Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Jira Is a Microcosm of What’s Broken in Software Development

linearb.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 182 posts

Re: Jira Is a Microcosm of What’s Broken in Software Development

#41

Post by laurent92 »

glouwbug wrote: post #25

I wonder if JIRA uses JIRA to track itself

Of course it does. For a while, external people could even log the issues themselves.

Having used it, I don’t understand all the hate. I love the Sprint boards, the drag and drop and the JQL. Of course I deactivate everything that tries to help me, it’s kind of like Clippy: they « make it easier for you » by hiding all the fields, or opening an issue by hiding the search table. Would be easier to understand if Jira only had 3 screens: Issue view, Search and Sprint board...

Re: Jira Is a Microcosm of What’s Broken in Software Development

#42

Post by pm90 »

boudin wrote: post #23
cloudengineer wrote: post #4

Jira is a workflow tool, which also means that most of the issues mentioned here, can be sorted out between the PM and devs on who the workflow should be, and what the rituals for updates should/could be. Jira is flexible enough to accomodate it (mostly). From a developer perspective, some of the points maybe valid, but not from PM perspective. It would also help if we could get an idea of what the alternatives are,…

I'm using Jira, not a huge fan (mostly because it's slow, the cloud version at least) and there's some clunkyness BUT every time I looked for alternatives it was either too opiniated (like SCRUM or nothing) or had really poor integration with dev tools. The big advantage of Jira is that you can customise it quite a bit and it has a good set of integrations and APIs. I'm still thinking of moving away at some point but…

Try clubhouse

Re: Jira Is a Microcosm of What’s Broken in Software Development

#43

Post by nine_k »

cj wrote: post #3

I spend hours per day in Jira. Half as a PM, and the other half as an IC. I've never used Jira Classic, so can't comment there. But Jira Next Gen projects have been great to work with. So much functionality and bloat is stripped out of Next Gen, sometimes too much was removed I think. I hear people hating on Jira very often, but at least the way our company uses it, it's great. The only thing I'd really want to chang…

I think that implementing a tool "like Jira, only fast" would be a quite interesting engineering challenge. With the amount of configurability which Jira allows, it is not easy to come up with something performant. Maybe a compilation-like approach would work.

Re: Jira Is a Microcosm of What’s Broken in Software Development

#44

Post by atonse »

Every single project I've been on in the past 15 years (public/private sector, many verticals, different companies), when push comes to shove, people resort to tracking everything on simple spreadsheets or punch lists. And it works just fine (although this results in more communication which is anyway true when things go wrong or overdue, regardless of tools).

So I'm really wondering how much utility a lot of these tools bring (I LOVED Jira in 2006 when it was a glorified table with powerful filters, but I was using it roughly like a smart spreadsheet). I feel a lot of what they add is just busy work that you have the luxury to play with in normal times, but when you don't have the luxury to do busy work, it just slows you down without much benefit.

What have other people's experiences been? An emergency can be a great filter to show you what matters and what doesn't.

Re: Jira Is a Microcosm of What’s Broken in Software Development

#45

Post by dijit »

laurent92 wrote: post #19
cj wrote: post #3

I spend hours per day in Jira. Half as a PM, and the other half as an IC. I've never used Jira Classic, so can't comment there. But Jira Next Gen projects have been great to work with. So much functionality and bloat is stripped out of Next Gen, sometimes too much was removed I think. I hear people hating on Jira very often, but at least the way our company uses it, it's great. The only thing I'd really want to chang…

> performance By Atlassian’s ToS, you are not allowed to « comment on the performance of the products ». I know no-one thinks this would be enforced here, but I just want to highlight that it doesn’t help a company to improve if they know they can just lawyer-up a problem away and avoid benchmarks and being compared on that topic.

That rubs me so much the wrong way.

If they ever terminated services for me because I commented on performance I would be the most loud person on the internet about it.

I would go to every review site, every comment board, and filter every title on every news aggregator and post as much statistics as I could about performance and issues that I had with it. Then I would state that they had terminated my services for commenting about it, with the proof.

I would be totally radicalised against them, it's absolutely insane that they even have this as a ToS, but if they ever enforced it I'm sure many people would salt the fucking earth.

Re: Jira Is a Microcosm of What’s Broken in Software Development

#47

Post by riffraff »

chadlavi wrote: post #20

I used to think Jira was horrible. Then I moved to a company that uses Pivotal. Now I know what horrible means.

my feeling to this day is, to paraphrase Churchill, that Jira is the worst possible project management software, except for everything else.

Re: Jira Is a Microcosm of What’s Broken in Software Development

#49

Post by osidenate »

laurent92 wrote: post #19
cj wrote: post #3

I spend hours per day in Jira. Half as a PM, and the other half as an IC. I've never used Jira Classic, so can't comment there. But Jira Next Gen projects have been great to work with. So much functionality and bloat is stripped out of Next Gen, sometimes too much was removed I think. I hear people hating on Jira very often, but at least the way our company uses it, it's great. The only thing I'd really want to chang…

> performance By Atlassian’s ToS, you are not allowed to « comment on the performance of the products ». I know no-one thinks this would be enforced here, but I just want to highlight that it doesn’t help a company to improve if they know they can just lawyer-up a problem away and avoid benchmarks and being compared on that topic.

source?

Re: Jira Is a Microcosm of What’s Broken in Software Development

#50

Post by cheriot »

> So why do companies use a tool that works for a few PMs and business leaders when dozens or hundreds of engineers hate it?

In fact, Jira is so infinitely configurable it reflects the org chart and culture of the company using it. Most Jira complaints I hear are more about that person's company than the tool. That said, the tool definitely doesn't help as much as it should (largely because engineers don't make purchase decisions).

Post reply on HN