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Linear – A fast issue tracker

linear.app

91–100 of 230 posts

Re: Linear – A fast issue tracker

#91
post #3

We've been using Linear for a couple months. It's kind of like Superhuman in that the primary benefit is hotkeys. Otherwise it is an issue tracker. I think the reason we see a steady stream of new issue trackers is that teams are trying to fix with software what are people problems. New issue trackers feel faster for the same reason switching browsers tends to feel faster—you're getting rid of all of the crap you pil…

It's not just speed, it's complexity. I've seen the cycle play out enough to know the real thing that drives how productive a ticketing system feels: How many distinct kinds of people are using it.

The new one always seems great, because whatever team pilots it is the only team using it, so they're able to keep it nice and lean and closely adapted to their own needs. But, as soon as the decision to migrate is made, then you don't just have additional teams using it. You have additional teams wanting to use it as a communication and monitoring channel, and building up reports and metrics and dashboards on top of it, and imposing restrictions on the ticketing system that ultimately limit other groups' ability to streamline their own workflows, and by the time everyone realizes they're back on the same old pain train yet again, it's too late to do anything about it.

It seems that developers are always the ones who get hit the hardest, because they end up with the largest number of outside parties who want to get involved in their business.

Re: Linear – A fast issue tracker

#93

We started using Linear a couple weeks ago and overall we're very happy. There is no doubt that @tyre's points about a "reset" being part of the reason folks like new issue trackers. But setting aside the "reset" we got (our backlog from other tools wasn't _that_ big), we really enjoyed the speed and accessibility (ex: desktop app, keyboard shortcuts, etc). I recommend folks give it a try. My only feedback to the Lin…

Thanks! It's a balance we need to strike, we also looking what would the best way to ask people to upgrade. We have bit too many recently, so we put a hold on new releases for now.

Re: Linear – A fast issue tracker

#94
post #55

Jira is a hot circle of garbage. I am going to check out Linear for my team because I can’t stand how slowly Jira pages load and how long it takes Atlassian to address documented bugs.

Anyone who makes general complaints about Jira like this a) works in a place where Jira has not been correctly configured or b) works in a place with a terrible internet connection c) works in a place where both a) & b) are true or d) doesn't have any idea what they are talking about. P.S. what exactly is "a hot circle of garbage" other than a mixed metaphor?

On-prem JIRA is fast. Cloud-hosted JIRA is slow. It's clear as day that Atlassian throttles the cloud-hosted version.

Re: Linear – A fast issue tracker

#95
post #15

I was ruined for bug trackers by RT ( https://bestpractical.com ). Driving issue tracking from email is brilliant - I only had to look at the application for reference or planning, all the normal back and forth happens from email. (Optionally - you can of course type in a web browser if you prefer.) Jira's email behavior is pointless to the point of being counterproductive, and I disabled it. I have to look at it con…

RT was great! Once upon a time, I worked in a Perl shop and we had a lot of automation for RT built via scripts that spit out emails.

Re: Linear – A fast issue tracker

#96
post #3

We've been using Linear for a couple months. It's kind of like Superhuman in that the primary benefit is hotkeys. Otherwise it is an issue tracker. I think the reason we see a steady stream of new issue trackers is that teams are trying to fix with software what are people problems. New issue trackers feel faster for the same reason switching browsers tends to feel faster—you're getting rid of all of the crap you pil…

I haven't tried Linear, but my company uses Jira. It's abysmally slow. Not "there are too many tickets and it's hard to manage" slow, just the interface is slow. I opened an issue link in a new tab. It took about 7 seconds for the page to become interactive (able to click on the issue status and get a dropdown) and about 9 seconds for the loading to complete and elements to stop jumping around. This is in Firefox 78…

Is there a site that lets you run performance profiles in browser developer tools and share the results? I could imagine that being really useful internally for devs troubleshooting and working with support.

It'd be harder to pull off as a way to shame poor performance because of the need to compare like with like, but I think it's needed to get the attention of folks.

Accessibility checkers are often rudimentary, but they are available to non-technical folks in companies and can be very effective at getting a conversation started.

Re: Linear – A fast issue tracker

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> JIRA cloud was unusably slow and as a result we didn’t want to use the tool. We hated it even though it technically “worked”. - every JIRA customer ever

We're a JIRA customer and we're quite happy. It's not slow, at least to any degree that matters. We're not a huge team, nor do use much more than tickets with FishEye integration though. We also have a self-hosted instance. But for us it has worked quite well, and I have better memories of JIRA than say MantisBT which I used before.

you are self-hosted, which is different from cloud.

Re: Linear – A fast issue tracker

#98
post #3

We've been using Linear for a couple months. It's kind of like Superhuman in that the primary benefit is hotkeys. Otherwise it is an issue tracker. I think the reason we see a steady stream of new issue trackers is that teams are trying to fix with software what are people problems. New issue trackers feel faster for the same reason switching browsers tends to feel faster—you're getting rid of all of the crap you pil…

Slightly OT thought, but related to ticket tracking systems and the idea of reduced backlogs: As we move more and more towards ubiquitous "Product Orgs," separate from engineering, I think we're seeing backlogs just explode in size at most places. People need to realize that a large engineering backlog has a lot of negative effects on the SDLC (& velocity) as a whole. I wish more people would embrace heavy-handed WIP…

Depending on your company culture, this may be difficult to do, but I've seen good luck with moving toward a model where the product team doesn't push things into developers' to-do lists. The product folks supply a strictly prioritized wish list, and developers pull from it. Always one thing at a time, always the very first thing on the list.

It's the only way I've seen to get the product people to shift their thinking from, "What's a giant list of all the things we wish we could build?" to, "What is thing we actually need to build next?" And, without that change in thinking, the natural impulse is going to be to try and pack more features into the product using a close analogue to the technique that farmers use to produce foie gras.

You may have to be willing to sit back and let them drop the ball and get burned for it a few times. If they're pure business folks with little customer support experience, they might never personally understand how fixing a bug can be more valuable to the business than building a new feature, if you don't give them a chance to talk to a user who's irate about some piece of deferred maintenance.

Re: Linear – A fast issue tracker

#99
post #45

been using Linear for 3 months at my new company. Honestly, I don't really see the value over any other tools (Jira, Trello, Asana, Monday, etc). Sure they have a command palette and the UI is pretty fast (like Trello) which is nice but you still need too many clicks/keyboard shortcuts for simple tasks like adding 2+ issues. Their Slack integration is also non existent. You can't create issues based on a conversation…

Thanks for the feedback! We want to add quicker ways to add multiple issues, which can be useful for example when creating a new project.

Also you should be able to create issues through slack with /linear or right click the message and hit the "..." menu to create an issue.

Re: Linear – A fast issue tracker

#100
25+ years of working in software engineering has taught me that "issue tracker" presents the wrong metaphor. This product looks like it's not providing any novel improvements on what has failed for everyone so far, other than a slightly shinier surface.

Clearly there's utility to issue tracking: Projects have problems of various kinds (bugs, mostly) that need to be fixed. Sometimes these are conflated with tasks, which are things that people need to do, but those are not the same. Sometimes these are also conflated with "support tickets" from consumers/customers.

The problem isn't having a "database of problems". Clearly that's useful: If I use a program, and it doesn't work in some way, being able to look this information up somewhere is useful, both as a way to confirm that the problem exists for other people, and to follow up on it, and as a way to potentially find an existing solution.

But issue trackers aren't mostly used for that. They're used to drive development, and in that sense, this model doesn't accurately represent the fundamental relationships and power dynamics between people and technology. Issue trackers rot and become unusable piles of cruft very quickly because they're just "databases", and not a process. Databases must be maintained; they model real-life information that becomes out of date almost the moment it's entered. Of course, an organization can use issue trackers successfully, but it requires a very rigid process that constantly follows up, and you end up with a top-heavy social process that mostly (ab)uses a database to keep notes about progress.

I'm a fan of action-oriented task management, based on the principle that if something isn't painful (poses a roadblock to development, for example) or risky (may cause a customer to leave, for example), then it's not worth entering into a centralized database. Project-level task management should be oriented around stakeholders: Whoever an issue is important to should own it and keep it alive.

For example, a project manager can keep a spreadsheet or whatever of what people are working on, and their job is assigning work and making sure things get done, that the work follows some development timeline, and that the upstream stakeholders are satisfied. Nobody downstream needs to see this spreadsheet, but the project manager may need to present it upstream. By doing this, you're essentially rate-limiting your issue/task flow, and ensuring that someone keeps what's important alive. If something slips through the cracks and nobody complains, it wasn't important enough to remember.

A simple document (Google Docs, a wiki, markdown files on Github, etc.) of "known issues" can be used by developers and certain customers/clients to understand deficiencies. It's going to grow stale fast anyway, so prepare for it. Keep it loose and let it rot, and use it as a springboard for ideas in the future (if you bother to ever look at it again). Whenever possible, describe known issues in code so that you can look for TODO comments; that way, they won't go out of sync so easily.

For clients of your project/product, have a support channel ("ticket system"). This is not a database, but a communication tool. Open tickets mean there's a stakeholder waiting at the other end that may not be serviced fully (even if your project doesn't have a formal SLA). Making it public allows people to discover existing problems and find solutions to problems people had in the past. Support channels shouldn't just be for external clients. I think a lot of companies could improve their communications by having internal ones, too.

I think a lot of people understand this, yet it feels liberating to put their backlog in a database, because it seems like something that's ideal for a database. Developers love building task systems; it's such a simple data model that seems to neatly organize real-life concerns. But it's also a model that doesn't scale to more than a handful of issues, and doesn't really match how people work and communicate.

At the same time, it may feel risky to forego an issue tracker. But there are plenty of large projects that are managed without one. PostgreSQL, for example, doesn't have an issue tracker, and bugs are managed entirely through mailing list discussions, and they're doing great.

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