21–30 of 71 posts
Although then we got 6 projects all related to one code base and switched to a homegrown system.
Our main win was making sure each engineer worked on the fewest number of projects. Letting people focus improved development speed and reduced confusion.
Yeah, Jira's default workflow isn't awesome. Yeah, it's a giant pain to configure an alternative workflow; and the learning curve to do so is ridiculously steep. Yeah, some BigCorps have configured painfully bureaucratic workflows in it.
But you can also configure it with a very Trello-like workflow.
Why would you use Jira with a Trello-like workflow instead of just using Trello?
Well, for one thing, you get additional features even just on the Kanban board - such as swimlanes.
But the most important reason is that with Jira you get a true database of your issues. One that you can query with a SQL-like language. And one that allows you to present multiple different views of the same data.
For instance, we have a main kanban board for one project. We have a main board for another. We have a kanban board that contains some issues from each specifically for our DevOps person; and another specifically for our QA person. The QA person's board contains three columns that correspond to a single column in the developer's board.
I can create an "epic" that contains multiple tickets (not subtasks or checklist items) that can each progress through the workflow and be deployed independently but still be grouped together under a single parent epic.
And if I want to pull up a list of all Foo component tickets that were filed by Bob before June, implemented by Alice, QAed by Carol, and were released in July - and then open each one in a tab - that's incredibly easy.
I have been using Jira at work for the last 10 months or so, and have been using trello for personal stuff for more than a year and a half. I dunno, but Jira doesn't looks so bad to me. To be quite honest, "Jira sucks" really looks like a meme to me, that people carry around for some reaons. I am not a jira enthusiast, nor i am endorsed/funded by atlassian in any way. Jira is a tool to me, and it does it job.
I dunno if Jira sucks, but the granular subtask hour estimation it encourages certainly does. Is this really how most 'agile' shops work in this industry?
Been using both for years, at multiple orgs, and can say with confidence JIRA does suck. Everyone in my org had given up trying to use it, I went through the pain and don't wish it on anyone... then there's Trello, it just works expected. With JIRA, prepare to invest significant pulling your hair out if you want to use any features. It's amazingly difficult to enable the use of the Trello-like board feature. Go ahead…
There are definitely ways in which JIRA sucks: it's hard to configure and requires someone with special skills, knowledge, and enthusiasm (!) in order to get it right; it definitely could and should be a lot faster; navigating around it is fairly bamboozling for the inexperienced; and certainly other things besides. But, with all those caveats noted, is there actually another product on the market that does as much a…
Was lightning fast, not crumbling under the amount of issues and projects we had, and interface much cleaner. I understand there's a ton of complexity in JIRA that we didn't use and they didn't have to implement, but anyway there's no excuse how unwieldy JIRA core functonality is.
Managers should stick to the rule "if you complain about Jira, you'll get Bugzilla."
I have been using Jira at work for the last 10 months or so, and have been using trello for personal stuff for more than a year and a half. I dunno, but Jira doesn't looks so bad to me. To be quite honest, "Jira sucks" really looks like a meme to me, that people carry around for some reaons. I am not a jira enthusiast, nor i am endorsed/funded by atlassian in any way. Jira is a tool to me, and it does it job.
I think the tool itself isn't that great. When you try to be all things to all people, it's easy to be tolerable for most and great for nobody. But the real problem is what it represents: a straitjacket for teams, used to force them to work in ways that people with political power deem appropriate.
The Lean Manufacturing folks put bureaucracy into two different categories, supportive and controlling.
Supportive bureaucracy is bottom up. E.g., by my door I have checklists for what I need when I'm going out running or swimming. Nobody makes me do it; I just was tired of forgetting something. Good teams do similar things, like an estimation checklist or a written-up release process.
Controlling bureaucracy is top down. It's where other people use systems to force you to work like they think you should. They're used as a poor substitute for trust. People experience Jira as sucking because it's a instrument of control, and controlling bureaucracy sucks.
> I think that [Jira sucks] is a vast oversimplification, and shows very little sympathy to the challenges faced by Atlassian (and the advantages the Trello team enjoyed). The problem isn’t Jira.