Ask HN: Should I fight back management enforcing Jira?

My team is in a somewhat similar position relative to our company. I like to think of Jira as an interface for management (and in our case, internal customers) to create and manage high-level requests and priorities. Then our team internally creates Trello cards for the actual tasks that need to be done because we find it significantly more efficient than Jira. On our current project, the ratio of Trello cards to Jira tickets is ~15.

As long as we also keep Jira reasonably current with the status of the project, Management's fine with however we want to track our work internally. YMMV.

No need to sling terms like "you should grow up". There's both a reason a big share of developers hate JIRA with a passion and also a reason business people like it. It's hard to find the fine line of it being useful for both parties and not just making the developers' lives harder and I've seen people having to spend an extra 30min per day just fighting the tool. This is not about whining to keep your independece, this is mostly valid criticism that it creates work instead of making life easier.

We use jira with around 10 different partners of ours. Where we buy software development on open source projects, but take code-base ownership and handle project management.

We use jira because it’s what the companies use internally, and being in project management in the public sector with more than 500 it systems, well, we’ve been around a lot of tools and know how to adapt to them.

I’ve only seen jira utilised in a way that wasn’t wasteful at one company though, and they’d spent a lot of time streamlining the way they used jira as well as how they wanted us to interact with them.

Every where else they would have done better with a white board and sticky notes, even though that’s not something I’d really recommend either. The worst example was a company that had to assign their own project manager to everything because their developers didn’t know how to label, move or even register things “correctly” in their own jira.

That’s why I think jira is terrible, because it’s designed to fail you miserably unless you spent resources beating it into submission.

Once you’ve beaten it into submission, however, it’s a marvellous tool. I’m just not into that process, I want my technology to work out the box without customisation. That gives me less freedom, but I don’t really care about freedom in “hour registration/planning” software, I simply want it to be as anonymous and easy going as possible with minimal effort.

Jira has a field for time spent on a ticket, and can produce reports about it pretty quickly. There are also plugins available to let developers use various timers with it, or even integrate with timesheet tools like Harvest.

I’ve worked in a company that qualifies development time as capex. They can’t just treat all developer butt-in-seat hours as capex. They have to allocate it to specific projects.

Using the issue tracker for that can streamline the process and saves the developer having to know which bucket to bill time against for each ticket, because the project manager or whoever can take responsibility for tagging each ticket with the appropriate accounting bucket.

And time spent on maintenance or meetings or peripheral tasks like interviewing candidates or configuring Jira goes into its own buckets that can’t be capitalized. Using the issue tracker to track capitalizable time makes that delineation easy to enforce. If it’s not in the issue tracker, it’s not capitalizable.

    We've got nothing similar to Jira in place and are dealing with things without any dedicated tools

Are you not tracking issues at all? I very frequently look up years old tickets to know why something is the way it is, and I could not imagine working without it.