Trello, “Jira Sucks”, and Tool Dysfunction • Hacker News Board

Re: Trello, “Jira Sucks”, and Tool Dysfunction

#41

Post by foolfoolz » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 2:41 PM UTC

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #32

The biggest issues I have with JIRA have to do with it being one of the world's most inconsistent, unintuitive, and undiscoverable UX's possibly ever made. All manner of things are hidden in "..." menus, and any screen will have several such menus visible at once, but they're all different. It feels very much disjointed and like the UX is done in a deeply siloed process that considers only the most local region of th…

older jira versions hid less and has way more buttons. it was overwhelming and complex.

how do you balance a very powerful product and simple day to day uses of it?

Re: Trello, “Jira Sucks”, and Tool Dysfunction

#42

Post by dangoor » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 2:42 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #33

twobyfour wrote: post #22

"Jira sucks" is not a useful thing to say. 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 Tr…

I get why you're excited about this, but I think it's a mistake. One thing I've seen over and over is projects where everybody did their job and the project still failed. Why? Because everybody was put into silos. Each person could define success as doing what they were assigned. The developer built to the spec. The database person made the database work. The QA person verified that the system met the spec, and the o…

I agree about the need for successful cross-functional teams.

But what happens when you have multiple cross-functional teams? Sometimes they have interactions. Sometimes you have management that needs some visibility into how things are going.

Re: Trello, “Jira Sucks”, and Tool Dysfunction

#43

Post by nthcolumn » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 2:42 PM UTC

tablet wrote: post #40

I develop Targetprocess (JIRA competitor in general) during 13 years. And I completely agree with the article. It is EXTREMELY difficult to balance product development to have a good enough feature set and bearable complexity. Here are two very typical feedback we receive from end users: NEGATIVE. Compare to Jira Target process is way behind. No ticket has the testing phase. This is very poor by design and it is very…

If I had a choice it would be tp2 - that's a beaut piece of software you got there... definitely does not suck.

Re: Trello, “Jira Sucks”, and Tool Dysfunction

#44

Post by antaviana » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 2:45 PM UTC

thriftwy wrote: post #9

znpy wrote: post #3

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 haven't seen an install of Jira where opening dashboard won't take five seconds and any search will take ten. I just don't see how it is acceptable in 2017, with added insult that the amount of data displayed is tiny.

In my case, opening a Dashboard takes 2 seconds and searching the full DB for text takes also 2 seconds. However, we only have about 2000-3000 issues in various projects in our DB.

Re: Trello, “Jira Sucks”, and Tool Dysfunction

#45

Post by notalaser » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 2:50 PM UTC

foolfoolz wrote: post #41

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #32

The biggest issues I have with JIRA have to do with it being one of the world's most inconsistent, unintuitive, and undiscoverable UX's possibly ever made. All manner of things are hidden in "..." menus, and any screen will have several such menus visible at once, but they're all different. It feels very much disjointed and like the UX is done in a deeply siloed process that considers only the most local region of th…

older jira versions hid less and has way more buttons. it was overwhelming and complex. how do you balance a very powerful product and simple day to day uses of it?

That's the thing -- it's (no longer) easy at all. When accessing every other function requires guessing which hamburger menu it's hidden behind, it looks clean and easy to use, but it's not.

Re: Trello, “Jira Sucks”, and Tool Dysfunction

#46

Post by kelvin0 » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 2:55 PM UTC

Jira: The tool that programmers love to hate. Anyways that's how most the programmers I know and worked with tell me (myself included...).

Re: Trello, “Jira Sucks”, and Tool Dysfunction

#47

Post by im_down_w_otp » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 2:56 PM UTC

foolfoolz wrote: post #41

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #32

The biggest issues I have with JIRA have to do with it being one of the world's most inconsistent, unintuitive, and undiscoverable UX's possibly ever made. All manner of things are hidden in "..." menus, and any screen will have several such menus visible at once, but they're all different. It feels very much disjointed and like the UX is done in a deeply siloed process that considers only the most local region of th…

older jira versions hid less and has way more buttons. it was overwhelming and complex. how do you balance a very powerful product and simple day to day uses of it?

It's still overwhelming and complex, so that part has stayed consistent.

I imagine it starts with always considering the thing as a product, not as its features, so that you can always make sure all the work being done integrates intuitively and intentionally into the original thesis of the product.

The very fact that one has to hunt through various layers of oddly organized configuration screens (several of which do almost the same thing), and has to often click on more than one "..." menu to poke around looking for assumed-to-exist functionality before actually finding it, is an indicator that JIRA might be developed as an ongoing train of user stories to create features unmoored from a central thesis.

Because if it was developed like a product in total, then its metaphors would be consistent, its language would be consistent, its modes of interaction with those metaphors would be consistent, and intuitive organization would largely fall out of that.

Re: Trello, “Jira Sucks”, and Tool Dysfunction

#48

Post by tablet » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 2:57 PM UTC

everythingswan wrote: post #34

bshimmin wrote: post #23

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…

This is essentially my opinion of it. I look at both Trello and JIRA as useful, depending on my use case. With a cross-discipline team focused on delivering a few things (basically epics/features/whatever) at once, I love JIRA. Working on my own, I'd use Trello. It has a similar feeling to the hatred for Excel we all have as we start to use it. So. Many. Features. When you have a team member who is a power user, it c…

I think it is possible to create a tool that will grow with the company from simplest setup to full blown PM tool with time.

Re: Trello, “Jira Sucks”, and Tool Dysfunction

#49

Post by Juliate » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 2:58 PM UTC

foolfoolz wrote: post #41

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #32

The biggest issues I have with JIRA have to do with it being one of the world's most inconsistent, unintuitive, and undiscoverable UX's possibly ever made. All manner of things are hidden in "..." menus, and any screen will have several such menus visible at once, but they're all different. It feels very much disjointed and like the UX is done in a deeply siloed process that considers only the most local region of th…

older jira versions hid less and has way more buttons. it was overwhelming and complex. how do you balance a very powerful product and simple day to day uses of it?

You don't. You don't use "very powerful products" for "simple day to day uses".

Used JIRA for 7 months now. Can't understand how people get anything done and tracked with it (trying to forcefully carve teams into a per-the-book SCRUM methodology with it).

Re: Trello, “Jira Sucks”, and Tool Dysfunction

#50

Post by tibu » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 3:02 PM UTC

JIRA is really good and useful if you know how to use it. We're using it for several purposes and I love it. Administration side of it is crazy complicated, for the best things you have to be global admin - this is something they should fix (but they won't I think because it would make things backwards incompatible).