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Ask HN: Should I fight back management enforcing Jira?

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Re: Ask HN: Should I fight back management enforcing Jira?

#21

Post by smackay »

The problem here is not the tool but the process that comes with it. From the managers in the bigger company's perspective integrating your team into the larger structure makes a lot of sense. What they are probably missing though is the impact that doing things their way is probably going to negatively impact your team.

Opposing the tool is not really going to get you anywhere. From the outside it will just look like you are resisting the integration with the bigger company and all the baggage that is going to come with not being "a team player".

For entertainment purposes only: fight fire with fire. Make a case for improving developer productivity by implementing a ticket quality score and use it as a metric. After all, the better the ticket the faster you can start work on the problem, rather than having to go chase down all the issues and requirements. Management will be rather annoyed at you flagging all their one sentence tickets as inadequate. As I said this is for entertainment purposes only. It's fun to make a point, but push quickly becomes shove.

Re: Ask HN: Should I fight back management enforcing Jira?

#22

Post by wtvanhest »

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #15

Management has a concrete problem they want to solve: "Their motivation is to be able to track what the dev team is doing and keep a log of the activities, with the end goal being to be able to qualify this work as Capex." So if you really don't want JIRA then offer an alternative that will meet those requirements. Management may still say "just use JIRA". Before pushing back on this have a think about the cost/benef…

To add to your coment, depending on the company, moving a lot of $$$ to capex is incredibly important for management.

If anything you should embrace Jira and look for ways to help get things classified as capex. Ask for a meeting with accounting/finance to fully understand it.

Just think of it as learning a new skill.

For the people saying to look for another solution, I would first figure out how much work they put in to selecting Jira. It was probably a big decision making process and you may be too late to make a change.

Re: Ask HN: Should I fight back management enforcing Jira?

#23

Post by seanjregan »

mongol wrote: post #6

I think you should embrace Jira but require that you get the access and permissions you think you need. Jira is not bad, but can be used in many ways, and when you figure out a way that works for you, it will not be a big deal.

Word. Solid advice. When you delegate all the decisions to a person looking at the global maxima at the expense of the local needs of your team you will not be happy with the results. For as long as you delegate this task, you will be unhappy with Jira. As soon as you take an active role, the perspective on Jira tends to change.

It's a good example of how being the change you seek changes your POV on something.

Re: Ask HN: Should I fight back management enforcing Jira?

#25

Post by seanjregan »

ilaksh wrote: post #8

The one place that I had to use Jira, it was poorly managed. The manager basically used it to create a list of every project and idea he could think of and then assigned quite a lot of them to me simultaneously. The result for me was that I was overloaded with work. And then the manager became unavailable to discuss some important blocking items for about a week. I am not saying that Jira or project management tools…

Spin up a simple one board kanban project, use the new roadmaps in Jira cloud to show the epics to management and move things from backlog to in prog to done. Add tempo for time tracking if you need to show the accountants how much work has been done.

Re: Ask HN: Should I fight back management enforcing Jira?

#26

Post by burfog »

bumelant wrote: post #16

If the requirement is coming from accounting (qualification of spend as capex) there’s no way to push back, but it also doesn’t mean you need to follow the exact process of bigger company. You can negotiate minimum amount of documentation that for legal reasons your team needs to track in JIRA and do just that. Good luck!

Wouldn't that goal (qualification of spend as capex) be solved better by timecards? I don't see how a bug tracker helps unless you abuse it to be a timecard system.

Of course, timecard software can be awful too.

Re: Ask HN: Should I fight back management enforcing Jira?

#27

Post by jaggederest »

Stratoscope wrote: post #18
topkai22 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Order of magnitude (base 2)?

Now that is funny, thank you! :-) But seriously, even when I've only thought I was twice as good as someone else (and I'm afraid I have thought that too many times), it usually hasn't ended well.

I've worked for few different companies where some development groups were producing negative productivity, and others were producing positive productivity. Consider that one "profitable product ruined", and one "unprofitable product made profitable", or equivalent metrics.

What's the productivity ratio between -1 and +1? Is the first team "less productive" than the second team? Certainly. Is the second team "twice as productive" as the first team? I think the answer is "infinity", so "over twice" is a good summary for people who intuitively distrust "10x" as a number.

Re: Ask HN: Should I fight back management enforcing Jira?

#28

Post by iandanforth »

Jira is pretty cancerous. It will likely lead to hundreds of developer hours wasted on buggy, complex UI, new processes which are put in place because the features exist to support them, and eventually a slide into a multi-atlassian-product cluster of almost-working cruft.

That said you're SOL because you don't have a solid set of tools in place today. I know large, distributed teams who use github effectively for example and they have the processes and cultural inertia to make it work, but it doesn't sound like you've even got a solid home-grown alternative.

Re: Ask HN: Should I fight back management enforcing Jira?

#29

Post by artwr »

smackay wrote: post #21

The problem here is not the tool but the process that comes with it. From the managers in the bigger company's perspective integrating your team into the larger structure makes a lot of sense. What they are probably missing though is the impact that doing things their way is probably going to negatively impact your team. Opposing the tool is not really going to get you anywhere. From the outside it will just look lik…

I am always reminded of this story around throughput metrics for Software Engineering: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...

Your suggestion is delightful, and in a former company, one of our PMs, at a time when we were overwhelmed with requests, tried to tame the tied by requiring requesters fill out this simple template along the folloing lines (but I am paraphrasing): - What is the impact on you/your team from this feature/bug not being addressed? - What is the priority of this in comparison to other asks you have from the team? - What is the impact to the business?

Even though the team did not like the bureaucratic approach, the number of requests went down dramatically.

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