[HN Gopher] I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)
___________________________________________________________________
I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)
Author : seabearDEV
Score : 206 points
Date : 2024-02-14 20:23 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ifuckinghatejira.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ifuckinghatejira.com)
| peter_l_downs wrote:
| Agreed. Other than Linear, are there any task trackers that
| people enjoy using?
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| I liked pivotal tracker (https://www.pivotaltracker.com) quite
| a bit when I used it at my last job, but that was 7ish years
| ago. Presumably it hasn't gotten worse. At the time I strongly
| suspected that it wouldn't scale past 30ish devs. That's more
| than enough for many people though, and that's assuming no
| improvements.
|
| I particularly liked that there are very nice cli tools for it:
| https://www.pivotaltracker.com/integrations/command-line
| stickfigure wrote:
| Can confirm that Pivotal Tracker has gotten better since
| then, not worse. But it's strongly opinionated and if you
| aren't using something very much like the Pivotal process, it
| might not work for you. Personally I love it.
|
| FYI a dozen people would be a huge team at Pivotal. 30 folks
| working in a single backlog is unheard of. But I hear Pivotal
| became a different place after Rob left, so I don't know what
| it's like now.
| quesera wrote:
| Interesting -- I've been using Pivotal Tracker continuously
| for at least seven years, and I don't perceive much change
| in that period. I think this is a good thing!
|
| For me, the most impressive thing is that Tracker manages
| to be simple enough but not simplistic.
|
| I've used a _lot_ of tracker products, and I don 't
| consider Pivotal Tracker to be particularly opinionated.
| That might just mean it works the way I prefer of course!
| But we do not do dogmatic methodologies, and Tracker is
| flexible enough to add zero friction to our process.
| beckler wrote:
| I haven't used it in a long time, but I enjoyed Shortcut (back
| when it was called Clubhouse).
| IshKebab wrote:
| Phabricator (or Phorge) is pretty great on that front. I think
| the basic Github and Gitlab systems are also all you really
| need. I mean Gitlab uses it and they have 60k issues and 2000
| employees.
|
| I think the key is to have good search, which Jira does not
| remotely have.
| dang wrote:
| _I fucking hate Jira_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31813957 - June 2022 (526
| comments)
| BanazirGalbasi wrote:
| I Fucking Hate This Website Design.
|
| I get their points, but the way everything is presented is awful.
| I assume that these are comments on an article or responses in a
| conversation, but I can't see who is responding to what. Clicking
| "Next" to see each individual comment is also tedious, and it
| means I'm going to stop reading after 4 or 5 pages. I'd rather
| read a single page that I can scroll through rather than an
| "interactive" site like this.
| ghostbrainalpha wrote:
| I don't understand why someone would make this?
| biddit wrote:
| Pretty grumpy take...
|
| I read dozens of them and I found the presentation to be a fun
| approach. The creativity is welcome IMHO. It was immediately
| clear to me that these were comments scraped from various
| sources on the internet. Who they're replying to doesn't matter
| much. If you've worked with JIRA extensively, you've already
| heard many of these criticisms.
| jmclnx wrote:
| Speaking to the choir :)
| schappim wrote:
| Several of the complaints mentioned are over a decade old.
|
| For instance, I searched for "I **ing hate JIRA too, the
| interface is clunky and slow and makes me angry.," and found it
| was from this comment from Feb 2014 [1].
|
| It is perhaps a bit disingenuous to not to include dates.
|
| 1.
| https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1z07fi/my_company...
| justinsaccount wrote:
| I fucking hate JIRA, the interface is clunky and slow and makes
| me angry.
|
| - Me, 2024.
| prmoustache wrote:
| It hasn't really changed in my experience.
|
| Some people complain that I don't update my stories but more
| often than not I just wait so much for stuff to open on Jira
| that end up doing something else while it is loading the page
| and forget about it.
| jameskilton wrote:
| Crap, clunky interface is ingrained in their culture. There was
| a release mid last year that changed the comments loading to be
| paginated to speed up ticket page load times.
|
| They loaded the oldest comments first... and you had to click
| "Load the next 10" REPEATEDLY until you got to the newest
| comments.
|
| I have since left that company and don't have to deal with Jira
| anymore so I'm not sure if it got "fixed" at all since then.
|
| It was the one of the most baffling, user hostile decision I
| have seen made to a product, and I'm sure someone got a
| commendation for "speeding up the ticket load page by X%".
| he0001 wrote:
| Jira tries to solve everyone's problem. It tries to incorporate
| everyone's idea of how and what's needed to be tracked.
|
| I can just say from my own experience that the one that created
| the workflow and what fields that they absolutely must have to do
| some sort of follow up, have never worked as a developer or
| anything near a software project, and yet enforces all this
| garbage for their illusion of control. And yet they have none.
| Just because they are higher up in the hierarchy than the people
| that works with the actual product.
|
| And then there is all these managers that think that everything
| should be a ticket and all changes can absolutely map to a
| ticket. Or that everything is actually done by the guy on the
| ticket.
|
| I bet when I die and go to hell, my punishment will be to fill
| out Jira tickets and push them through the workflow.
|
| Edit: formatting and spelling
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Lots of things can be a ticket, though.
| dingnuts wrote:
| > that the one that created the workflow and what fields that
| they absolutely must have to do some sort of follow up, have
| never worked as a developer
|
| This is all configurable by the JIRA admin at your org. You're
| not complaining about JIRA, you're complaining about someone at
| your company who set up the workflows. I figured this out after
| bitching endlessly about JIRA at company 1 only to move to
| company 2 and discover everything I had hated about the process
| was set up by my previous boss...
|
| I thought it was JIRA, but it was the org..
| submain wrote:
| I share the sentiment and frustration of having to fill useless
| boxes.
|
| However, as a manager, things go south very quick if you're not
| tracking what's being changed and by whom. You won't know
| what's included in your release, nor if it was tested properly.
| You won't know who to reach for fixes after testing or even
| what to tell clients when they ask if a feature/fix was
| shipped.
|
| I hate overly complicated processes, but tracking things is
| essential.
| jdmoreira wrote:
| Your developers must be children then. (Maybe because you
| treat them like children).
|
| The source of truth is their changelog not your Jira tickets
| occz wrote:
| Seems like the kind of thing that Git is really good for,
| right?
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Continuous deployment is the solution to that. You always
| know what is in a release because it's the one thing that you
| were trying to change when you clicked merge.
|
| Overly complicated processes are just patches to try to cover
| up for immature engineering practices.
| _dain_ wrote:
| _> tracking what's being changed and by whom_
|
| git
|
| _> You won't know what's included in your release_
|
| release notes
|
| _> nor if it was tested properly._
|
| CI
| vundercind wrote:
| Resistance to simply reading data _we already fucking have_
| is so very weird to me in "agile" (and much of non-agile,
| to be fair).
|
| Part of the trouble is using things like Jira and moving
| tracking-what's-happening and chatting-about-features
| farther from the code than it needs to be.
| scubbo wrote:
| There are already 4 replies telling you that you're trying to
| reinvent source control, and that's still not enough.
| ozim wrote:
| Bonus points for insisting on tracking everything in Jira and
| then not making effort to open it up to check and asking for
| status updates via im/mail/call.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| The problem is when your instance has too many masters - all
| fields are global, then their visibility is controlled at the
| project level. In a big company with one instance, holy sh!t.
| There are so many duplicated fields, unused fields. When you go
| to the bulk change option, it shows you all of these and it
| goes for days. It works well if you keep it under control, but
| word to the wise to any company. Create a governance board
| that's not afraid to tell a VP to fuck off with their requests
| for yet another ill-conceived field. That's from the user / web
| viewpoint. Don't get me started on their API. v2, v3 changes -
| the stuff you can't filter out that bloat responses, etc....
| But otherwise, if well controlled, it is good. Or at least one
| of the least bad systems.
| bschne wrote:
| I always wonder how much of this sort of thing is disdain for the
| specific tool vs. disdain for what working in a mid-to-large org.
| is like and the overhead it usually brings with it.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| The specific tool is often bad, working in mid-to-large orgs is
| often bad, and the two combined can be catastrophically bad.
| Poorly configured Jira on top of a poorly run large
| organization and you end up with an orwellian system that does
| nothing but punish people and squander productivity and human
| life.
| itronitron wrote:
| Jira + Scrum is a soul crushing nightmare, Jira + Kanban is
| fine.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Until someone comes along and tries to put some scrum into
| your kanban.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Ahh, someone woke up and chose violence today.
| teeray wrote:
| "but once we can get our estimates right, then think of all
| that we can do with these burndown charts!"
| breather wrote:
| Is there a context where time estimation is not employed,
| even implicitly?
| scott_w wrote:
| No, never. I've stopped doing story points for this
| reason. When people want an estimate, I tend to chop
| things into reasonable same-sized chunks and do my best
| effort based on that. I prefer the NoEstimates approach
| and try to use past data to be a bit more "real" but it's
| not always possible.
|
| The truth is, if someone wants a time estimate, just do
| that and don't beat around the bush. It's too much effort
| to still be wrong.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Chevy Chase in "Christmas Vacation": "Bend over and I'll
| show you."
| OJFord wrote:
| I agree that scrum is a soul-crushing nightmare & kanban is
| fine, but Jira a nightmare of a tool to use regardless of
| your process, IME.
| 112233 wrote:
| It is possible to have terrible poorly made tool, and use it to
| commit unspeakable atrocities.
|
| If JIRA at least had rational design underlaying poor
| implementation, it would give some reason to bear and hope.
| Instead, it is an infinite fractal of nope, the likes of which
| you hardly encounter outside government contract projects.
| colordrops wrote:
| It's both.
| DarkNova6 wrote:
| I am thinking the exact same thing. Right now I wish I could
| use Jira because I'm using this IBM equivalent tool ,,CCM".
|
| CCM is so bad it's nearly dysfunctional. Image Jira but 3 times
| the necessary clicks (this is not hyperbole).
|
| With Jira I can see the good intentions and how they go awry.
| But CCM is pure madness from top to bottom.
| username135 wrote:
| Gods, anything thats interactive and IBM related is generally
| annoying and not user friendly.
| dakial1 wrote:
| Even IBM is getting rid of IBM (or ex IBM) stuff. They are
| using outlook now, lots of teams use Jira/Trello/Confluence
| etc...
| sverhagen wrote:
| My team does a lightweight agile process, we don't hate it. If
| we used a better tool, we'd love it. We have Jira, and I don't
| have the energy to change it, nor do I want the responsibility
| to decide or suggest what other tool that should be. I've
| always used Jira, I have no suggestions ready. I'm sure it's
| easy to pick a simple tracker, like GitHub Issues, but I would
| not know if it'd suffice all our needs and if it would scale,
| and again, I don't have the immediate energy to invest time
| into that. But meanwhile Jira is slowly eating away at me. I
| think the general concepts are acceptable. It's just all the
| rough edges, all the stupid little design decisions, and its
| slowness that I hate (passionately).
| emllnd wrote:
| - Monday.com
|
| - Airtable
|
| - A giant board on Miro.com with a bunch of notes in frames
|
| Of course the scaling needs are different whether it's for
| just a single team or if the data needs to be aggregated into
| some KPI. In my experience it's better to keep KPI publishing
| separate from task tracking, though
| karaterobot wrote:
| The biggest company I've ever worked in was 120 people, and I
| hated using Jira. I also hated Jira at the ~100 person company
| I used to work for, and the 7 person company I worked for a few
| years ago. Jira has a lot of problems. I've yet to find the
| one, true, perfect work management system, but of the half
| dozen I've tried, Jira is the one I like the least.
| vundercind wrote:
| I've never once been able to figure out WTF actual benefit it
| provides over GH issues or Gitlab's equivalent. I was once
| told we couldn't use Issues because "non-developers find it
| confusing" but _holy shit_ that cannot be true, have you
| _seen_ how much more confusing even a very vanilla Jira is?!
|
| It seems to me these tools should be optimized for the
| _majority_ of their users (developers) and if the PMs need
| pretty graphs and someone else wants it all in a spreadsheet
| (OMFG) they could use any of a hundred integrations to
| extract the data and generate those without more effort than
| wrangling Jira.
|
| Shit, lots of places are already paying for GH or Gitlab (or
| self-hosting the latter). They just don't use that part and
| instead _also_ pay for Jira or Asana or ADO or whatever
| productivity-murdering junk-drawer-where-information-gets-
| lost garbage.
| viraptor wrote:
| Jira is very crud-like unless you add plugins to make it a bit
| better. (Unless things have changed since I last used it?) That
| means lots of unnecessary clicking around and waiting for slow
| page loads when you just want to achieve something simple.
|
| That compounds any corporate-inflicted issues.
| ta1243 wrote:
| I work in a mid-to-large org. The more agile part use tools
| like jira and slack. The older part (established in the 1920s)
| use Remedy and Teams.
|
| Jira is brilliant. It is team-led. Different teams have
| different approaches, some love all the features like
| components, versions, issue types, assignee, kanban boards,
| scrumms, reports etc etc. Others like my team use it with
| subject/description/comments. You make the tool fit what the
| team needs.
|
| Same with slack, you can create and destroy channels around
| your team -- anyone can create any channel at any point it
| makes sense -- problem at 3AM, spin up a channel to discuss it,
| job done. You can integrate and add plugins nice and easy.
|
| Remedy and Teams are led top down. They're designed to be
| organised, not organic. They're not built for the teams doing
| the work, but for the people wanting reporting. It's more about
| monthly KPIs than actually improving performance.
|
| I have no doubt you can use Jira in a "KPI led" way. I do doubt
| you can use Remedy in a responsible way, but even if you can,
| it relies on the culture of those selling the tools.
|
| Sadly I fear jira and slack will be next -- they already took
| Zoom and gave us teams instead, after all we "already pay for
| teams with office" (which aside from cloud-based email, I, and
| my teammates, never use).
|
| Never has an anti-trust move been so obvious or damaging.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I can personally vouch that Jira can be inflicted on
| engineers in a "KPI led" way.
| freedomben wrote:
| yes same, in fact the access to metrics (for use in part in
| KPIs) was a primary driver of our adoption of Jira
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I don't want to use any tool or methodology.. I just want to
| do my work.
| fragmede wrote:
| how do you want to do work without tools?
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I'm assuming that's a funny/sarcastic comment, but the
| scary part is... there's a _chance_ it might be serious!
| :-O
| blueskythinking wrote:
| If by "team lead" you mean the noisy few set the rules and
| the rest of us have to deal with it, then that also matches
| my experience of Jira.
| almostnormal wrote:
| > Jira is brilliant. It is team-led. Different teams have
| different approaches, [...]
|
| That doesn't sound real. There's supposed to be some central
| department(s) that collect ideas from the process framework
| of the season or requested by customers (especially those
| items for levels that are not requested), add their own ideas
| and create a superset of that as configuration with
| everything set to mandatory. The result is infliced upon
| everyone, except of course the department that was
| responsible for the definition.
| vundercind wrote:
| Teams would be fine with two things:
|
| 1) Let a Team channel be a normal-ass chat instead of some
| weird forum-in-a-chat-interface. Shit gets lost. Creating a
| new post feels very formal and high friction, because it'll
| push everything else out of view (another, minor problem:
| teams' padding and whitespace is _way_ out of control). Make
| it configurable! That's ok. The weird chat-as-forum thing is
| fine for a very low-traffic announcements channel (and very
| bad for anything else) so having it as an option is alright.
|
| 2) Allow "create a meeting for this Teams channel" that puts
| any meeting chat directly in the channel.
|
| These two problems force conversations away from the "Team"
| and into meeting-specific chats and DMs. It's _really,
| really_ bad. It silos knowledge and makes it hard to tell wtf
| is going on.
|
| Teams is horrible for distributed or hybrid work because of
| these two deficiencies.
| a1o wrote:
| There is probably some feature request somewhere in
| Microsoft weird tech channel with thousands of comments and
| upvotes and some MS person appearing every three years to
| let us know they "are looking into it".
| vundercind wrote:
| There were a couple years-old ones on public feature
| request sites last I checked. They're ignoring them.
|
| It's frustrating because Teams can already do normal chat
| rooms, and can already schedule meetings. Just not in the
| most-useful places to have those two features. It's not
| brand-new feature development from scratch.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Interesting; I think this is a demonstration of how much what
| seems like a "Tool" is actually "organization", because my
| current experience is _completely_ opposite:
|
| * In MS teams, I can create conversations, group chats,
| organic meetings, and add people (and include history) as I
| want and desire. I prefer it for quick discussions with my
| colleagues and to get a rapid problem solving or critical
| incident conversation where I don't immediately know who I
| need / what it's about, and it'll scale as I add people. I
| push a button and talk to people, push a button to add
| people, push a button to video chat, all seamless.
|
| * Slack is structured and formal and based around enterprise-
| created channels and workgroups, with way too much noise in
| each massive channel and way too little content that's even
| remotely relevant to me. Outside of channels, conversations
| are horribly gimped: A) I can only have one conversation with
| each set of people, I cannot simply rename a chat and have
| three different chats with same people around different
| topics B) If I add people to an existing conversation, it
| will create a new chat without history (this may have
| improved recently as I know we sent a TON of feedback to
| Slack admins). Basically, to get anything done you have to
| create channels, which is great for "top down, I know ahead
| of time what I need / want to enforce" structure, but awful
| for "this started as a one-on-one and is now a massive
| discussion with 17 people"
|
| I'm looking at some of the other comments, and it seems they
| have some weird gimped version of MS Teams. E.g.:
|
| >> _" Allow "create a meeting for this Teams channel" that
| puts any meeting chat directly in the channel."_
|
| This... is how it works for me. I start a conversation with
| some people, then I add people, then I click "Call", then we
| all video call together, then we are done and keep typing in
| it, repeat as needed.
|
| Weird!
| TJSomething wrote:
| > Basically, to get anything done you have to create
| channels, which is great for "top down, I know ahead of
| time what I need / want to enforce" structure, but awful
| for "this started as a one-on-one and is now a massive
| discussion with 17 people"
|
| In Slack, you can turn a group DM into a private channel
| and keep the history.
|
| https://slack.com/help/articles/217555437-Convert-a-group-
| di...
| lmm wrote:
| > Jira is brilliant. It is team-led. Different teams have
| different approaches, some love all the features like
| components, versions, issue types, assignee, kanban boards,
| scrumms, reports etc etc. Others like my team use it with
| subject/description/comments. You make the tool fit what the
| team needs.
|
| > Same with slack, you can create and destroy channels around
| your team -- anyone can create any channel at any point it
| makes sense -- problem at 3AM, spin up a channel to discuss
| it, job done. You can integrate and add plugins nice and
| easy.
|
| > Remedy and Teams are led top down. They're designed to be
| organised, not organic. They're not built for the teams doing
| the work, but for the people wanting reporting. It's more
| about monthly KPIs than actually improving performance.
|
| I'd say it's the other way round. Everywhere I've seen Jira,
| the person who can change the tool settings (e.g. make
| mandatory fields optional, add a transition to allow you to
| move a card to the column it should be in (because Jira is
| deny by default, you can only move things in ways that are
| specifically allowed) is a very distant part of the org chart
| from the team doing day to day work on it. "not built for the
| teams doing the work, but for the people wanting reporting.
| It's more about monthly KPIs than actually improving
| performance" is exactly how I'd describe Jira, given how I've
| seen it used (across a great many organisations, large and
| small - indeed I'd say switching to Jira is the most reliable
| indicator that a previously fun company has grown too big and
| it's time to leave).
|
| Some stuff is probably just typical managerial bullshit. But
| the fact that Jira defaults to working as a slow, drag-and-
| drop interface _with no undo_ is absolutely an unforced
| error.
|
| > Never has an anti-trust move been so obvious or damaging.
|
| Atlassian buying Trello and gradually ruining it is worse
| than MS giving away crappy products for free.
| zac23or wrote:
| "Jira is brilliant"
|
| I've never read that sentence before!
|
| My feeling is... developers hate Jira, managers love Jira.
| And that is expected. The tendency is for things loved by
| managers to be hated by developers, such as meetings,
| metrics, etc.
|
| An example of a very misused metric: In one of my jobs,
| managers started using Scrum Poker results as a productivity
| measure. "My team scored 100 points in the last sprint."
| Imagine the chaos this generated. Quickly teams began to hate
| the Scrum poker.
|
| Jira is probably just a scapegoat in corporate theater,
| something needs to be to blame. Jira is a good culprit.
| VonGallifrey wrote:
| When I clicked on the site the very first opinion called Jira
| shit because they had 20 different boards for the same thing,
| 2000 tickets in the backlog and 20 different mandatory fields
| for each ticket.
|
| Which is absolutely not the fault of Jira. Jira does not make
| you create 20 boards and per default a Title is all you need to
| create a Ticket. By the complaints own wording they had 2000
| tickets because management refused to delete outdated and
| irrelevant tickets.
|
| A new tool would not fix this since I would bet that management
| would insist that all 20 boards with all tickets in the backlog
| would need to be transitioned to the new tool. The mandatory
| fields are obviously also highly important to management, those
| need to be configured in the new tool as well.
|
| Instead of complaining about the obviously bad management they
| just complain about Jira. That is, I think, very common when
| complaining about jira.
| sb8244 wrote:
| This hits the heart of it for me.
|
| I've used Jira (last job) and Linear (now). I don't really
| see any compelling reason that Linear is "better" than Jira.
| Jira was always pretty easy to use and navigate for me, and
| we had team-focused views for ourselves.
|
| Even on this site, several opinions I looked at are about the
| idea of process or the implementation of a process--not
| really about Jira. And several of the ones about Jira just
| came off as whiny nitpicking and not actually meaningful.
| stackskipton wrote:
| Linear being strongly opinionated helps keep Project
| Managers (broad term for manager types) in check. Jira
| trying to be everything to everyone means KPI management is
| just a few clicks away.
| michaelt wrote:
| Would you at least agree that it's bad that Jira is slow as
| shit, in both its hosted and on-prem forms?
|
| Management didn't insist on _that_.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I'm not going to "stan" for JIRA, but I've developed software
| before Jira with Bugzilla and other smorgasborgs of tools.
|
| JIRA was a dramatic improvement at one point, however, it is
| bought and sold to managers, so it is unsurprising it
| eventually converges to managerial overengineering.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Trust me it's distain for the tool. Jira is bad on three
| fronts:
|
| 1. It's too configurable. It's like the company wiki. People
| come in, set up some random projects, processes, fields,
| statuses, etc. and then move on. There's rarely someone making
| it all consistent and sensible. This results in task statuses
| that can be TODO, BACKLOG, PENDING, WAITING, TO DO, etc. etc.
| etc. You also end up with _waaaay_ too many fields for tasks.
| Arbitrary distinctions between "Tasks" and "Stories", etc.
| You're at the mercy of your Jira admin who will _definitely_
| make worse decisions than e.g. the developers of Phabricator or
| Gitlab. Hiding useful fields, adding pointless ones, etc.
|
| 2. Despite being super configurable, it can't do some really
| basic things you'd expect from something whose sole job is task
| tracking. For example you can only parent tasks 2 or 3 levels
| deep. A task can't have two parents. Subtasks can't be in
| different sprints. You can't reorder tasks by priority in the
| backlog.
|
| 3. Most offensively it is just _incredibly_ slow. The main way
| you add tasks to a sprint is drag and drop on the backlog, but
| it performs _so_ badly (100% CPU all the time) that they 've
| had to add context menu options to move tasks to the top/bottom
| or to a sprint. I believe there's also an option to disable
| animations. A simple web page should not consume 100% of my
| CPU.
|
| It's by far the worst issue tracker I've ever used.
|
| Companies still pay for it though because PMs love the pretty
| burndown charts and being able to add a gazillion fields to
| tasks. How will they report project status to their bosses if
| they can't have Jira work out the exact-to-the-second estimated
| delivery time automatically? And by "automatically" I mean by
| making someone else do all the work.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| Re. your third point, Confluence is also slow as shit. Using
| both together is like returning to the age of dial-up.
| toolslive wrote:
| Not only that. Once you've battled the sucky editor and
| have the document in confluence, you will realize that if
| you export it to pdf (or word) it will look like shit. So
| what's the point?
|
| "Confluence is where information goes to die"
| erik_seaberg wrote:
| My favorite is trying to figure out the subtle inflection
| differences between "won't do," "rejected," "deprecated,"
| "won't fix," "can't fix," "cancelled," "invalid,"
| "abandoned," and "declined," as well as the priority with
| which we aren't doing something (um ... low?)
| mrdoops wrote:
| Yeah 100% the root pain is from low agency/trust dynamics of a
| large org.
|
| Jira is just the tool management chooses because nobody-got-
| fired-for-buying-jira.
| kagevf wrote:
| I've wondered the same thing about Microsoft Teams. Is Teams as
| horrible as people say, or do they just hate it because it's
| what they happen to use for video meetings at work? Conversely,
| I don't hear much hate for zoom.
| prepend wrote:
| I can't get a modal popup when someone messages me directly
| on teams. I have to check the list of chats for if someone
| has messaged me.
|
| That's stupid and a flaw in teams. It's a bad messaging app.
| It's pretty good with meetings though.
| kagevf wrote:
| > I can't get a modal popup when someone messages me
| directly on teams
|
| that's pretty damning ...
| magicmicah85 wrote:
| Are you on Mac by chance? I use notifications to gather all
| my pop ups as I've never been able to get the modals to
| work.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Having used Teams previously, I strongly suspect the latter.
| I didn't find anything about it to be particularly obnoxious.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| It's slow, it's got a really poorly designed UI. It tries
| to do too much. It's not configurable enough, very low
| density
| psunavy03 wrote:
| And it was none of these things enough for me to care.
| I'm not over the moon about it; I just don't despise it
| either. It's a tool, so I used it.
| mablopoule wrote:
| Teams is nice enough when it works, but it tend to break
| far more than any other chat app I used. Stuff like getting
| the call notification (won't work on Firefox, I have to
| launch Chrome even though I can join a meeting on Firefox).
| The most annoying is that sometime it just doesn't display
| anything. Like no notification on my phone, or the lastest
| message will sometime not appear on a device.
|
| Teams also have some very nice things going for it with
| it's Office 365 integration, but as a chat app it's just
| way more buggy than it should.
| OJFord wrote:
| Teams is the only reason Chrome (well, Chromium) is installed
| on my work laptop: it detects Firefox and refuses to
| function. So does Facetime, incidentally, which I found out
| more recently for a family thing, and that's why Chromium is
| also installed on my personal laptop currently.
|
| I assume they're both doing something unfriendly that Firefox
| disallows on privacy or security grounds.
| whstl wrote:
| I wonder if it refuses to function because of a lack of
| third party cookies. This is what caused it to fail for me
| on Safari.
|
| Allowing third-party cookies solved my problem (but create
| others, of course).
| WesleyJohnson wrote:
| We switched from Slack to Teams several years ago because we
| were all-in on Office 365 products. Everyone hated the
| change, but with stuck with it. It was slow, crashed a lot,
| search was abysmal and you'd have to be a masochist to use it
| willingly....
|
| But they pushed out a new version recently. Now you've got
| Teams Classic and Teams NEW (work or school)... at least on
| the Mac.
|
| It's sooo much better. Way more stable. Search is a delight
| (relatively speaking). We get far fewer complaints now.
|
| Worth mentioning: We only use the "Chat" aspect, we don't use
| the "Teams" aspect. If we want to discuss a project, we just
| spin up a new chat with relevant parties and rename the
| channel to the project. Works great. We could never get "buy
| in" on the Teams aspect, nor threaded discussions. The main
| reasoning was having to monitor two tabs in the product.
| Everyone just wanted to stay on the Chat tab, so we made it
| work.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > If we want to discuss a project, we just spin up a new
| chat with relevant parties
|
| This part I struggle with, and maybe we're doing it wrong,
| but to me as a PM, this way is painful.
|
| Search helps. But then I have to remember, "Was discussion
| about X in the chat with people A + B + C, or was it in A +
| B + D's chat, or B + D's chat, or..."
|
| We also have significant challenges with knowledge silos
| (not intentional, and more about a cadre of new devs being
| brought on) that (not the only solution) I feel that
| pushing conversations to specific teams when appropriate
| might help, improving visibility.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Is Teams as horrible as people say, or do they just hate it
| because it's what they happen to use for video meetings at
| work?
|
| So, let's sum up my personal gripes (on a Mac):
|
| 1. Teams keeps locking up the dGPU for whatever reason
| randomly after calls, draining the battery and grilling my
| legs until I figure out that Teams has gone nuts again.
|
| 2. Since the macOS Sonoma update and the switch to the "new"
| Teams client, every time a call comes in, the ringtone
| glitches out (and I'm not alone in that)
|
| 3. There are _three_ different ways of chatting with other
| people: Meeting chats and direct /group messages (these are
| summed up under the "chat" tab) and "teams" with "channels".
| The latter don't produce instant notifications when someone
| writes there, I guess because Microsoft doesn't want to deal
| with "I get an instant notification every time someone posts
| a kitten photo in the off-topic channel" complaints.
|
| 4. There is only _one_ uploaded-files repository which means
| if you have a "screenshot.jpg" sent to someone, and you try
| to send a different file with the same name in a different
| chat, it will say "you already uploaded screenshot.jpg, do
| you want to replace this?". This is fucking bad UX, likely
| caused by Teams using OneDrive under the hood to share files.
|
| 5. The search is slooooow as molasses and damn useless. You
| have zero chance of ever finding something again, the larger
| the org the worse the pain.
|
| 6. No window/functionality remembers your context when you
| switch away. Say you click on a notification from a chat
| because a colleague needs an urgent answer, while you're
| scrolling in a team thread... you go back, and your scroll
| position is lost.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I've worked in both large and small orgs with Jira. Hate it
| just as much in small orgs. Maybe more even.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > disdain for the specific tool vs. disdain for what working in
| a mid-to-large org
|
| You're kind of missing the problem here - it's both and
| neither. It's not the tool (it's awful) or the mid-to-large org
| itself, it's the concept that a tool as blunt as a ticketing
| system can meaningfully capture software development management
| in a useful way.
|
| If people just treated it as a "necessary evil" time-tracking
| type system to make sure people were really working when they
| said they were, that would be irritating but not damaging. But
| far too many people without a lot of mental faculties actually
| take it completely seriously and try to put everything in it
| and expect meaningful results out of it. It actually ends up
| being worse than "nothing at all" because it _insists_ on the
| "only do what can be predicted and whose predictions is
| measured in hours" model of software development that stupid
| people think encapsulates creative activities.
| lijok wrote:
| > But far too many people without a lot of mental faculties
| actually take it completely seriously and try to put
| everything in it and expect meaningful results out of it. It
| actually ends up being worse than "nothing at all" because it
| _insists_ on the "only do what can be predicted and whose
| predictions is measured in hours" model of software
| development that stupid people think encapsulates creative
| activities.
|
| You're conflating ticketing systems with work estimation.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| So are they.
| dboreham wrote:
| > the concept that a tool as blunt as a ticketing system can
| meaningfully capture software development management in a
| useful way.
|
| The background to this is : yes it can. I worked in
| organizations (long pre-Jira) where we developed the
| bug/ticketing system specifically to drive our development
| management process. The two evolved in concert. The result
| was excellent, and sadly has never been re-achieved with any
| of the modern tools.
|
| My take on this is that somebody was told that the bug system
| can be used to drive project management (which it can) but
| then implemented a bug system without any real understanding
| of what that means or how to achieve it.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| It's no different than Agile or Scrum. It's just a tool, but if
| you put it in the hands of morons, you're going to have a bad
| time. Especially when there are explicit assumptions about how
| you'll use it built into said tool, and then said morons ignore
| them.
|
| Unfortunately in any medium-to-large org, there are a non-zero
| number of morons.
| irrational wrote:
| I love my job and the people I work with. I hate Jira with a
| vivid passion. It is, by far, the worst tool I have to work
| with. In fact, it is the only tool I hate to work with.
| tikhonj wrote:
| I worked at a large organization and yet didn't have to put up
| with anything Jira-like and top-down. Ticket-based development
| is neither necessary nor sufficient--nor even particularly
| effective--for coordinating software development at scale. It's
| a throwback to the superficially compelling but thoroughly
| ineffective ideas of "scientific management".
| mschuster91 wrote:
| We did the switch to Atlassian Cloud last year as there was no
| way to justify going for the 4x markup of a data center edition
| for self-hosting and oh boy, what a ride. The UI keeps changing
| around, it's _dog slow_ , for some reason you can't copy a text
| from a ticket description because the pure act of clicking on
| the text will switch over to the editor that takes >10 seconds
| to load even on a high-power machine on a 10 GBit/s uplink...
|
| Atlassian _desperately_ needs to pause on new acquisitions and
| new features for at least two years and rework all of the
| products they acquired and unify them. Literally every
| Atlassian product offering has a different way of doing things,
| no consistency anywhere. Oh, and half of the functionality has
| no API, and there is no first party Terraform provider so you
| have to do everything by hand every fucking time.
|
| The abusive workflow bullshit by clueless middle managers is
| another problem in itself, thankfully I'm in the lucky position
| to tell people "no, we won't do that".
| zozbot234 wrote:
| JIRA is a silly proprietary system, there's just no clearly
| stated case case for using it when we've got open alternatives
| like Phorge (nee Phabricator) that also see wide-ranging use.
| mac-mc wrote:
| At my last large tech company we moved from Phabricator to
| JIRA. It was a global downgrade for actual users through and
| through. Engineering hated it, usage of ticket tracking went
| down a lot because nobody wanted to interact with that crappy
| tool. A good chunk of team's tasks just went into more informal
| google docs, sheets & slack channel bots as a result and the
| teams responsible for managing the tool had a hard time getting
| real adoption.
|
| We were forced to get off of Phabricator because it was
| abandoned, but JIRA was still a downgrade in every way. Linear
| will eat JIRAs lunch and in a decade, it's going to go the way
| of HipChat as the thing that everyone used but nobody talks
| about.
| Beijinger wrote:
| Never heard about it. You mean this product?
| https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/
|
| While I have not heard about Jira, Atlassian rings a bell. Not
| sure why.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| Savor it while it lasts.
| mablopoule wrote:
| Reminded me of that tech-oriented colleague who never heard
| of an NFT last year.
|
| It figured out it was best for him to continue that way.
| systems wrote:
| i wonder how common this is, and why havent you heard of it,
| specially that you know about this site hacker news
|
| this is almost on the same level as someone saying he never
| heard of subversion
| Beijinger wrote:
| Not sure why. But feel free to recommend a better tool, since
| I will need something like this soon.
|
| How about this? https://www.openproject.org/
| nix0n wrote:
| As a developer, OpenProject is fine.
|
| Search is pretty good, so I assume the reporting is okay,
| but I've never tried it.
|
| We used to get occasional slowdowns, but someone threw more
| HW at it, and speed is good now.
|
| I've never used Jira, so I can't compare directly.
| bscphil wrote:
| People working on open source "hackery" stuff are probably
| much more likely to be familiar with Github / Gitlab issues,
| or Bugzilla. I can only think of one open source project that
| uses Jira; it's my only encounter with the program, and it's
| without question the single worst experience I've ever had
| reporting a bug to a project from a technical point of view.
|
| I'm not so sure about the subversion comparison. Maybe it's
| out of date - someone who got started programming in the last
| ~10 years has probably only ever used Git, whereas plenty of
| organizations use Jira, as far as I know.
| _dain_ wrote:
| Not every tech-interested person has been in that kind of
| corporate SWE workplace. There are students, hobbyists,
| scientists, artists etc here. It's a big world out there!
| MilStdJunkie wrote:
| When you lay down to sleep, as your consciousness loses sync
| between limbic system and visual cortex, the Outer Dark hisses
| into your temporal gyrus: vast and precise architectures of
| obscenity, a choir of horrified mothers giving birth to
| dreadful machines. It is then that you know: every measure of
| human atrocity pales in comparison to the stupendous cruelty of
| the cosmos and its capacity for sin and murder.
|
| That's where a lot of people usually hear about Jira, but it's
| going to depend on your org.
| wcoenen wrote:
| There is much worse out there. We were forced to use Rally[1] for
| a few years, and I'm absolutely thrilled that we're going back to
| Jira.
|
| [1] https://www.broadcom.com/products/software/value-stream-
| mana...
| glxxyz wrote:
| I was at a company where we were forced to migrate from a
| simple lightweight internal tool to Rally, against my advice.
| It was much worse, and we migrated back within a year. Waste of
| everyone's time, and our issues got completely mangled and all
| the formatting looked like total garbage.
| tiltowait wrote:
| We're forced to use Rally. I look at Jira with envy and
| longing.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| I quite like Jira, it does the job I need it to.
| morkalork wrote:
| Confluence is where documentation goes to die.
| ben7799 wrote:
| That's cause it's write-only.
|
| It's like:
|
| cat $DOCS > /dev/null
|
| rm $DOCS
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| Where would it need to be not to die? Also, what kind of
| documentation? Technical? Or business?
| wwilim wrote:
| In the repo with the code, linked to from a sensible wiki
| that serves only as an index
| ta1243 wrote:
| That's how our conflusence is used.
|
| Some departments do stupid things like duplicating
| information. We use confluence to describe the
| requirements, the concepts, then point to the right
| locations.
|
| Take IPs, some departments have pages and pages with the
| same IP, subnet, etc in
| morkalork wrote:
| In the repo with the code. Seeing commits where both the
| code and doc change together is a sight to behold.
| expazl wrote:
| You can do that in confluence.
| Washuu wrote:
| Confluence search is terrible and never finds what I want even
| if I type in the exact title.
| gyudin wrote:
| They gave a try fixing it a while ago before giving up
| completely
| slingnow wrote:
| What do you use for documentation? My experience with
| Confluence has been similarly bad.
| tomohawk wrote:
| markdown, in the repo with the code.
| dingnuts wrote:
| It's the worst documentation tool, except all the others.
|
| Seriously though, what is better?
| sa46 wrote:
| I've been pretty happy with Slab. Straightforward shared wiki
| with a good editor, governance, and integrations.
| https://slab.com/
|
| I tried using README files in the repo but there's far too
| much friction to get most folks to bother. Google Docs tend
| to disappear content due to a lack of structure.
| morkalork wrote:
| Speaking of Google docs, I _just now_ had the joy of
| talking to a co-worker while trying to figure out the
| source of truth for something and we spent 10 minutes
| thinking we were looking at the same doc when in fact we
| were not! The owner had made and shared multiple slightly
| different copies.
| paiute wrote:
| At my current job, i need to make a jira ticket, a branch,
| do a live review... all to change a minor thing in a README
| nomel wrote:
| > I tried using README files in the repo but there's far
| too much friction
|
| I have confluence links in my Readme, which seems to be a
| pretty good balance, since it's physically impossible for
| people to use a search bar in a wiki.
| paiute wrote:
| Readme.md and an examples/ or tests/ I liked notion for
| business wikis.
| circusfly wrote:
| I much prefer Confluence to something like myriad Word and
| Excel sheets of uncanny versions floating around mostly unknown
| Sharepoint locations.
| rightbyte wrote:
| At least you can search more or less properly in network
| folders.
|
| At my old work I usually left a search going from the root
| network folder over the weekend, scanning for some keywords,
| when I needed a doc none knew where it was or if it existed
| at all.
|
| There was a parallel documentation system from IBM that
| didn't work, where the canonical docs should be. But you more
| or less had to know the document ID to query it. So most
| documents were also in the network folders spread out between
| hundred project folders and meeting folders.
| andrewheekin wrote:
| Inscribing "Jira is the worst project management tool, except for
| all the others" on my epitaph
| dopamean wrote:
| Maybe I'm lucky but I have yet to work in a place where any of
| the organizational or project management problems could be blamed
| on JIRA. Not even as like a top 5 reason. I don't love many of
| the tools I use day-to-day but JIRA is the only one that I
| consistently hear and read so much vitriol about. I think there's
| something else people are so angry about and JIRA is getting an
| outsized share of the attention.
| alistairSH wrote:
| My "issue" with Jira is that it's a large, amorphous piece of
| enterprise software. So, there's a million ways to do things.
| And a million plug-ins to extend functionality.
|
| So, when I try to do something new (to me), and I search the
| web, the hits are frequently outdated or related to a plug-in
| that I might not have access to. Makes it really difficult to
| do anything that isn't part of my company's baseline.
| kledru wrote:
| When it comes to JIRA, I agree, but I find Conflunce to be pretty
| good tool. Unfortunately, most of the people using it are not
| very good at writing documents or organizing knowledge in general
| :)
| more_corn wrote:
| The thing I fucking hate about jira is that it's a gateway drug
| for confluence.
|
| Jira doesn't actually bother me. Confluence is a tool of satan.
| stillbourne wrote:
| Jira is one of those tools where infinite configurability leads
| to infinite complexity.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| We are going to need a story for that. Be sure to set a good
| estimate of your effort in the form of story points. Use the
| Fibonacci sequence to pick the difficulty level for your story
| points. Your manager will then arrange your stories in priority
| order, Stories must be worked in priority order. At review time
| the number of stories and the number of points per story counts.
| Hurry up now.
| blueskythinking wrote:
| Story points represent complexity, not difficulty. We also aim
| for a certain amount of story points per sprint. After 13 we
| leave the Fibonacci sequence and just double them. The entire
| team must vote on story points simultaneously to avoid
| affecting each other's opinions, then must discuss the votes
| until we agree on a number. Stories that have sat too long in
| the backlog need re-pointing. Voting is now done with post-its
| in Miro, just to be modern.
|
| Things are sometimes stories, sometimes epics, and sometimes
| tasks or sub tasks. No one knows why, nor have they found a
| good way to integrate them all into The Workflow.
| circusfly wrote:
| At some places, any story higher than 5 gets split, an Epic
| is created and the 2 (or more) new stories are added to the
| new epic. I really don't get the online disdain for JIRA
| unless it's Microsoft employee astroturfers, almost as bad as
| Jetbrains and Red Hat astroturfers.
| blueskythinking wrote:
| Ah, that explains why I keep being asked to split a complex
| feature into pointless pieces that don't stand alone. No
| wonder we need so many team hours in sprint planning, to
| keep track of them all.
| hkchad wrote:
| The issue w/ jira is usually the people running it. Jira will let
| you customize just about every aspect of it, this typically leads
| to a garbage experience.
| web3-is-a-scam wrote:
| The only thing worse than Jira managed by an obsessed
| micromanaging manager/Jira admin is when they leave and you're
| left with their godforsaken configuration that everyone hates
| and nobody can change.
| tomohawk wrote:
| But this is exactly the problem with Jira. It enables
| overachieving in doing tickets, which should never be a goal,
| to the detriment of things that are actual goals.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I wrote "Jira Is a Code Smell": https://honeypot.net/post/jira-
| is-a-code-smell/
|
| Short version: Jira, in a vacuum, is neither great nor awful. It
| just is. But it has a complication that makes managers I want to
| work for dislike it, while strongly appealing to managers I don't
| want to work for.
|
| That's not universally true, I'm sure. However, it's been my
| experience.
| kagevf wrote:
| > But it has a complication that makes managers I want to work
| for dislike it, while strongly appealing to managers I don't
| want to work for.
|
| I think that could also be described as Jira gives people who
| don't really have anything to do, something to do, but for
| those who are blessed with an abundance of work, Jira can be
| unnecessary overhead.
| Supermancho wrote:
| My primary problem with JIRA, is that there is very little
| support for dependency trees. I have tickets X and Y linked to
| A,B,C,D and nothing but an ad-hoc way of determining how they
| are related. A visualization and tool to assign places in a
| tree, are part of what keeps JIRA from being excellent...ok
| that AND the horrid UX.
| n4r9 wrote:
| If Jira could take a dependency tree and estimates against
| each item and build out a timeline and display it like a Gant
| chart, that would be incredible. Even better, factor in
| employee working hours per week and bank holidays. Even
| better, dynamically update the timelines based on estimate
| updates, delays in external dependencies, or sick days.
|
| But actually my biggest grievance is the terrible search
| function. You can search for the literal title of an issue
| and it won't come up in the results.
| simmanian wrote:
| People who complain about Jira from a user perspective should try
| managing an instance - hundreds of people filing tickets to
| change specific configurations for their project and the right
| knobs and levers are so difficult to find that you end up filing
| tickets to engage Atlassian support so they can tell you where
| those settings are.
| siggalucci wrote:
| You and me both. I compare it to laundry though, I hate doing it
| but it's necessary.
| greencore wrote:
| You don't hate Jira, you hate capitalism
| mablopoule wrote:
| No.
|
| Working on an efficient and product-oriented company can be a
| joy, and 100% capitalist.
|
| Working projects that are just politically driven, or where
| process took over common sense, that's depressing, capitalism
| or not.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| > If we don't kill the staff at Atlassian, they're gonna kill us.
|
| What the fuck is this? I don't care how much you dislike a
| software package, this is not ok to say. Regards, an ex-Atlassian
| staff member.
| circusfly wrote:
| Agreed, doesn't seem like mods should even allow the link to be
| posted on a respectable site like HN.
| mrbombastic wrote:
| I really don't understand the disdain for jira, it is not great
| but mostly fine. Basically every other tool I have used has been
| worse. Heard good things about Linear but have a hard time
| believing that the effort to switch from jira to linear would be
| worth it for an org.
| throwanem wrote:
| Jira's much more a toolbox than a tool.
|
| If you have someone with the knowledge to use what's in the
| toolbox and the scope to build flows that support how work is
| done in your org, you'll love Jira, because it'll work far better
| for you than anything else could.
|
| If you don't have someone like that, or if you're small enough
| not to want or need that yet, then you'll fucking hate Jira.
| nipponese wrote:
| From the content of the post, it sounds Jira got used as an
| excuse to not interface directly with Eng. Stupid move, for any
| org.
|
| I have tried all the Jira clones, and Jira is the only thing
| that doesn't try to turn PMing into a video game for lazy
| micromanagers... if you don't let it become that.
| tootie wrote:
| I got two slides in before I disagreed with everything. JIRA does
| not emphasize how over why. It literally just has a text box for
| a description. What you write is up to you. JIRA does not
| discourage in-person conversation. JIRA is there to document
| conversations and it's incredibly good at it. Any PM tool that
| doesn't allow threaded comments is dead to me.
|
| I've never spent more than like an hour training anyone on JIRA
| and have used it successfully for many, many years.
| globular-toast wrote:
| The worst thing is you just can't get rid of it. You might try
| suggesting a simpler tool like Gitlab, but because Jira does
| absolutely fucking everything there will be one thing someone
| just can't live without and makes the alternative unviable. Of
| course if the simpler tool was used from the start nobody would
| miss that feature.
|
| I personally just my own backlog/todo system (both for work and
| non-work stuff) and consider Jira usage a necessary evil part of
| the job. Hopefully I'll someday work somewhere uninfected.
| Xiol32 wrote:
| Could be worse, you could be using Azure Devops.
| ndjshe3838 wrote:
| How do you avoid that problem where you have 30 random fields
| that are only relevant to other teams/projects
|
| It gets ridiculously bloated
| scott_w wrote:
| I don't hate Jira but I can see why people do. I've seen some
| pretty rubbish looking configurations (and done one or two
| myself!) so it's definitely a giant foot gun.
|
| That said, when it's bad it's because the company is trying to be
| too clever with it. If it's used how Atlassian recommends, it
| works fine. If not, you have a lot of pain. I can't blame
| Atlassian too much for their customers, either. The customer is
| always right.
| djha-skin wrote:
| I am more interested in the CSS/JS they're using to do the
| highlighting and the underlining. Does anyone know the library or
| what's going on?
| strunz wrote:
| A quick look through the source brought me to
| https://roughnotation.com/
| profmonocle wrote:
| I used Jira at my old job and didn't care for it. At my new job I
| have to use Procore half the time. I can't tell you how much I
| miss Jira.
| lolpanda wrote:
| I've used many tasking tools in my previous startups, Asana,
| Phabricator, Jira, Shortcuts... I think I liked Phabricator
| because it's flexible and not scrum like when you manage
| projects. I can see why people hate Jira.
|
| Jira is the only tool I know that has proper permission and
| visibility controls.
| et1337 wrote:
| The problem with JIRA and its ilk is that they try to do bug
| tracking, planning, and historical data all in the same tool,
| when those are really separate problems.
|
| Have a bug? JIRA makes perfect sense, you have a ticket with
| comments, it keeps track of how long it's been around, it can
| automatically move the bug through a process, etc. All these
| tools started out as "bug trackers" after all.
|
| Trying to plan future work? What I usually want is some kind of
| lightweight graph tool to figure out task A unblocks task B, etc.
| This graph changes a lot over time, with tasks merging and
| splitting apart. I've wasted a lot of time trying to enter all
| this in tickets.
|
| Want to know about work that's already completed? I would never
| look at JIRA. Look at your Git forge. Pull requests should have
| proper descriptions. The Git history will always be more accurate
| and detailed than a bunch of JIRA cards.
|
| So basically, use JIRA for bug tracking, Git/Github/Gitlab for
| historical tracking, and I'm not sure what to use for planning.
| Honestly I've been reaching for Excalidraw recently.
| nomel wrote:
| JIRA includes integration for Github Enterprise. If a commit
| message or branch references an issue number, it will
| automatically be included in that JIRA issue.
| jensenbox wrote:
| Never going back - Linear is my new god: https://linear.app/
| roskoez wrote:
| Still beats Trello though.
|
| (No really, Trello is just Jira with cuter, slower menus)
| tomohawk wrote:
| Jira and the company's other offerings are designed to be sold,
| not used.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Confluence + JIRA have made my life sooooooooo easy.. It's a pain
| in the ... to control/maintain the dictionary/keywords. So if the
| admins are doing a good job, it's a bliss.
|
| On top of that, I can create a quick form in Confluence (with
| some intelligence/dependencies) and
| enabling/disabling/showing/hiding other options, sections,
| questions, etc.
|
| No complains from either products here. Are they perfect? No.
| What is?
| rozenmd wrote:
| I love to use Jira as an example of why focusing on the buyer is
| important (since these days, users don't choose to buy Jira as
| much as say, Linear).
|
| Of course the idea is to make a good product that folks like to
| use, but it's surprising that you can succeed by knowing what
| buyers want.
| inferense wrote:
| Here's a simple way to avoid it, and have your personal knowledge
| base integrated https://acreom.com/bye-jira
| circusfly wrote:
| I guess I'm unique, I like JIRA.
| akudha wrote:
| Most people shit on Jira, I guess it deserves it. But what is the
| alternative? I tried a bunch of tools couple of years ago. They
| were all as bad as Jira or worse.
|
| I dunno if the situation has changed since then, but I would bet
| it hasn't changed much
| harry8 wrote:
| The people who make the purchase decision to pay Atlassian are a
| tiny fraction of those using the tool. The rest have no say in
| the choice that results in sales dollars. Atlassian can treat
| this majority with contempt because their only option is to bitch
| &/or quit which is a very limited amount of power. So Atlassian
| _does_ treat the overwhelming majority of its users with total
| contempt and this is financially rational.
|
| Right up until Atlassian and Jira become synonyms for everything
| bad amongst the overwhelming majority of people who have
| encountered it. About when "Jira-free workplace" goes on job ads.
| Which has got to be a pretty good strategy by now. Anyone seen it
| yet?
| giovanni_or2 wrote:
| Based
| glial wrote:
| I thought I hated JIRA until I moved to other companies that
| don't use it.
|
| One company allowed each team to manage tasks however they liked
| - and therefore each team had a different method. Other companies
| tried to force Trello or Asana into software engineering
| workflows. I now think of JIRA wistfully.
| neaumusic wrote:
| I worked at Smartsheet for a while, and it can compete with Jira
| for most cases (we used Smartsheet rather than Jira internally)
| noddingham wrote:
| Jira needs an admin to help manage the configuration. It's like a
| Swiss army knife and the reason many teams hate it is because
| they don't have an admin helping them get what they need out of
| it and keep the rest of the tool out of the way. The flexibility
| is both a blessing and curse. If you don't like Jira it's likely
| your configuration is shit, or your process is shit, or both.
| bern4444 wrote:
| Eh - I like Jira or rather I don't dislike it.
|
| My team has done a lot of work to lean into the tool IE well
| defined issues, epics, tickets, t shirt sizing for pointing via
| 1, 3, 5, etc.
|
| There is lots that can be improved for sure.
|
| With this system, my team, in addition to any one else at the
| company, is able to click into our JIRA board and get a very high
| level to a very low level understanding of what we are working
| on.
|
| This allows for very clear reporting structures and ensures our
| goals are on track with those of the company's. This also makes
| outcomes more measureable which is exceptionally helpful for
| reviews.
|
| At the end of the year or halfway through I can go in and say: I
| worked on these 4 epics that are part of these two Issues which
| serve company goals A, B, and C. I completed x% of the tickets
| for each of these epics, led this entire other epic which was
| completed on time etc etc.
|
| Where we run into issues is when there a ticket that has to move
| between boards. The ideal situation is we just move the ticket
| from board to board as needed but based on the user they may or
| may not have permissions and have to open a new ticket linking it
| to the previous one. Not ideal but that's up to us to resolve to
| make sure the right people have the right permissions.
|
| We ignore all the analytics IE burn down and friends. Those are
| useless.
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