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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?

#31

Post by tokyodude »

probably the wrong thread to ask but what should a 5-10 person company with 20-25 outside contractors and lots of costumers that may need to access the issue use?

I'm currently consulting for a company who has no issue tracking system. they use an excel sheet which makes it impossible to have conversation about individual issue and nearly impossible to track updates.

I can't imagine getting them to spend $300+ a month for a managed system. bugzilla or Trac seem progammer oriented whereas this is a game dev company meaning copy/paste drag/drop image support is important (having to first create a local image file and then navigate to it is right out)

any solutions out there they could install on an unused computer or remote computer that might meet their needs or do they just have to be convinced to pay $4k+ a year?

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

#32

Post by chrisper »

tokyodude wrote: post #31

probably the wrong thread to ask but what should a 5-10 person company with 20-25 outside contractors and lots of costumers that may need to access the issue use? I'm currently consulting for a company who has no issue tracking system. they use an excel sheet which makes it impossible to have conversation about individual issue and nearly impossible to track updates. I can't imagine getting them to spend $300+ a mont…

Can't you use something like trello? (I think they got bought by Atlassian recently, so I don't know how long they will be around)

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

#33

Post by nl »

Jira is fine - it's a complex tool and maybe slower than would be ideal, but they are really the only significant issues.

There are lots of positives, too - it is very flexible, and integrates with anything you want.

To be honest, I don't think there is anything nearly as good if you want beyond what Trello can do.

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

#35

Post by chris-at »

tokyodude wrote: post #31

probably the wrong thread to ask but what should a 5-10 person company with 20-25 outside contractors and lots of costumers that may need to access the issue use? I'm currently consulting for a company who has no issue tracking system. they use an excel sheet which makes it impossible to have conversation about individual issue and nearly impossible to track updates. I can't imagine getting them to spend $300+ a mont…

Take a look at Bitrix - IMO it's better (and cheaper) than Jira for small teams.

https://bitrix24.com/

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

#36

Post by peterwwillis »

To answer your concerns: 1) What you've heard is probably accurate. 2) It probably will add paper-filling work. 3) They will definitely enforce using Jira in some kind of way, but not necessarily a strict way.

How you should handle this: acknowledge that it's just a complex tool, and like any complex tool, how you (and others) use it determines the experience. Yes, there will be an up-front cost to onboarding. But it doesn't have to go horribly.

As your team gets trained on it, you will probably quickly experience pain points. Document them and constantly measure the effect of them on your team's output. Implement workarounds as necessary and measure the effects. Provide the results to management along with your recommended fixes. In theory you should end up with 1) "We tried it your way, and this is how it went", 2) "Then we tried it our way, and this is how we improved it."

This provides a method to work around problems, and a solid argument to upper management to modify their use of the tool. Make sure the argument makes it clear that your changes are in line with the business's objectives, or probably nobody will care if it's painful for your team.

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

#37

Post by bumelant »

burfog wrote: post #26
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.

That would be one of the options - I have used Primavera in one of my previous jobs. But I assume from the question that the company has decided to use JIRA for that purposes.

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

#38

Post by gaius »

end goal being to be able to qualify this work as Capex

This is a common piece of tax optimisation, basically if you say to the government “we did X hours R&D this year and here is the proof” they give the company some tax back. Of course it is pure coincidence that the word “development” has been overloaded in this way and you can get cash back for cranking out CRUD apps...

If that’s the goal, you will not win this one.

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

#39

Post by raarts »

tokyodude wrote: post #31

probably the wrong thread to ask but what should a 5-10 person company with 20-25 outside contractors and lots of costumers that may need to access the issue use? I'm currently consulting for a company who has no issue tracking system. they use an excel sheet which makes it impossible to have conversation about individual issue and nearly impossible to track updates. I can't imagine getting them to spend $300+ a mont…

Setup your own Redmine instance.

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

#40

Post by coffeemug »

wtvanhest wrote: post #22
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…

> moving a lot of $$$ to capex is incredibly important for management

A few questions:

  1. Why is this the goal?
  2. Why does it depend on the company?
  3. How could you categorize development as capex? Isn't it obviously opex?
  4. Why do they need JIRA for that? Why not GitHub issues?
  5. Who's "management"? Engineering management? Executives? Someone else?
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