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Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams

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Re: Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams

#61

Post by ticmasta »

alkonaut wrote: post #57

I think it looks promising. Just trying to move to Azure Devops and it has a good product/issue separation I think, but it's way too customizable. I don't want a tool that can be made to suit any process, I want one that supports a reasonable process without hours of configuration and plugin. E.g. i Azure Devops it seems extremely hard to get feature progress and time rollups for features broken into backlog items an…

Nothing made me enjoy Jira like being forced to move to DevOps.

By MS's own admission it's way too complicated, so much so that they've now made the "Basic" workflow (which looks a lot like Jira) the default.

Re: Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams

#62

Post by probius »

msla wrote: post #19
new_here wrote: post #8

Zepel looks great, a much cleaner and more pleasant experience than JIRA. Everyone uses JIRA because it's become synonymous with agile, so companies purchase and use JIRA to show that they're agile. In practice though, JIRA is ridiculously cumbersome and slow. It's time for it to be challenged. If you can market yourself as a simpler and faster way for agile teams to run projects, and deliver on that, then you'll pro…

The thing about Jira and Confluence which annoys me most is the fact it's possible to have useless combinations of permissions. For example, in Confluence, there's a nested structure: Pages exist in spaces. Pages can have more restrictive permissions than the space they're in, so you can have a space with pages anyone can edit and pages only a select few can edit. Now for the annoying part: It's possible to have perm…

Although it's not packaged together, you can download this sudo plugin: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/archive/12730 and it should still work on the latest version of Confluence.

Re: Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams

#63

Post by Tharkun »

codegladiator wrote: post #11
gauthamshankar wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi there kopiblanca, One of the founders of Zepel here. We believe JIRA and most other project management tools have evolved from the core use case of issue tracking. While they might be great for tracking issues and ad hoc work items, when it comes to product development, bug tracking is only a part of the equation. We believe 2 key aspects make product/feature development different. - Unlike bug tracking, a feature…

Product teams don't hate JIRA. They love JIRA. Engineers hate JIRA. From your explanation, I still don't understand how this is different from JIRA (apart from the theme).

A subset of engineers hate Jira. A lot of us love it. It's orders of magnitude better than any other issue tracker out there. It's an absolute powerhouse with its "Jira Query Language" query support. It scales from tiny one man shops (in which case it costs you a tenner), to massive organizations like the Apache Software Foundation.

It's got bells and whistles to spare, including several kitchen sinks, which can make it a bit daunting to configure. But you can configure it to suit your needs, instead of having to conform to some harebrained workflow someone else decided was Good Enough.

What I really hate is that, even after all these years, it doesn't come with a good planning tool. Portfolio is terrible. I've evaluated several Gantt plugins, which were all terrible. A closely related problem is the missing calendar integration. Atlassian has a calendar plugin for Confluence (wiki), which makes zero sense to me. In my world, issue tracking and planning go hand in hand. And you can't plan shit without a calendar. Surely I'm not the only one who feels that way?

Edit: while I'm out praising Jira, have you seen their SDK? You can roll your own Jira plugin in 15 minutes. Bam. Frictionless. Engineers hate it? Those are some weird engineers.

Re: Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams

#64

Post by eddieh »

awillen wrote: post #32

As a PM, I've generally used JIRA because most of the people using the product are engineers, and that's what eng management pushes for. I have generally found that most PM-oriented products like this just require me to duplicate all the stuff that's already in JIRA to the point where the additional effort just isn't worth whatever benefit I get. Given JIRA's ubiquity, I would strongly recommend that you build an int…

As an engineer that just created a Zepel account, it looks to me like it would replace JIRA for all users. As an engineer I already love it. JIRA is pure unusable garbage.

Re: Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams

#65

Post by eddieh »

ken wrote: post #37

It starts with "Zepel adapts to the way your software product team really works", which sounds great, but I can't tell what this means. This claim doesn't seem to be connected to anything else on the page. The major selling point / complaint of Jira seems to be that it's too customizable. They're all different, and a bad manager can make your particular Jira instance unusable. Is this one as customizable? Or is it in…

Maybe create a free account and try it out?

Re: Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams

#66

Post by clairity »

ska wrote: post #58
MegaButts wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be the first to admit that as a whole, Jira is poorly used. That said, it's surprisingly powerful software. It's just that nobody takes the time to learn how to use it properly. Think of how shitty your first massive OOP language project was. Think of how different coding schemas and practices are between companies. Now realize that over the years, better and best practices have started to be established. Obviou…

Jira projects massively benefit from a PM who is an expert user, or another expert user involved in care-and-feeding of the projects, in my experience. Just throwing a bunch of developers at it and hoping ... doesn't lead to a good time.

yes, i've set up jira for a few teams (as a pm), and developers, designers, and other users generally have been surprised at how low-friction jira can be.

custom workflows can add automated state management and notifications where appropriate for your dev practices without restricting what you can do. then a little light process on top (who does what with issues in which states, i.e., assuming ownership by the team) glues it all together.

Re: Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams

#67

Post by grey-area »

MegaButts wrote: post #45
giancarlostoro wrote: post #5

This looks nice and sleek, I hope it improved upon the pain points of Jira and builds upon new strengths. The thing that kills me about Jira is the inconsistency I experience between projects. Everybody sets it up differently, and work based off entirely different views and contexts. It is exhausting and there's always too much friction. Maybe managers love it cause they got more time to waste on tools like Jira than…

I'll be the first to admit that as a whole, Jira is poorly used. That said, it's surprisingly powerful software. It's just that nobody takes the time to learn how to use it properly. Think of how shitty your first massive OOP language project was. Think of how different coding schemas and practices are between companies. Now realize that over the years, better and best practices have started to be established. Obviou…

So it sounds like what you're really complaining about is that the Jira admins and program managers at your company are just not good at their job...The problem is the people in charge of Jira usually suck. And that's a much harder problem to fix.

Or perhaps the problem is that Jira gives people too much rope to hang themselves with.

It should not be possible to make the experience of users sub-par by 'holding it wrong', and it should not take months or years to learn to use a project management tool IMO - the project should be over by then! Tools like Jira should get out of the way, not get in the way of the real work.

Re: Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams

#68

Post by veidr »

vasco wrote: post #26
new_here wrote: post #8

Zepel looks great, a much cleaner and more pleasant experience than JIRA. Everyone uses JIRA because it's become synonymous with agile, so companies purchase and use JIRA to show that they're agile. In practice though, JIRA is ridiculously cumbersome and slow. It's time for it to be challenged. If you can market yourself as a simpler and faster way for agile teams to run projects, and deliver on that, then you'll pro…

I use JIRA cloud every day and have for almost 4 years and it's never been slow. Is your company using JIRA cloud or hosting your own?

We are using JIRA's cloud offering and it's the slowest application I use. It's slow enough that I don't care about any of the other (pretty glaring) UX flaws.

It often takes more than 2000ms to switch views (e.g. just to switch from looking at an issue to the board showing list of issues in the current sprint for my team). Sometimes, 5000ms plus.

It's so slow that I've noticed everybody does what I do, namely ⌘-click all links so that they open in a new tab. That way you don't "lose" what you are currently looking at, and have to endure another 2000ms load time just to see it again.

Everybody's JIRA window has like 40 tabs open by the end of the day.

One result of this, beyond being irritated, is that meaningful bug discussion never happens on the ticket comment threads, the way it used to with GitHub Issues, or the way it would happen if JIRA was as fast as a normal app (like, say, GitHub Issues). The discussion is all on Slack now, completely separated from the issue tracker and super hard to find when you need it.

I occasionally manage to paste a few Slack links into JIRA bug comments, since I already have that tab open and I know nobody else will.

We didn't love the feature set and UI of GitHub Issues, either. (Hence the sadly failed search for a new tool that resulted in JIRA.)

But it wasn't slow, so people did actually use it. I don't think we have a features/UI problem with JIRA. If it was fast, I think people would use it about the same as they did GitHub Issues.

But it is slow, so engineers use it very minimally: create an issue (which is usually done via our Slack chatbot, because using the JIRA UI is so annoyingly slow that somebody wrote a bot to automate that), put the issue into a sprint, and then close an issue when it is finally done. Those are the 3 operations we do.

I think the project manager people are OK with JIRA, because they mainly use it to generate fairly complex reports that admittedly are pretty useful to see how we did in the past iteration compared to our goals. That is SUPER SUPER slow too, but they don't mind as much because it's a bi-weekly thing they do, not something they do over and over throughout the day.

I think JIRA has a variety of other usability problems, but the deadly slowness outweighs all of them combined. We still "use" JIRA in the sense that it's the system we use to track bugs. But we don't actually use it much at all — because it's slow.

Re: Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams

#70

Post by rangitatanz »

Tharkun wrote: post #63
codegladiator wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Product teams don't hate JIRA. They love JIRA. Engineers hate JIRA. From your explanation, I still don't understand how this is different from JIRA (apart from the theme).

A subset of engineers hate Jira. A lot of us love it. It's orders of magnitude better than any other issue tracker out there. It's an absolute powerhouse with its "Jira Query Language" query support. It scales from tiny one man shops (in which case it costs you a tenner), to massive organizations like the Apache Software Foundation. It's got bells and whistles to spare, including several kitchen sinks, which can make…

Curious to know if you have seen any project management software with either good calendar or planning support built in? What made it better?
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