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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?

#71

Post by Carpetsmoker »

awaywopassd wrote: post #66
wtvanhest wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Unfortunately, this is a reality. I am part of a small team where we moved pretty fast. We used to write our own stories in Jira and they were mostly one liners. They have now implemented so many required fields to fill out. Filing out one story might take 30 minutes. And the management has implemented a mix of waterfall and agile methodology. It is combination of worst of both worlds. We are asked to plan our next 1…

> I fought this as much as I could.

I think that "fighting" this in the first place is not the correct approach. It would be better to "work on improve" it.

Perhaps I'm being pedantic, but I think it's an important difference, and creates a different (more constructive) mindset.

But yeah ... I've been where you are and I feel your pain :-(

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

#72

Post by matt_the_bass »

awaywopassd wrote: post #66
wtvanhest wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Unfortunately, this is a reality. I am part of a small team where we moved pretty fast. We used to write our own stories in Jira and they were mostly one liners. They have now implemented so many required fields to fill out. Filing out one story might take 30 minutes. And the management has implemented a mix of waterfall and agile methodology. It is combination of worst of both worlds. We are asked to plan our next 1…

> We used to write our own stories in Jira and they were mostly one liners. They have now implemented so many required fields to fill out. Filing out one story might take 30 minutes.

Perhaps you should embrace this. Spending time at the story level means you spend early effort to clarify the issue and specify the (possible) solution. In other words: planning.

I know this may seem like it sucks and is not really worth it, but it is often really valuable, especially as you grow and scale. Your company has been bought by a larger one. Obviously one value of this is to use the larger company’s resources to scale faster.

Maybe some of the story requirements are extraneous, but perhaps you should work with central management to improve the jira story requirements not fight against them.

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

#73

Post by TheGrumpyBrit »

I use Jira at work, and also at home for my side projects. At home it's little more than a self-hosted Trello instance. At work, it's more complex. Both do their jobs well enough.

Your problem is that you don't currently have any tools to track what your devs are doing. Your proof that you are "orders of magnitude superior" is nothing if you don't have the metrics to back it up.

If you accept that the larger company is going to want metrics on what your devs are doing (and that's an inevitability) then unless you have an alternative in mind and a compelling reason to use it instead of Jira, your best bet is to get on board, and do so with enthusiasm. If you're earnestly trying to use it, people will listen to the problems you run into and workflow changes you ask for. If you're complaining because you just don't want big brother watching you, you'll be ignored.

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

#75

Post by mbrodersen »

eksemplar wrote: post #12

I think jira is terrible because it’s complexity does the opposite of what you want management tools to do. It slows production to a crawl unless you invest heavily into change management and into building processes and training. That being said, I think you’d be facing an impossible fight. No developer loves these tools, and as a manager you hear complaints about almost everything imaginable, and if you have jira, a…

You are making broad sweeping statements about things you can't possibly know ("No developer loves these tools" and "It slows production to a crawl ...") It might be the case that it is your subjective experience. However it certainly isn't mine (having used JIRA for years).

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

#76

Post by a-saleh »

Disclaimer: I actually like jira.

If I were you, I would primarily fight to have enough privileges to be able to have your own workflow. In that case, Jira can be maleable enough to make it fit your current process, and if you can negotiate to be the one that decides/implements the workflow, you should be able to shield your team from any rashly imposed process from above.

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