Ask HN: Any Positive Jira Experiences? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Any Positive Jira Experiences?

#11

Post by SteadBytes » Fri, Jun 03, 2022, 5:49 PM UTC

balex wrote: post #5

I was actually fairly pleased with Jira. Or rather the results of putting in the effort to build the flows we wanted. Sure, building the forms and the workflow is an annoying experience. If Jira admin hasn't set up a good separation of templates, things get mixed up and cluttered (for project admin tasks). And it feels like you're working for the system instead of it working for you (again, when building your flows).…

> But at the end of the day, it's about the process you build and making sure the tools serve it

This seems to be the key. The _process_ is important and Jira (or another tool) _can_ be used to help implement that process, but Jira itself is not the process.

Re: Ask HN: Any Positive Jira Experiences?

#12

Post by rektide » Fri, Jun 03, 2022, 6:43 PM UTC

I worked at a data-warehouse company once that made incredibly good use of Jira for orchestrating their pipeline/data-flows. 80% of the purpose of the company was collecting, ingesting, & cleaning up a huge number of pretty dirty data-streams, often by calling people & having them send us files or sometimes disks. Some really rough data, & we had multiple automated & physical processes, & needed different people to sign off on different stages.

The whole system was built around Jira & performed wonderfully. Jira governed all the data-flow through the system. Each ingest was a ticket, and tickets would move from one stage to the next (Across the swim lanes) through over a dozen steps, some automated, some manual. Signing off was just the person with the role to move the ticket to the next column doing so. If the pipeline hit a snag, it turned red via a label & some js. Jira ran that company, was it's workflow engine, and it did a great job.

Not the day-to-day developer experience, but it left a huge mark on me; radically shifted how I view software, how I view workflows, made me rethink of Jira from a way to ship code into something far more generic & capable, if the need arises.

Re: Ask HN: Any Positive Jira Experiences?

#13

Post by fer » Sat, Jun 04, 2022, 11:53 AM UTC

SteadBytes wrote: post #10

fer wrote: post #4

Jira is fine to me (as a SWE), but it's way too complex for untrained managers/PO/SM to use properly (read: to make it more useful than a simple kanban board). Expanding on what @necovek said: In a big company we used it, and while everything was "agile", there were very rigid processes in place (for a good reason). Those processes were properly translated and implemented into Jira. Development support teams wrote pl…

> Those processes were properly translated and implemented into Jira. Development support teams wrote plugins to connect Jira with in-house systems and have proper synchronization with customer facing bug tracking systems Interesting, do you think that Jira _requires_ that level of integration to be useful or could a simpler (e.g. less plugin development, synchronization with other systems e.t.c.) also be successful?

In this case there was so much in-house software already following the processes that Jira would have just been a royal PITA to use without custom plugins. But if your team is lean enough in such terms, I don't see a need for these things to benefit from Jira.