Atlassian debuts new Jira Software Cloud with timeline view, configuration flow

Atlassian debuts new Jira Software Cloud with timeline view, configuration flow
venturebeat.com

On the other hand, I can totally understand people associating Jira with everything that is awful with "Agile", and as you mentioned, micromanagement.

Our PM team recently requested we move from Waffle to Jira, since Waffle has no backlog management and Github's is lacking from a PM point of view. As a developer, this is a giant leap backwards.

Jira is a terrible mess of throw spaghetti at the wall and hope it works out. A jumble of all the features you could possibly want, half-assed and thrown together with terrible UX. The data model is non-sensical (everything is shared between projects - if you create a status, a field, an issue type, it becomes the one true object shared by everyone), making the damned thing impossible to configure.

The way kanban boards currently work is that they don't scroll. They adjust their horizontal scaling to shove all the columns on to the screen. Dragging cards between them frequently fails, because when you are dragging, you can end up scrolling and that will knock Jira's awareness of the card's position out of whack. When you drag the card, it greys out the board and highlights the columns you can drop it in in green - which is how I know that Jira's position tracking gets out of whack. After I've dragged to cause an accidental scroll, the column I'm hovering over will fail to highlight, but the one two columns over will highlight.

The whole thing needs to refresh every time you make a change. Or when someone else makes a change, instead of just showing the change you get a little box saying "please refresh me". To see your PRs attached to a card, you have to click into the card, then click into the PR list. It doesn't list which repo each PR belongs to anywhere, so you have to put that in the title yourself if you want to be able to see it from Jira. You can't see review status or comment status from Jira, so you have to click straight through to the PR if you want to see how the conversation has moved.

And yeah, right now, you have to configure your workflow independently of the columns and then attach the the statuses to the columns. Figuring that out took a solid day of clicking around in the nightmarish admin sections. Now that I'm using it and not trying to configure it, it's annoying, it's definitely slowing me down over waffle, but it's... manageable. But god I miss waffle.

These changes, if they actually exist look like they would salve some of these pains... at least a little.

No, that's not the case. If you create any of those new objects, you have to explicitly add it to what you want it to be associated with. New fields have to be added to screens and schemes, new issue types associated with issue type schemes and then to projects, and so forth. None of this happens automatically from the admin side.

If you want to share stuff across projects, you can, but it is in no way a requirement.

> As a developer, this is a giant leap backwards.

The only Jiras I've ever seen suck that hard is when the end users are treated as hostile rather than stakeholders in the deployment. It can be as easy to use or as complicated to use as the people writing your workflows and screens.

That applies to the UI as well. The basic UI, OOTB, is fairly easy to understand. Once you have management dictating 30 different required fields along 50 different projects, each with their own issue types and workflows... yeah, it can get hairy.

> To see your PRs attached to a card, you have to click into the card, then click into the PR list.

This is going to be a bit "you're holding it wrong", but why would you expect to see PRs at the card level rather than the detail view? The agile board is meant to show who and what, not how. PRs would be meaningless noise to the average user of an agile board, not to mention taking up the limited space available on a single card.

Those issues aside, you'll never hear me accuse Jira of being easy to administer. It's a tool that tries to be all things to all people, meaning it will take a non-trivial amount of time to get your head around and have some rough edges.