads the codebase directly instead of asking anyone to describe it.

Where this fits

This is written for a team where GitHub is already the center of engineering work: branches, pull requests, a repo everyone lives in daily. If engineering work isn't tracked through Git yet, or the team is small enough that a shared doc still covers it, the sync described here won't have much to attach to just yet.

A broader technology company juggling engineering against product and go-to-market at the same time may find that a wider view of the company, not just the sprint board, matches how its week actually runs.

Somewhere between those two is a small software house building its own product while also taking on contract work for a client or two. That combination works here too: the product side runs sprints against the GitHub sync described above, and a client engagement runs as its own board with its own request queue, on the same subscription rather than two separate ones.

What it costs

• Free, forever, up to 5 users and 2 projects: enough to connect one repo and see whether the GitHub sync actually saves anyone time.
• Team, ₹299 per user monthly or ₹2,899 yearly, up to 40 users.
• Business, ₹599 per user monthly or ₹6,499 yearly, adds burndown-backed forecasts, scorecards and the owner command center.
• Every paid plan starts with a 14-day full-access trial on Business, sample project preloaded, no card required.