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

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

#51

Post by AlexandrB »

nicofcurti wrote: post #33
laurent92 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Wow, that sounds like the most communist thing I've ever read in a ToS

Broad ToSs and zero consumer rights are full laissez faire capitalism. So I would argue this is the most capitalist thing in a ToS.

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

#52

Post by GCA10 »

OP sounds like someone who's unhappy working on big software projects. That's understandable. But once you're on a big project, you can't keep it all in your head. You can't make your own clever adjustments when problems arise without documenting everything and then taking it through channels.

For what it's worth, sales people have the exact same complaint. They can get testy, too, about executives using software-oversight tools to take away the soul of what they really do. Allow me to change 15% of the words in this piece, and it could become a rebuke of Salesforce and its siblings, as applied to large sales organizations. So the brief allusion to sales seemed way off base.

Process can be exasperating, until you've worked in a big place where there's no coherent process.

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

#53

Post by ceocoder »

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.

This is from Atlassian's ToS

(d) incorporate any Cloud Products into a product or service you provide to a third party;

does this mean that I can't integrate JIRA into a ticket tracking workflow that I build for my product with IFTTT that creates a new ticket when someone sends an email to a support alias?

(e) interfere with or otherwise circumvent mechanisms in the Cloud Products intended to limit your use;

(f) reverse engineer, disassemble, decompile, translate or otherwise seek to obtain or derive the source code, underlying ideas, algorithms, file formats or non-public APIs to any Cloud Products, except to the extent expressly permitted by applicable law (and then only upon advance notice to us);

(g) remove or obscure any proprietary or other notices contained in any Cloud Product;

Fair enough.

(h) use the Cloud Products for competitive analysis or to build competitive products;

Sure, I mean this is hard to enforce but if the team at Trello was using JIRA while making Trello, Atlassian could just say "hey - stop, no like".

(i) publicly disseminate information regarding the performance of the Cloud Products;

Seriously? I really didn't believe when I saw parent say you are not allowed to comment on performance of the product but I stand corrected. I will not comment on performance of any Atlassian product ever, ever ever. You got me Atlassian, this is what I get for not reading ToS before clicking Accept.

(j) encourage or assist any third party to do any of the foregoing.

Ok.

[0] https://www.atlassian.com/legal/cloud-terms-of-service

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

#54

Post by rgbrgb »

awinter-py wrote: post #5

yeah, there are a couple of up-and-coming tools that try to correlate product spec to tickets while maintaining a separation between the two hard problems like spec, estimation of work, and assignment of work to people are conflated in a ticketing-only universe

Interesting. Can you drop some links to your favorites?

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

#55

Post by nine_k »

Jira does have an extensive and documented API. They have e.g. an official integration / "client" for VSCode. There is a couple of CLI tools.

I hope more alternative frontends will eventually come up to address the UI issues, to streamline particular kinds of usage, etc.

This can't address the API speed, though.

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

#56

Post by fivre »

My struggles with Jira are more that the people who should be in charge of configuring it effectively and running it smoothly (team managers and PMs) often don't. I see a lot of stuff that's incredibly inconsistent and a lot of features that are used incorrectly (most prevalently using labels for EVERYTHING, usually using 4 different labels for the same purpose where say, a component or Epic would make more sense). Exacerbating that is that these ad hoc half workflows aren't communicated effectively, so the only people that understand the systems are their creators

Jira's complex, I get it, but lots of things are. Jira's docs are decent enough--certainly decent enough that following the tutorials will grant you an understanding of the various tools and their intended purpose--but people seemingly just don't read them. Some things just aren't going to be fully discoverable or clear through UX alone.

More galling is that these are usually the same people that then create shadow PM empires through Excel spreadsheets of their own design, which is just ugh. So much blame is heaped on Jira that's probably better blamed on ineffective management.

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

#57

Post by nooyurrsdey »

I've never understood the hatred for JIRA - it includes a ton of features that many find useful. Yeah it's a PM tool but you need the ability to organize boards and workflows at scale in larger organizations. It's not a tool intended for your startup that can manage with Trello or Github Projects.

This reads like the usual developer's opinion of "the world is not built for me" and "I don't like it if developers aren't thought of first"

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

#58

Post by pianoben »

I recognize that this is a marketing blog, but it blames Jira for what are really culture problems and/or bad management practices.

This is an emblematic quote:

    Take subtasks, for example. The invention of Jira subtasks is an affront to dev teams. Clearly someone who has never spoken to an engineer on a dev team created it. It’s the least dev-friendly way possible to get insight into what’s happening with a Jira story.
Behind the bombast, the author assumes that the purpose of subtasks is to provide micro-level insight on progress to PMs. I agree that this would be a misuse of subtasks. Speaking as an engineer, I _love_ subtasks because they help me keep track of my various efforts towards whatever feature the ticket is tracking. Also, I'm the one who defines them!

Jira isn't anyone's favorite software, but it is so configurable that it ends up being an embodiment of your dev process. If you hate it, chances are it's because you hate how you're managed.

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

#59

Post by hector_vasquez »

tensor wrote: post #14

"Though I think of Jira more like a spreadsheet. Very useful once upon a time. Outdated now. Static. Manual." This statement is so blatantly wrong that it actually put me off even reading the rest. Spreadsheets are stronger than they've ever been and are never going away, let alone being "outdated." Sure there are products that claim to be "the next spreadsheet" but most of those actually serve a different purpose: n…

I assumed the author really meant that using a spreadsheet for project tracking is outdated, static, and manual. Which I agree with. But spreadsheets in general of course are tremendously useful!

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

#60

Post by CraigJPerry »

JIRA is just a tool. A pretty reasonable one. It integrates with every dev tool under the sun at this point. It’s as lightweight, or invasive, as you want it to be.

Sometimes there’s people or workflow problems that get blasted as jira (or rally/ac) problems because that’s the interface you see those people or workflow problems through.

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