[HN Gopher] Plane: Open-Source Alternative to Jira
___________________________________________________________________
Plane: Open-Source Alternative to Jira
Author : viharkurama
Score : 594 points
Date : 2023-05-30 19:42 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| simmanian wrote:
| I've been looking for a competitive open source alternative to
| Jira for a non-profit I volunteer at because they cannot afford
| to pay for any cloud service and Trello has its limitations. Does
| Plane offer all pro features for open source instances as well?
| Does it support login via Google or other identity providers?
| lstamour wrote:
| Edit: I should clarify, supporting open source is the best
| possible model for price pressure and innovation, especially in
| the cloud hosting space, but I also wanted to let other non-
| profits know about the discount if Jira is too expensive per-
| user due to volunteers, etc.
|
| FYI, Atlassian has a non-profits license. While the cloud
| version only has a discount so you still have to pay per user,
| the on-prem version is free. Best part about running on-prem
| under this license is that a lot of on-prem extensions have
| opted in to atlassian marketplace licensing and offer free
| plans for non-profits. While this would be expensive to do in
| the cloud, because the plugins run on your server, it's
| basically free for everyone involved. The downside is you still
| have to manage and renew licenses, and don't expect too much
| support given the free price.
|
| > Atlassian also offers free Data Center (self-managed)
| licenses for registered charitable non-profit organizations
| that are non-government, non-academic, non-commercial in
| nature, non-political, and have no religious affiliation.
|
| More at https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/purchase-
| licensing#trial... under the faq question about non-profit
| pricing...
| simmanian wrote:
| unfortunately, we are a buddhist organization so we do not
| qualify.
| brightball wrote:
| You can do a lot on free ClickUp
| umangrathi wrote:
| Recommend Clickup highly for multi user flows on a free tier
| (infinite users), only issue you can not attach many files
| (have uses google drive link for that earlier)
| smallerfish wrote:
| Check out Youtrack - not open source, but free if you have 10
| or fewer users.
| simmanian wrote:
| we are trying to work with ~35 volunteers for this purpose,
| but i will check it out nonetheless.
| viharkurama wrote:
| Youtrack is great but complicated with it's UX. Code level
| extensibility with Project management tools is near zero. We
| are working on our extensibility framework called Propel, it
| gives you the ability to write code with React to extend
| Plane. Open-sourcing in Q3 2023.
| shamiln wrote:
| Now this extensibility is what I'm interested in, as I'm
| working in a project which needs front end extensibility
| and have no idea where to start!
| contravariant wrote:
| That's a bit unfair towards youtrack, you can extend its
| behaviour with arbitrary javascript. It's not the cleanest
| development experience I had but it is powerful.
|
| Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean by "code level
| extensibility".
| netsharc wrote:
| I've used Redmine although with just 2 users:
| https://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki
|
| The per-project wiki feature is useful for documentation.
| NickNameNick wrote:
| I always liked how Redmine has a tree of projects, rather
| than just a list.
| andrewl wrote:
| OpenProject (www.openproject.org) is a fork of Redmine. I
| have not used it, but I did extensive research on it a
| couple of years ago while looking for a new project
| management system for our division. I think it is worth a
| look.
| kypro wrote:
| I used to use Redmine at a company I worked for several years
| ago. There was probably about 20 of us in total. It worked
| well.
| kirbyfan64sos wrote:
| Check out Taiga: https://www.taiga.io/
|
| By the creators of Penpot, free plan is basically only missing
| premium support. Not sure about the login though...there seem
| to be some plugins for it, not sure how that works with the
| hosted version?
| simmanian wrote:
| thanks! looks like it's also open source as well.
| viharkurama wrote:
| We have a singular focus working only on Plane and making it
| big for everyone. We are still in early stages, so had to
| rush on few decisions, but we treat every user the same.
| cutemonster wrote:
| What's the differences between Plane and Tagia? (I actually
| came to think about Tagia me too when I saw this HN about
| Plane)
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Do you know if it integrates with GitHub pull-requests?
| tupolef wrote:
| Try a stack like this :
|
| Zammad + Taiga.io|Redmine + Growi|Xwiki + Rocket.chat
| mch82 wrote:
| Try GitLab with all project features disabled except the issue
| tracker. It works quite well & simple Kanban workflows are
| super easy to setup.
|
| Edit: in the spirit of the thread, also try Plane.
| pachico wrote:
| I don't know how Plane is but I know very well how Jira is and it
| definitely needs a viable alternative.
| AltruisticGapHN wrote:
| I remember using JIRA like 12 years ago, as a developer. We had a
| big "issues" list. It was a plain table, really easy to scan and
| see progress.
|
| Ten+ years later I had to use Jira in another company and now
| it's all like expanding panels, sidebars, constantly navigating
| to different views. I couldnt get a simple straightforward list
| of issues, or I could only see things assigned to me as opposed
| to see the progress of the team in a straightforward table...
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Worth noting - I am not sure how the legalities of it all map out
| but although it is Apache licensed, it appears to depend on MinIO
| which is AGPL for self-hosting. That may be just a swappable back
| end S3 layer but if you want to self host this you may need to be
| comfortable with AGPL (for those in environments that are
| allergic to AGPL ...)
| rst wrote:
| Just about any ticketing system (including the established open-
| source ones) could be described as an "alternative to JIRA", even
| if bare-bones, so you might be better off describing the unique
| capabilities or UX that makes this one special. (And if
| mentioning JIRA at all, say what you offer to people converting
| -- $dayjob would probably be interested in one that seamlessly
| imports tickets with extra custom attributes and custom workflow
| which refers to them, but implementing that is not an easy lift.)
| jrockway wrote:
| You reminded me of Jira's most hilarious feature; if you type
| JIRA in a ticket, it auto-corrects it to "Jira". This one
| better do that or, uh, it's one less checkmark on the
| comparison chart!
| unixhero wrote:
| Plans: Plane Free - Free forever
|
| Forever, are you sure about that?
| keyle wrote:
| The plane free plan is ;)
| pfych wrote:
| I tried setting this up on my homelab via docker. Not only did it
| take ages to build, I found it really difficult to run it behind
| an already configured nginx instance, it seemed set on running
| its own one. There's an open ticket on the repo to improved the
| docker setup experience, I'll definitely be checking this out in
| a few months once its all be streamlined.
| fffrantz wrote:
| It seems ok with podman but I can never login using the default
| credentials. Build time was indeed pretty long as well, and
| throwing all kinds of errors. I think if you set it up with an
| IP address, it doesn't run an nginx container to front the
| whole thing.
| oefnak wrote:
| Are there mobile clients for Android and/or iOS?
| remram wrote:
| How is it different from all the other open-source issue trackers
| and project managers? Taiga.io, Open project, Focalboard,
| Redmine, etc
|
| Those don't market themselves as similar to Jira, but that's not
| exactly a feature, so what are the differences in practice?
| viharkurama wrote:
| Hey, Our philosophy behind Plane is based on the concept of
| "Tasks meets Method." We have specifically designed this
| product to accommodate various project management practices
| such as Agile or Waterfall, allowing you to seamlessly
| implement the framework of your choice. The core idea behind
| Plane is to provide a solution that is both simple to use and
| highly extensible. Unlike other tools such as Focalboard, which
| solely focuses on Kanban, or Taiga, which strictly adheres to
| Agile principles, and Redmine, which serves as a more general
| project management tool, Plane aims to offer a versatile
| platform that combines simplicity with flexibility.
| remram wrote:
| It's hard to parse this marketing speak, you are better at
| specific frameworks than the mono-framework tools, and a
| better general tool than general tools? But specifically,
| how?
| xiaodai wrote:
| I just want a simple customisable ghant chart
| viharkurama wrote:
| Plane's Gantt Chart component is completely built from scratch
| and is open-source. Still in early stages, but we expect a
| stable version by mid-june.
|
| https://github.com/makeplane/plane/tree/develop/apps/app/com...
| nixarn wrote:
| Damn so many negative comments here. I think it looks decent, and
| will probably try it out, paying $10/user/month for something as
| simple as an issue tracker is annoying. I get that bigger
| organizations have more feature requirements, but for many
| companies, we just need a simple issue tracker that's not jira
| (very biased against jira from my experience, but it's probably
| gotten better)
| alonsozzz wrote:
| Probably the best feature of Linear is realtime sync, that is
| also what makes it feel so good to use (it writes to memory first
| so everything is instant). This seems like it doesn't have that,
| so it lacks a pretty big selling point.
| viharkurama wrote:
| Plane will also support Real-time, shipping soon :)
| ngrilly wrote:
| I'm not sure how I feel about this. On one hand, I love having an
| open source option. On the other hand, this is a total rip-off of
| Linear.app. Even the website is a copy-paste of Linear.app. A bit
| shocking. And for the record, Linear.app is amazing and a
| fantastic alternative to Jira.
| viharkurama wrote:
| We greatly appreciate the meticulous design and user-friendly
| approach taken by Linear. Their work serves as a true
| inspiration to us. However, Plane have implemented all the
| concepts of Linear in a simpler terminology, making it more
| accessible to a wider range of users. Additionally, we are
| proud to make Plane an open-source project, which fosters
| collaboration within the community.
| pcurve wrote:
| Yeah, the resemblance is too strong to pass off as coincidence.
| gexla wrote:
| Seems to me that "open source alternative" is missing the key
| thing which the company provides. Which is support, and a button
| for "call us" as an enterprise plan.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| It's weird that the landing page has "Joe" and "Leo" (uncommon
| names in India), as placeholder users, but the authors are from
| India.
| [deleted]
| gervwyk wrote:
| It is weird to hight this as feedback. Choosing very common
| names for a product intended for a global audience. How is that
| weird?
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| It is just weird to me that using those names was perceived
| as a necessary step.
| viharkurama wrote:
| I agree to the idea of not ignoring Indian names. We do
| have India names as well on certain screenshots. To
| distribute well we used all kinds of names. We tried our
| best to globalize.
| pdappollonio wrote:
| Native Spanish speaker that builds software for English
| speaking markets: I don't think I would write a software or
| make screenshots where I would think first to put names
| like Juan or Pedro in them if the target audience is
| English speakers.
|
| When you're writing English it just feels like the names
| flow better, that's all (like, avoiding stutter in a
| sentence, but with names). I don't think it would be fair
| to say we're just not honoring our roots
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Why not?
|
| Also you could use "Joe" and "Pedro" instead. To me it
| seems even more global.
| viharkurama wrote:
| We used Joe and Pedro on some of our screenshots.
| Discussion is all about that :)
| gervwyk wrote:
| Valid. I get your point.
| ceving wrote:
| It seems to have no way to define own workflows. This is no
| alternative to Jira.
| slushh wrote:
| How do you manage the coherence of the entirety of the tickets?
| E.g. how do you make sure that the tasks of tickets don't overlap
| or that there is more than one ticket for a task?
|
| *edit: For me, backlog views are not enough to structure tickets
| in a meaningful way. Does Plane have a view to fluidly manage all
| open tickets?
| jimbru wrote:
| What's the tl;dr comparison with Linear?
| viharkurama wrote:
| Hey, Linear is opinionated in it's philosophy of Project
| management and the usage of terminology. We do accommodate all
| the features that linear has in a general way. Plane is
| extensible where users can build the framework of their choice.
| esafak wrote:
| Can you compare it with Height too?
| viharkurama wrote:
| Height is a very general tool with it's focus on various
| kinds of teams. With Plane you do that as well. But it's
| focus is more on the Method. Method or the framework of
| choice that the team wants to use to manage their projects.
| deepak_sozial wrote:
| [flagged]
| nine_k wrote:
| (I wonder what do these "1 ." at the end of some sentences
| mean.)
| lobochrome wrote:
| it's a glitch. hush. don't disturb the transformer.
| donalhunt wrote:
| How widespread is Ctrl + K -> insert URL?? Because using it for
| something else could cause confusion (already encountered on
| other platforms).
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that's the cross browser shortcut for "search
| with default search engine". At least on the browsers I usually
| encounter it is.
|
| These types of shortcut key overrides are why I've got them
| disabled in my browser by default.
| lucb1e wrote:
| For anyone else frustrated, a quick workaround is to do
| Ctrl+FK instead of Ctrl+K on offending websites. Focuses the
| browser UI's search input which then makes the Ctrl+K bubble
| up from the browser UI instead of the website's document
| tree.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| It's very common across lots of platforms. Slack overrides it,
| and it irritates me (although I have adjusted to Slack's
| alternative which is that Cmd/Ctrl+V turns selected text into a
| link with the clipboard URL, which is actually really slick).
| quasarj wrote:
| I definitely use it, and you're right that's going to be
| confusing. But maybe worth it..
| icemelt8 wrote:
| inb4 . they use Discord and Docker, I will not use it
| bogwog wrote:
| Discord I understand, but Docker?
| mejutoco wrote:
| IMO Jira is not the problem. It is the place where other
| organizational problems become visible.
|
| If the org has a very strict form-filling culture, your Jira
| tickets will be full of fields to fill for no reason. If no one
| is valuing documentation, the documents will be outdated or
| spread randomly. Personally, with the right culture I do not see
| the problem with Jira, and with the wrong culture Jira can be
| slog.
| atbpaca wrote:
| This looks nice. I will have a look. Meanwhile, does it have a
| Gantt view?
| kaliara wrote:
| Looks like they just announced Gantt on the changelog:
| https://plane.so/changelog
| kschrader wrote:
| Having spent 7 years now building https://www.shortcut.com/ it's
| very clear to me that at a certain point in the life-cycle of
| many organizations a bunch of people get hired who can only
| "think in Jira" and the vast majority of feature requests are
| attempts to get us to add whatever feature(s) they love using.
|
| Conversations about why it's bad for developers or product
| managers or attempts to show them how to get the same value in
| another way often fall on deaf ears (or don't happen at all)
| because it's the only way that they know how to work.
|
| One of the key indicators that this is happening is when people
| start saying things like "this can't do Agile because it doesn't
| have PET_FEATURE"
|
| Jira isn't just software, it's a way of working that's become the
| de facto standard, and it's hard to get out of that box for a lot
| of people.
| 3riverdev wrote:
| For what it's worth, thank you for fighting this fight.
| Shortcut has been a fantastic tool for us as a direct result of
| it doing things differently and more naturally. Please don't
| change that!
| jupp0r wrote:
| "Alternative to JIRA" makes me cringe. Why would you put the most
| hated brand of all issue trackers in your pitch line?
| snthpy wrote:
| That was my first thought as well. So glad someone else said
| it.
| malikNF wrote:
| Sorry, I don't understand what you are trying to say here.
|
| If JIRA is the "most hated" brand and at the same time a very
| popular issue tracker, then "Alternative to JIRA" sounds like,
| "here's an alternative to the product you so hate" isn't it ? I
| mean why would I look for an alternative if I didn't hate the
| thing I am working with or thought it was not good enough?
| halestock wrote:
| It's also the most widely used of all issue trackers.
| jupp0r wrote:
| That makes it even worse!
| findthebug wrote:
| mmh, on ipad i cant add an new issue. my issues > add issue.
| enter title/desc, click add issue. issue is not saved, all fields
| blank
| smallerfish wrote:
| I love seeing competition for Jira, because it needs to die, but
| I think you need to do a better job explaining your value prop.
| Your first bullet list of features doesn't really make it sound
| all that different. Why would I have a better time using this
| than Jira, bearing in mind that I'd be giving up custom workflows
| and probably a lot of integrations? (No shade intended. If you
| can answer that concisely, put that at the top of your copy.)
|
| Also, please consider finding a native english copywriter to take
| a run at your writing. It's readable, but not fluent, and overly
| filled with jargon.
| intelVISA wrote:
| Value prop:
|
| - It's not Jira
| thiht wrote:
| > I'd be giving up custom workflows
|
| That's the value prop
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > Your first bullet list of features doesn't really make it
| sound all that different.
|
| It's... free? Isn't that a pretty big difference?
| https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing
| TylerE wrote:
| Not really. Jira licensing costs are on the order of about 10
| minutes of employee time per month. So, if it is even
| slightly worse it's a financial disaster. (Of course, Jira
| itself is hell, but then what is a likely-buggy and feature
| incomplete version of hell?)
|
| Plus, even if the software itself is free, you still have to
| host it somewhere.
| troyvit wrote:
| That oversimplifies the cost though. Take your typical 200
| person company. Maybe 20 of them develop using Jira, 30
| more create issues, and then 10 more poke their head in
| there so they can check on developers and project managers.
| So of those 60 registered users 40 of them spend just about
| 20 minutes a month in it. You still have to pay for them
| though. The problem grows because we need to run similar
| numbers for every Saas this 200 person company uses. You've
| got Jira for project management, Zen/FreshDesk for support
| issues, Mailchimp for spamming customers, CMS, CRM,
| payroll, etc.
|
| You end up with many many hours of employee time per month
| spent on licenses for SaaS products that you never own,
| can't control, and often can't extract your data from if
| you want to bail.
|
| So yeah, as a middle manager trying to cut costs, any free
| alternative to a SaaS product sounds good to me. It beats
| dribbling out licenses piecemeal and living without core
| functionalities (looking at you monday.com) to stay within
| the lowest payment tier where I can see that 10 minutes-
| employee-time per month.
|
| I admit that paints products like Jira in a bad light and
| ignores all the upsides (no hosting issues, upgrades are
| automatic, etc.).
| dangus wrote:
| Isn't a big part of the value prop not paying a big per-user
| bill to Jira?
|
| The fact that it's basically the same thing is probably a
| positive for a lot of people shopping for alternatives.
| jszymborski wrote:
| I haven't tried the app, but I'm almost certain you can make
| certain favourable comparisons of page render speed.
| viharkurama wrote:
| Our page speeds are currently standing at ~350ms at this
| point. we are trying hard to make it < 100ms. Feedback helps.
| fijiaarone wrote:
| You'll have hook it up to the network at some point. And
| then you'll want to add IO.
|
| If page render takes 100ms you'd better have some pretty
| complex animations. Data and bandwidth should be at least
| 80% of your web app speed, and you should work on
| optimizing the other 15% that is server side CPU bound.
| esafak wrote:
| I agree. Call out famous competitors like JIRA and explain how
| you are better. Don't make me think. It won't cost you any
| business if everybody already knows them.
| gghhzzgghhzz wrote:
| I've used it as a stand in workflow/case management tool in dev
| and production apps a few times. e.g. when presented with a lot
| of detailed requirements on case management from product
| managers, and knowing at an early stage they are far too
| detailed to stand up to the reality of being used in the
| business, I've argued for simply creating a new project in an
| existing well-speced Jira instance with minimal workflow,
| taking that live as a prototype and modifying the workflow
| later, possibly with the goal of getting better specs for
| replacing it with something custom-built.
|
| As a development tool for stories / tasks and bug tracking I
| don't enjoy it.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Is Jira that bad? It sure is a mess, but that's because its
| requirement are a mess. It is not SAP but that's the idea,
| something that sits between developers, testers, management,
| customers, etc... People who want different things, speak
| different languages, and somehow need to work together.
|
| If you just want an issue tracker, there are many options.
| Bugzilla, Mantis, GitHub, GitLab, Gitea,... Some of them
| customizable via plugins. Heck, you can even do it with Excel,
| I don't recommend it, but it gets the work done at many places.
| I mean, it is just a shared TODO list.
|
| But then you want people to get notified by email, and the boss
| want a colorful dashboard with progress graphs, and QA wants a
| documented process, and developers want to attach tickets to
| their commits, project managers want time estimates, customers
| want to report bugs, sales want to send invoices, etc... That's
| how you get monsters like Jira, because the organization itself
| is a monster.
| da39a3ee wrote:
| I think one of the biggest problems with Jira is that it's
| taken the approach of so many other "Enterprise" products
| made by talentless teams: they just add all functionality
| into the app that anyone ever asks for.
|
| The result is that for some of the companies I've worked for,
| each team's tickets have different but very similar
| "workflows" using custom state labels. In some projects when
| I go to close a ticket, it offers me approximately 30
| different semantics which which to close the ticket. These
| include things like both "Done", and "Completed". What the
| fuck is the difference between "Done" and "Completed"? I do
| not know or care whether it is Jira that has populated this
| dropdown with such embarrassingly unintelligent crap or my
| company: if the latter then Jira should have neither
| encouraged nor even made it possible.
| jamesfinlayson wrote:
| I've worked at a company that had Cancelled instead of
| Abandoned - so if you try and "cancel" a ticket you're
| given a model with two action buttons - Cancelled and
| Cancel: Cancelled cancels the ticket and Cancel cancels the
| modal.
| esafak wrote:
| Linear and Height are not monsters but they do all those
| things, if I not mistaken.
| otikik wrote:
| It's "death by a thousand cuts" for me. On planning meetings
| I usually take notes on a notepad and transfer that to Jira
| after the meeting, because interacting with Jira directly
| (plus the swearing) would make the meeting take double the
| time.
| prepend wrote:
| Jira was acceptable when it was easy to run and cheap
| ($10/year for 10 developers).
|
| My problem is that it's expensive. $100/year/user for cloud
| and minimum $40k for "data center" hosting.
|
| Also, it's java based so updated are kind of a pain with ears
| and jars and wars and manually application. And there have
| been a few zero days and data loss.
|
| At this price, I want something else. I don't think issue
| tracking is a "big deal" but Jira is making it a big deal
| because of its price and security.
|
| I'm trying to get by with gitlab and GitHub issues.
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| It's really not bad. It's gotten much simpler and faster in
| the past 5-ish years. If you take the time to learn it, it
| does pretty much everything you want, and there's always the
| API, extensions, automations, etc.
|
| But it's an opinionated tool. Almost every person I have ever
| worked with has never read the docs, so they just sort of
| suffer and complain and never learn that they're using it
| wrong. I'm the guy on every job that has to teach the team
| how to use Confluence and Jira correctly. My biggest
| challenge in making Jira work well is convincing coworkers to
| stop using it wrong. (They'd rather come on HN and complain
| about it than read the docs or take a Udemy course)
|
| All this is compounded by people who don't even know how to
| do Scrum or Kanban or even basic project management, so their
| complaints are also often just people who don't know how to
| work. Which, again, is most people I have worked with.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| The problem I see is that Jira encourages "management by
| looking at Jira" - effectively Jira becomes a second source
| of truth that is unconnected and unconstrained by the actual
| truth (the code). Jira acquires state that has to be
| carefully maintained as a separate operation by the
| developers to keep Jira's state in sync with the actual state
| of the project. Since most of the organisation are looking at
| Jira, the effective source of truth becomes Jira's current
| state, and the developers end up running to try and keep the
| actual project in sync with Jira. Or they become disconnected
| and Jira's state becomes completely independent of the actual
| project state (tickets being marked as "done" that aren't
| complete, or sometimes even started, because it doesn't
| matter because everyone is looking at Jira and not at the
| code).
|
| I would love to see Jira state somehow derived from the state
| of the codebase. Tickets get marked complete when they are
| actually complete in the code, with tests and documentation
| and everything, because the ticket state is derived from the
| code state.
| Tainnor wrote:
| The code itself doesn't even contain much of the
| information relevant to coders, you'd have to also look at
| the git repo, its history, its commits, etc.
|
| The code, or the repo, however are in most cases not the
| source of truth for a business roadmap, prioritisation
| discussions, estimation, customer feedback, bug reports,
| and so on.
|
| It's a myopic view to only look at the code without any of
| its context and conclude that it's "the" source of truth.
|
| Also, I don't know about you, but most places I've worked
| haven't struggled with keeping the code and JIRA in sync.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I've noticed it particularly with outsource teams where
| the communication is difficult. The team update tickets
| with what management expect, not what code has actually
| been written.
| justahuman74 wrote:
| You can write glue for whatever hosts your repository to
| make api calls to Jira.
|
| Say you have some code that needs some changes but at a
| later time, you can put a comment above it (or really
| anywhere)
|
| // JIRA: MYPROJ-123
|
| When the glue sees that comment disappear from the
| codebase, it can mark the ticket as done.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| The code is the model.
|
| The project management system is the view.
|
| The model shouldn't have to change to accomodate the
| view.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Useful, I guess, but that seems to be inverting the
| responsibility. The code needs to have comments inserted
| into it referring to the state of Jira, rather than the
| other way around.
|
| The thing I'd like to see is that ticket "Write the login
| page" is automatically marked complete when the codebase
| contains a working login page, there are unit and
| integration tests for the login page, and maybe
| (depending on how you do your documentation) a set of
| comments on the API methods involved describing their use
| in the login process. All without those code elements
| ever needing to know the ticket exists.
| Tainnor wrote:
| What you're describing looks like magic to me. How would
| your ticket system know, without it being told (in some
| way, e.g. through backreferences from the tests), that a
| particular feature has been implemented? That's very
| likely going to be a formally undecidable problem.
| superice wrote:
| Writing end-to-end UI tests to validate a certain
| behavior and then automatically resolving a ticket once
| those tests pass seems really cool though. Not sure how
| realistic in practice, but it's definitely an interesting
| concept.
| Tainnor wrote:
| Sure, but then you have to tag those tests with the
| ticket, and GP didn't want to have references to JIRA
| inserted in the code.
|
| The other problem is that you still need to track when
| all the tests for the feature have been written.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| yeah, something like TDD but the ticket is actually a set
| of integration or end-to-end tests that must pass for the
| ticket to be "done". Hmmm, interesting...
|
| edit: actually, thinking about it, you could do plain TDD
| and track the tests as the tickets. Write all your tests
| for the project first, then track how many are passing as
| the progress measure.
| fijiaarone wrote:
| Code is not a source of truth, it is an attempt at partial
| realization of an incomplete understanding of a bunch of
| contradictory assumptions about what's true at a particular
| point in time.
| blowski wrote:
| It's a source of truth about what code has been written.
| [deleted]
| plumarr wrote:
| I have used Jira at several place, and every time that it
| worked fine Jira was the source of thruth for the project.
| There was no shadow tracking beside it. So everybody
| updated it happily and used it.
|
| You can't do that based of the code because the code is
| limited to its content. How do you track everything that
| isn't in it ? (requirements, relation with other teams,
| delivery to customer, customer tickets,...)
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > Is Jira that bad?
|
| Jira itself is fine. It is very powerful, and with that
| power, it can be setup "wrong". That all stems from
| opinionation. On itself it's an empty box, right?
| notatoad wrote:
| Jira sucks in the same way that email sucks - the platform is
| fine, the stuff people put in it sucks. you probably don't
| hate jira, you hate your boss, or their boss, or your
| colleagues, or your business's development practices or
| prioritization. or your developer's productivity levels, if
| you're looking at it from the management side.
|
| but it's easier (and probably healthier) for jira to soak up
| that hatred. jira's good at that.
| pigeons wrote:
| even a default jira is unusable just from a slowness
| perspective.
| pas wrote:
| slowness, I can accept, but the extremely bad UX,
| byzantine inconsistency, some parts are SPA some are long
| forgotten wizards with useless and completely idiotic
| next-next-finish steps, some functions are so close to
| useful, but ultimately fall short because even though
| Jira can do anything it can't simply graph a fucking JQL
| result set over time, it simply doesn't have anything
| useful to report by default. Epics and subtasks and story
| points seems useful, sure, we picked it because it has
| the best scrum support, but there's no aggregation of
| points from subtasks to tasks. Oh, yes you can DIY with
| ducktape-and-hate using the new automation functionality,
| but it'll have the same bad UX of course, because it's
| not integrated, because it's Jira. It's hell. It's bad.
| It's ridiculous.
|
| It's unfathomably tragicomic how the alternative
| offerings are also UX nightmares. PM tools are cursed, it
| seems.
| notatoad wrote:
| i'm not really sure what your metric is here, or if
| you're talking about their on-prem version. but the jira
| hosted by atlassian seems like it runs at about the same
| speed as most websites. i'm not going to say it's blazing
| fast, but it's acceptable.
| pigeons wrote:
| I mean I can't even use the one they host because I wait
| for things to load and spin.
| keb_ wrote:
| My biggest issue with Jira (and Confluence) is that it is
| unbearably _slow_. At every company I 've worked at, we've
| used Jira, and everytime, it is slow.
| jpalomaki wrote:
| I think Jira is fine and it's ok tool. Nowadays the
| performance of the cloud version also has been good.
|
| BUT it is absolutely possible to configure Jira to be
| horrible to use. Add lot's of extra fields, force complex
| workflows etc.
| EuAndreh wrote:
| > Is Jira that bad?
|
| As the saying goes, Jira is fine, the only problem is that it
| is Turing-complete.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It's pretty bad. The actual interface has improved a lot over
| the last 5 years, but it's still _very_ unintuitive and has
| weird limitations. For instance you can 't have proper
| hierarchical tasks. In Phabricator you can just give tasks a
| parent task and it will display the whole hierarchy. Very
| useful. In Jira, a task can be a child of an Epic... and
| that's it. You can have "subtasks" but they aren't really
| full tasks so you get 2 or 3 levels of hierarchy max.
|
| Another example: tasks can't be part of more than one
| project. Have a task that affects multiple projects? Tough.
| Pick one.
|
| The backlog doesn't update immediately when you edit tasks on
| it. You have to refresh.
|
| But a big part of the problem with Jira is that it is highly
| configurable and you always end up with project managers
| massively overcomplicating things. You get dozens of issue
| types, dozens of statuses, weird automation rules etc.
|
| It's not _awful_ , it's just surprisingly bad at its core
| task.
| xp84 wrote:
| Having used Jira for only a modest 12 years, I have had
| multiple stages of feelings about it. I agree with the parent
| that "everybody" hates Jira because "it's too complicated" --
| yet when developers try to use a lean, simple tool like
| Pivotal or Trello, inevitably other stakeholders demand
| something better for business users, these simpler tools
| can't deliver that, and the replacement ends up being Jira
| 99% of the time. I've started tech orgs on multiple issue
| trackers and this plays out every time.
|
| Also, I hated Jira before learning a lot of its features and
| how to use them, getting frustrated that everything is not
| just a setting, but something meta where you need to adjust a
| "scheme" and understand how it works with the other data
| objects in the system. Eventually I learned it, just in time
| for Atlassian to put a lot of effort into a candy-coated,
| "simplified" set of defaults that hides 99% of the system's
| power and abilities.
|
| The main thing I actually don't like about Jira is that: its
| insistence on setting up all new projects with infantile,
| Trello-like schemes, which then encourage sloppy setup when
| you start customizing unless you're very seasoned with Jira.
| I think they should consider training an AI to "do what I
| mean" and help users to build out their setups --because
| transitioning from the "out of box experience" which I call
| "Expensive Trello" into a sophisticated workflow which
| actually models the business processes correctly and protects
| you against breaking your agreements, while making it easy to
| understand what to do next, is very difficult. In all but the
| biggest orgs, i don't think it ever really happens.
| irjustin wrote:
| I agree with this sentiment completely. It's a "do
| everything for everyone" but "impossible to do anything"
| software.
|
| Excel sheets ALWAYS is simpler to understand what's going
| on at a high level, but then devs want, then biz wants, etc
| etc and i just end up at the soup that which is jira.
|
| It's annoying because there's a always a better individual
| tool (pivotal, trello for devs, excel, powerpoint for biz),
| but none of them inter-op and then you're stuck at jira
| which does it all but not very well. It really feels like
| salesforce, just an absolute mess but it can really do
| everything.
| XorNot wrote:
| I don't know what value non-developers are getting out of
| Jira, because I've been asked to produce reports out of
| Jira at different times and the only thing they ever want
| is "give me a list of all the X" or "graph the number Y
| across all the projects".
|
| The one thing they all do is go in and mess with the issue
| workflows: they never _improve_ the workflows, but they
| sure love adding states and restricted transitions and
| renaming them...and then promptly ignore all of it because
| it turns out your 3 layers of "review" transitions don't
| actually have any staff assigned to look at them, it's just
| all the same guy who either spends all his time updating
| the issue as he works on it or just hits the transition
| button 3 times when he's actually done with it.
| Aurelius108 wrote:
| Nailed it, the biggest issue imho is those state
| transitions. Why make a state that can't transition to
| all others? It takes forever to tease out the intention
| behind it. State machines are notoriously difficult in
| code, why add them into something unnecessarily?
| flicaflow wrote:
| We got that from the last audit. They don't like it if
| everyone could set the state of some ticket and thus
| circumvent the required workflow. A lot of companies
| develop certified software and thus have the same
| requirement.
| fijiaarone wrote:
| Bad management demands bad tools.
| yard2010 wrote:
| [flagged]
| sverhagen wrote:
| >because "it's too complicated"
|
| I personally "hate" Jira because it's so dumb.
|
| I open an epic, to see the stories that still need my
| attention, it shows all the stories, so I hit the "Hide
| done". Then I thoughtlessly click on one of the stories, I
| edit it, go back to the epic, and now it shows all the
| stories again. Rinse and repeat.
|
| I open a screen, it loads slowly, when I think it's ready I
| click on whatever I wanted to click. Apparently, it wasn't
| quite ready, so by the time my mouse-click lands, I click
| the wrong thing, which brings me to a new screen, so I have
| to go back to where I came from. Rinse and repeat.
|
| I open an epic, click the button to "Add a child issue", it
| prompts a "task", I want a "story", so I have to change the
| selection in the dropdown. Next time, it prompts again a
| "task". How many times did I mistakenly make a "task" where
| I had meant to make a "story"?!
|
| There's this sort of silly (to me) things all over the
| place, which has often made me wonder: do these people use
| this software themselves, and if so, do they take any pride
| in it?
| viraptor wrote:
| This applies to many systems I've seen and my short
| summary of that is "the bigger the system the more it
| resembles CRUD scaffold, because they stop implementing
| specific user flows".
|
| Luckily it's a nice space to contract in, making simpler
| dedicated interfaces to the heavy enterprise stuff.
| jamesfinlayson wrote:
| > which has often made me wonder: do these people use
| this software themselves, and if so, do they take any
| pride in it?
|
| Agreed - Jira is functional but there are endless little
| annoyances like this. My usual problem is that I work
| across two project boards, and no matter what board
| you're on, the default project that Create Task picks is
| the last board that you created a ticket on, not the
| project for the current board that you're viewing.
| someweirdperson wrote:
| Random idea, untested. Maybe it remembers client side?
| Then using two different browsers (or users in the same
| browser) could separate them.
| sally_glance wrote:
| They do use it: https://jira.atlassian.com/issues
|
| As for being proud, with roughly 8k (?) employees I
| imagine you get the full spectrum.
| onionisafruit wrote:
| It all comes down to managers and PMs. or wanting to do their
| job of communicating status to stakeholders so they try to
| automate it with the monstrosities.
| Tainnor wrote:
| I used JIRA at, I think, every single company I've worked at
| and I never really liked it much...
|
| But the company where I work at right now has a really well
| set-up JIRA board where most things that I need to do are
| easy to so and there are clearly defined workflows. Compared
| to the morasses of legacy code I have to wrestle with, I find
| JIRA now to be one of the least troubling aspects of my work
| day.
|
| I'm sure it was super painful for the people who had to
| actually set up the current flows, but I guess that once you
| customise JIRA to your needs, it can work really well. The
| issue probably is that many companies don't want to bother
| setting up good, streamlined processes, or just don't know
| how.
|
| Now, Confluence on the other hand... I have no excuses for
| it. I can't understand how a documentation tool can have a
| search feature that is unable to find what you're looking for
| basically every single time.
| vxNsr wrote:
| > _I 'm sure it was super painful for the people who had to
| actually set up the current flows, but I guess that once
| you customise JIRA to your needs, it can work really well.
| The issue probably is that many companies don't want to
| bother setting up good, streamlined processes, or just
| don't know how._
|
| It's actually not as bad as you'd think to set up. The
| reason Jira is so universally hated is because everyone
| uses it and very few people spend any time thinking about
| how it should work. In most companies it gets adopted by
| shadow IT, and is supported by whatever team member was
| most excited about it. But their competency isn't Jira
| configuration, it's widget support, so they spend the bare
| minimum amount of time setting it up using online tutorials
| and various blog/SO posts. They don't follow any
| recommended best practices because they don't know they
| exist. Eventually that person leaves/gets promoted or the
| system just becomes so widely adopted IT is forced to take
| over support. By this point though, the damage is done, the
| system is a mess of half baked badly implemented ideas. And
| there's no budget/time to start from scratch. So it just
| limps along, being hated but no alternative being
| offered... until some VP discovers ServiceNow...
| jsight wrote:
| I don't know, I've seen that extreme, but I've also seen
| the other extreme.
|
| People with vast knowledge of JIRA, obviously far more
| than anyone else in the org, developing vast dashboards
| and labeling systems. Every ticket has to be properly
| groomed and properly built (even if not useful).
|
| That isn't always better.
| vxNsr wrote:
| Knowledge doesn't equal expertise.
|
| JIRA has a very simple initial onboarding story,
| especially in comparison to servicenow or SAP. But it's
| got a lot of hidden complexity that can make it super
| powerful. That power can become its downfall if
| implemented badly. Vast dashboards and labeling systems
| is improper implementation.
| ian-g wrote:
| And then you have some poor suckers doing their damnedest
| to balance all the demands of all the middle managers who
| all want servicenow customizations on priority.
|
| Truly just a horrifying situation to be subjected to.
| xiaodai wrote:
| Do u happen to work where I work? Lol
| vxNsr wrote:
| I fight a lot about unnecessary customization, but the
| one place that I'll never back down on is touching the
| priority/urgency matrix.
| throw0101b wrote:
| > _Is Jira that bad?_
|
| As someone who had to admin an on-prem installation of
| various Atlassian products, upgrades were always a nightmare:
| you could try multiple dry-runs to make sure data tables were
| updated, and plug-in upgrades were good, but invariably there
| would still be a good chance that something would still go
| wrong when you tried it with production.
|
| The workflow we settled on was basically leave the old
| version alone, rsync over all the data to a completely new
| app and DB servers, and do the upgrades on the new systems.
| Any attempt at in-place upgrades was just asking for trouble.
|
| Anyone who was prime on the software was very happy when The
| New Guy on the team arrived due to personnel churn and they
| got handed the baton for dealing with it.
| jamesfinlayson wrote:
| I feel bad for the people that have to the Jira updates
| where I work - every time it happens it seems to take
| forever because it needs to "reindex", and they try and
| start it in the early evening but it still seems to bleed
| into business hours the next day.
| macintux wrote:
| Atlassian seems to be pushing hard to get everyone into
| their cloud. I've heard, but don't recall details and have
| no direct knowledge, that the pricing for an on-premises
| install has gotten outrageous.
|
| Perhaps that's because they're spending too much money on
| supporting companies who are struggling with upgrades.
| bombcar wrote:
| They eliminated the server-tier licensing so now you have
| to go cloud or go datacenter, which is much more
| expensive.
| hooby wrote:
| To me personally, Jira was the best tool I've used so far
| (used a few of them, but not very many).
|
| But I still was not too happy with it back when I used it -
| main reasons being extremely slow load times (we had the
| cloud version, not self-hosted) - and lots of annoying
| inconsistencies, like "create issue" using a completely
| different editor than "edit issue", etc.
| j45 wrote:
| jira-1369 is a 20 year old bug of email notifications not
| being put into a digest and instead flooding users.
|
| I for one feel like I grew up those people and we should
| share our wedding and other milestone photos and
| announcements on that chain.
| [deleted]
| justinpombrio wrote:
| One feature they have that Jira does not: the ability for a
| customer to avoid multi-week outages. Jira went down for some
| customers and took weeks to restore. A customer could avoid
| this possibility by hosting locally, but I hear Jira is phasing
| out local hosting while Plane lists it as a feature.
|
| Another feature Plane probably has: not being horribly laggy.
| You could make a ticket in Jira with a bunch of links or
| whatever the hell it is that makes Jira load so slowly, and
| make an identical ticket in Plane, and compare the loading
| times. From my Jira experiences it shouldn't be hard to be 10x
| faster.
|
| https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/news/252515706...
| viharkurama wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! We will definitely work on it.
| nberkman wrote:
| One advantage you have: a BAA, required for HIPAA compliance,
| is only available with a very expensive Enterprise plan. For
| HIPAA compliant organizations, a self-hosted alternative
| could be very attractive.
| zdragnar wrote:
| If I'm not mistaken, they want a minimum of 800 seats to
| sign a BAA. It's absolutely crazy, and forced my company to
| choose a significantly worse product in its place.
|
| Edit: for Plane, the GPT powered pages are a non-starter
| for HIPAA unless the feature can be completely disabled.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > I love seeing competition for Jira, because it needs to die
|
| I think when I die in ~50 years that HN will still be filled
| with stories ragging on Jira, or whatever it is that eventually
| replaces it. It's like the pastime that will never end.
|
| To be clear, I think it's great to see open source projects
| like this, and I think increasing competition is a really
| wonderful thing. I also totally agree that Jira has lots of
| room for improvement, with performance probably being the most
| common gripe. But I always smirk a little to myself when I hear
| complaints that are solely from a particular point of view
| (usually an individual developer). Project management tools
| have an extremely difficult task of needing to fulfill a
| gargantuan range of requirements for many varied stakeholders
| (frontline devs, dev managers, product managers, business leads
| and execs, sometimes end users depending on ticketing
| functionality, etc.)
|
| Some simple pieces of evidence:
|
| 1. For one, just look at the varied list of comments already
| coming in on this story "does it support multiple issue types
| or tiered issues?", "Does Plane offer all the pro features for
| free because we can't afford to pay anything for it?", "Does it
| support Google login or other identity providers?", "It needs a
| walkthrough video that must be short, I'm not going to look at
| a long video", "Is Ctrk+K a good shortcut?", "Can't add an
| issue on iPad", "Can it autodelete issues after 30 days of no
| changes?"... Point being, for any project management tool,
| you're going to basically get feature requests as varied as the
| number of comments, and I think I see this more frequently with
| project management tools than almost any other type of
| software.
|
| 2. Think about the legions of Jira competitors that have popped
| up: Asana, Basecamp, Monday.com, Linear, Rally, YouTrack,
| ClickUp, Trello (obv. under Atlassian now, but can't count the
| number of times I've heard "We loved Trello because it was
| simple and easy to get started, but we eventually outgrew it
| and needed additional features."), etc. etc. I have yet to ever
| hear one of those competitors being universally loved. On the
| contrary, I've seen cases where a competitor is touted as "the
| next big thing", and then when it gets more popular people talk
| about how much they hate it (Asana comes to mind in that
| regard).
|
| In general, I don't think the problem is the tool, I think that
| most people just don't like to do ticket management, so it's
| all a case of looking for the "least bad" tool out there.
| kschrader wrote:
| As soon as we add a new feature to Shortcut people inevitably
| use it in a way that's complex and unexpected and that causes
| a large portion of the team to hate it. It's a very hard
| dance to do.
| matwood wrote:
| I can list all sorts of issues with JIRA, but completely
| agree with you. The hate for JIRA is typically hate for the
| companies process(es). I've used JIRA for years and it's
| fine. But, we did a lot of work (and still do) to make sure
| our development process doesn't suck. JIRA has done a good
| job adapting to us.
| pokepim wrote:
| [dead]
| lxe wrote:
| From glancing at the bullet points and feature list, along with
| commit activity, the value prop seems to be the product and its
| features... which seem polished and useful.
| aetherspawn wrote:
| The value prop is that you can self-host it at all, which JIRA
| now discontinued unless you pay ~$50k per year.
|
| Within 3 seconds of reading the GitHub page I was sold. It's
| already on my todo list for next week.
| Croftengea wrote:
| This! Jira works ok and gets job done, like the UI and the
| default workflows or not. But for those who are not willing
| (or required not to) outsource all their business to the
| Cloud it just doesn't exist anymore.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Spamming description with emoji is certainly one way to show a
| project is serious...
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| Can it auto-delete issues untouched for the last 30 days? Idk if
| jira can, but this would be the single biggest productivity boost
| to any organization forced to use this sort of software.
| simmanian wrote:
| for jira (and I assume many other similar products), it is
| definitely possible
| ezekg wrote:
| Why would you want to do that? I personally hate those "stale
| issue" bots on GitHub, and this sounds like the same.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| Like it or hate it, there just isn't enough time and energy
| to do all the things you might like to do. Triaging and
| prioritizing are usually best done manually, but "it hasn't
| been worked on" is a cheap and acceptably accurate proxy for
| "not that important" for some teams.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Taking a bug report and making a good workitem might be a
| lot of work. If the same thing happens 2 years later you'd
| need to do the same work _again_ if you already deleted the
| bug workitem. If the old stale bug ticket was still around
| you 'd both have a) saved the work of writing it again
| because you would find it when searching and b) have a very
| good indication that the bug you are triaging might not be
| that serious because it has been seen before and not
| prioritized.
|
| You could just automatically mark it "stale" or whatever
| instead of hiding it, which would give the best of both
| worlds. Automatic sunset for the item, without the
| duplicated effort.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| From a brief look at the code, it appears to be written in
| python. I am surprised at that choice for an application that has
| speed as a goal. Of course database performance is likely to
| dominate, but every bit adds up. I feel like I've only heard bad
| things about trying to maintain a service written in python long
| term (both from a performance perspective, as well as ease of
| code maintenance). This is not first hand knowledge though. Does
| anyone here have experience to comment on the wisdom of using
| python in an application like this?
| rirze wrote:
| From what I can tell, it's Python for the API server,
| Typescript for everything else.
|
| FWIW, Python servers like this are just a wrapper around
| `gunicorn` or some other performant low level tool. For some
| teams, it's easier to define a schema in Python for a couple
| years now due to some very innovative libraries with easy-to-
| use decorators.
|
| I have no personal experience with using it in production or
| for an extended amount of time however.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| At the only place I've worked where they used Jira, only the
| product managers and business people used it. Devs worked from
| stories printed on cards. The cards would get passed around until
| completed, the manager would then update Jira. The advantage I
| guess is that Jira had a smaller audience so could be better
| configured for what the business wanted from it, and fewer people
| had to learn how to use it.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Printed as in _physically_ printed? That 's kinda neat.
| DrAwesome wrote:
| I played around with Plane locally a little bit about a month ago
| - I think it's really promising! I wish the documentation was a
| little better, though; I had to dig around through the source
| code to figure out how to get the OpenAI/GPT-powered features to
| work locally. I also wish it supported the gpt-3.5-turbo model
| instead of relying on the InstructGPT models (like text-
| davinci-003) for those features (while this isn't exactly a
| "chat" use-case, I think the chat model would still do a good
| job, and the 1/10 token cost would be nice).
|
| I'm planning to set up a Plane instance for my friend group as
| soon as it supports OpenID Connect (SAML would work as well, but
| I imagine OIDC is coming first, since it's a lot more sane). We
| have some small projects we maintain, and we desperately need a
| nice issue tracking tool like this.
| tompandolfi wrote:
| Looks great, our team will be trying it out next month
| throwuwu wrote:
| Walk through video please. For people on mobile checking it out
| it's more convenient to watch a short video. Serious about short,
| I'm not going to start a half hour long video while browsing.
| Also subtitles.
| kjs3 wrote:
| And a pony. They must provide a complimentary pony. An
| Andalusian...I wouldn't be caught dead on some common draft
| horse. Also a stable.
| NegativeK wrote:
| It's an open source project.
|
| PRs would probably be welcomed.
| smallsaas wrote:
| Beware its open core
| https://github.com/makeplane/plane/issues/1171
| echelon wrote:
| Please build a startup on this. I don't want to run a Jira
| alternative myself. I'll pay you to do it for me.
|
| Edit: looks like you do [1]! Perfect! I'll sign up shortly and
| give it a spin.
|
| [1] https://plane.so
| viharkurama wrote:
| thanks echelon, we are working hard to make it happen in a more
| simple and extensible way. Also Open source :)
| nnurmanov wrote:
| It seems, over an extended period of development, any enterprise
| software tends to become equally hated:)
| da39a3ee wrote:
| Right, so perhaps the answer to that is not to make your
| software "Enterprise". There are a lot of idiots in management;
| do not give them what they ask for if you want your product to
| retain any vestiges of quality.
| spyremeown wrote:
| Please, kill Jira and Confluence. I hate Atlassian tools so much.
| The user interfaces are sluggish no matter the hardware you're
| using... it's a shame it became almost a standard in our
| industry.
| gabrielgio wrote:
| I just opened a view mode page in confluence, and it made >400
| calls until fully loaded. ~80 XHR calls and >300 js files being
| loaded, in what world that is acceptable?
|
| Indeed it is a shame that they still a thing.
| bipson wrote:
| The Problem with Jira is not that it's dumb or too sophisticated.
|
| The first problem is that everyone, even in the same team or org,
| needs something different from it. Sometimes it is even single
| individuals needing one particular thing one time, and the same
| day for another workflow or view another thing. It is when Jira
| caters to the wrong use case for you _right now_ where the a lot
| of frustration arises.
|
| In a similar vein, it wants to cater devs, coaches, POs, business
| people, customers and all of them over various orgs with
| drastically different workflows. Serving everyone equally must
| lead to a mediocre experience. You will always miss something,
| while there is so much stuff you don't need or want and you have
| to work around.
|
| Arguably, this has become better a lot in the last 10 years, but
| you will always long for "something better".
|
| But the most painful issue is that in some orgs Jira _is_ the
| workflow, instead of supporting it and staying in the background.
| At some point people are only sending around ticket links,
| commenting on tickets, requesting people monitoring their queues.
| This creates overhead, redirection and Jira becomes a distraction
| you need to handle.
|
| As a result Jira becomes a proxy for all the things going wrong
| with your daily work and a problem of its own.
| mark_and_sweep wrote:
| The biggest issue, in my experience, has always been its
| performance. Perhaps I have only worked in organisations that
| have completely misconfigured their Jira instances or the
| servers are underpowered, but even with the Atlassian Cloud, I
| am used to waiting 10 seconds to move a ticket from one column
| to another. Or add a ticket to the backlog, click the backlog,
| ticket isn't there yet, refresh the backlog, it's there. Add a
| ticket to the sprint, click the sprint view, ticket isn't
| there. Refresh the sprint view, it's there. This sh*t. Every
| day. Is driving me insane.
|
| I don't want the perfect tool, just one that isn't horrendous.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Perhaps I have only worked in organisations that have
| completely misconfigured their Jira instances or the servers
| are underpowered, but even with the Atlassian Cloud, I am
| used to waiting 10 seconds to move a ticket from one column
| to another.
|
| There must be some sort of misconfiguration going on here, as
| I _never_ have this experience in Jira Cloud. Your opinion is
| a common one so I 'm not discounting it, but with "New Jira"
| as I call it (the Team-based projects), this never happens to
| me.
|
| But in general, I agree that Atlassian should primarily focus
| on performance fixes, it is by far the most common complaint.
| notjustanymike wrote:
| I took a look at this a few years ago when considering a
| tool. Back then it turned out every button on a ticket needed
| to query the server as to whether it had permission to show.
| Just a terrible architecture.
|
| We went with Asana. I miss the ability to create epics and do
| proper sprints, but at least the things load when you click
| on them.
| pcurve wrote:
| 100% this. The worst software in the world could be forgiven
| if it were fast. Ours was self-hosted, but it's depressing to
| hear that the cloud version isn't much better.
| bilekas wrote:
| Yes to this, the performance is terrible and the UI/UX is
| extremely janky.
|
| There is a lot of fault on the companies who are implementing
| bad configurations and multiple setups for different teams
| definitely adds to the complexity. To have a 'lite/light'
| stripped down version which is purely functional and not
| bloated with drag and drop events etc would be a really nice
| to have.
| fatfox wrote:
| Absolutely. I worked with a lot of different tools and Jira
| is as good as any other project management tool. But it
| just didn't feel as responsive as, for example, Linear.
|
| Asana was just as bad as Jira in terms of performance, with
| the added feeling that somehow something was always
| happening in the background...
| stusmall wrote:
| I used to be a pretty big Atlassian fanboy. I'd default to
| most of their tools when they were available.
|
| Before the new UI came around in ~2017 it performed pretty
| well and if you were judicious with customization it was easy
| to use. Everyone knows Jira so it was easy to get new people
| started with it. Then the redesign came out.
|
| I opted in for a bit when it was in Alpha but bailed because
| I had trouble getting my job done in trivial ways. I'm
| normally pretty accepting and friendly to new UIs, even if
| its rough at first. I generally accept that I won't like most
| at first because it disrupts my workflow in the short term.
| _Usually_ once I relearn the project its for the best. Not
| with this one. It 's just so damn slow. It's terrible.
|
| I'm not in a position where I pick our project
| management/documentation tooling anymore, but if I was I
| don't know what I'd pick. It used to be that I wouldn't think
| twice, now Jira isn't seriously in the running anymore. I
| think notion has beaten out confluence even if I'm still not
| in love with it.
| kevincox wrote:
| I agree. Most of the workflow jank could be forgiven if I
| didn't need to wait double-digit second loads frequently.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Yeah I agree with the problem description. I've seen several
| times Jira becoming co-opted into a sort of potemkin village
| where official progress is reported for customers/nervous
| bosses/reports upstairs, where every wording is carefully
| chosen as to not raise questions and sometimes tasks and
| progress is invented to create the appearance of smooth
| operations; meanwhile the need for actual tracking and planning
| is done offline on post-its or over email, away from prying
| eyes.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Seems like you are describing a agile burndown chart? Soooner
| or later the ant hill learns to report progress to make the
| line smooth via telepatic cooperation.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| That's _one_ of the additional usages, along with various
| progress reports, planning for management, time reporting,
| cost reporting, a support ticket system for the customers,
| etc..
| jacobyoder wrote:
| > The first problem is that everyone, even in the same team or
| org, needs something different from it.
|
| Big yes to this. One of the things I noticed at a client that
| was using it, and growing, was that multiple people not
| directly involved in development had a lot of visibility in to
| developer-focused boards. Those folks were using numbers and
| info we were recording, taking them largely out of context, and
| making strategic decisions from those.
|
| One of my big bug bears is 'story points'. In general, I don't
| like them - the effort involved in accurately getting them
| "right" usually takes longer than just doing some of the work
| (not always, but a non-trivial number greater than 0).
|
| Over time, our 'story points' and 'velocity' numbers came to
| mean a lot of different things to a lot of other people. We had
| 5 different parties who would routinely check those numbers,
| and often interject their own questions, call for more
| meetings, etc. And 99% of it was just... useless. After more
| talking, I'm realizing that parties A, B, C, D and E all are
| using the same number (story points in this case) for different
| purposes, sometimes vastly different.
|
| To counter some people getting upset at seeing certain numbers
| go up or down too much (or too fast or too slow), sometimes
| numbers would be changed midway through a sprint. And,
| sometimes things would be added or removed from tickets mid
| sprint. These may be unavoidable in some cases - I get it - but
| the changes weren't at all related to helping the front-line
| workers get work done. The changes were done to make someone's
| sprint report numbers acceptable to someone else who asked for
| these reports. Neither of these parties were ever in meetings
| with any of us.
|
| In the spirit of cooperation, I suggested we add some more
| custom fields to track the actual numbers they wanted to track
| (one of the things Jira does well is letting you add more data
| collection points). Rather than overload and use one piece of
| data for multiple purposes (which not everyone was aware of),
| why not just capture more data, to get more accurate/complete
| data? "Too confusing. That's too much work for you all". What
| they meant was "I don't know how to make new reports with this
| info, and I couldn't compare current data historically against
| old data, so we'll just keep doing this half-assed thing".
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Catering to many different kinds of people explains some of the
| bad stuff, but it does not explain, why seemingly every single
| Atlassian product including Jira sucks at parsing Markdown or
| supporting Markdown well. In the big picture maybe some things
| suffer from catering to too many audiences, but in the small,
| it is just lack of good engineering. Basically any markdown
| parser you can install at no cost and even with pushover
| license for any popular programming language works better than
| what they cobbled together. Is it a case of some "senior"
| person sitting somewhere sheltering their brain child?
|
| Also they seem to be immune to feedback, which they wanted to
| collect in Confluence, using some popups.
| edude03 wrote:
| It does explain it though? Not everyone who uses Atlassian
| products use markdown, and I'm pretty confident that the
| biggest users of Jira aren't software engineers so why would
| they invest time and effort there?
| dventimihasura wrote:
| I wonder where you get your confidence. In my experience as
| a software engineer in the Bay Area for 25 years, every
| company I've worked at (all medium to large either ISVs or
| internet companies) used Jira and at every one of those
| companies Jira was used most heavily by software engineers.
| logicchains wrote:
| >it does not explain, why seemingly every single Atlassian
| product including Jira sucks at parsing Markdown or
| supporting Markdown well.
|
| Australian here, I can provide some clarity on that.
| Australians in general are fairly lazy; we like to do the
| bare minimum necessary to get the job done so we can knock
| off work and grab a beer at 4pm. Atlassian is an Australian
| company, and has generally inherited such an approach, so
| there's little tolerance for putting extra effort into things
| like adding the finishing touches to markdown parsing or
| improving performance (or even preventing it from
| regressing).
| [deleted]
| RileyJames wrote:
| Unfortunately we've been piss farting around and never got
| round to writing a markdown parser for Aussie++.[1]
|
| If you could do a bloke a favour and chuck up a pull
| request while we nip down the pub for a coupla you'd be a
| bloody legend.
|
| Alright piss off now mate.
|
| [1]https://aussieplusplus.vercel.app/
| eecc wrote:
| Ah, they systematically eschewed quality and engineering
| from their development mindset. I remember their gaslight
| routine whenever a proposal was made: "oh we should never
| divert from the 80/20 rule and whenever you work on a 20%
| feature, you are morally stealing from the remaining 80% of
| the customers. Shame on you!"
| skinkestek wrote:
| > or even preventing it from regressing
|
| Here they are in good company with Google.
| matwood wrote:
| Whenever people tell me they hate JIRA, what they are usually
| saying is they hate the process their company uses.
|
| Could JIRA be faster, easier, etc...? Sure. But, I have tried
| many products to run agile/scrum teams and haven't found
| anything that gives the flexibility and options that JIRA has.
| williamvds wrote:
| Ignoring the annoyances of Jira-style project management,
| here's some things I hate about Jira (cloud, on Firefox on
| Linux):
|
| - the keyboard hotkeys aren't customisable, and often fire
| when I'm using alt+numbers to switch tabs, so when I come
| back to the Jira tab it's on some report page I don't care
| about
|
| - sometimes the content won't render when switching pages,
| requiring a full refresh. It's difficult to tell whether it's
| just being slow to load, or it's gotten itself stuck.
| Sometimes I sit there for a few seconds like an idiot until I
| remember to hit refresh
|
| - there's pretty poor support for ticket templates as far as
| I can tell. My company's method uses a confluence page with a
| table with the templates, then uses the bulk "create Jira
| ticket" option. But this edits the wiki page for some reason,
| which you need to revert. They're probably expecting you to
| duplicate a whole template page before generating, but the
| editing part could be an option in the generator wizard. With
| this method there's no way to go back and amend the auto-
| generated tickets' titles and descriptions etc. You're stuck
| with manually editing all of them along with the template.
| Surely templates are a common enough use case that warrant a
| dedicated workflow?
| gbalduzzi wrote:
| Jira is awfully slow though, saying "it could be faster" is
| an understatement.
|
| The "better Jira" that I dream of is simply Jira but faster
| and with a better UI, I don't have issues with the underlying
| process
| pyrale wrote:
| > As a result Jira becomes a proxy for all the things going
| wrong with your daily work and a problem of its own.
|
| And It became that willingly, because Atlassian understood that
| their customer wasn't devs or PMs, but managers and corporate
| procurement people. They fully deserves to be on the hook for
| their product.
| raverbashing wrote:
| I agree these are issues
|
| But having a jquery frontend experience with a single-threaded
| backend system doesn't do it any favours ;)
| skinkestek wrote:
| Is this true?
| raverbashing wrote:
| It certainly feels like it, even though it might not be
| technically true
| Devasta wrote:
| Agreed. Jira is great, but only if you have an angry tyrant at
| the helm managing it.
|
| Its too flexible, if you allow people do what they want they'll
| have no structure at all, and you end up with disasters like a
| bunch custom "priority" field which are the exact same as the
| regular priority field except it just has different variations
| on "low", "medium", "high".
|
| For my team I use basically none of Jiras features. I have a
| simple kanban board with 7 steps, and encourage my team to use
| it as a ships log. No story points or sprints or any of that
| stuff, the only hard requirement is that in order to close a
| ticket you have to write a paragraph about what was changed or
| attach an email to the Jira where you did the same but with a
| client.
| fijiaarone wrote:
| Im glad there is finally an open source app with a UI that has
| more white space than content.
| joduplessis wrote:
| Very nice! Good job to the team - looks great. Crazy how you can
| jump into so many codebases & find React/Next/Tailwind.
| [deleted]
| aetherspawn wrote:
| Has anyone had a play with this and know whether it supports
| multiple different issue types and/or tiered issues
| (parent/child-level1/child-level2)?
| viharkurama wrote:
| Hey, we do have a feature of nested issues as part of Plane.
| You can go n-levels. You can have different type of issues via
| labelling.
| aetherspawn wrote:
| Thanks, our use-case is requirements management and n-level
| support is perfect.
|
| I think labelling would get us out of the woods. Schema would
| be preferable, but there's no reason why labeling won't work.
|
| I plan to give it a go at our consultancy next week, thanks
| steve1977 wrote:
| The problem is not Jira the software, but what corporate people
| are doing with it.
|
| No, you're not "agile" just because you have scrum sprints in
| Jira.
| charles_f wrote:
| > Open Source JIRA [...] in the simplest way possible
|
| Mmh.
|
| I like that it's opensource, that way product owners can become
| even more inventive with great ways of making a process
| cumbersome
| Aleklart wrote:
| Now suffering free of charge
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