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

151–160 of 182 posts

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

#151

Post by mixmastamyk »

Well, I've been forced to use Jira for a decade or two now. Not a huge fan, but it is ok. Ties directly into gitlab, has a kanban-like board. Every used bugzilla?

But, I've never had any of these other complaints. When will this ticket get fixed? By the end of the sprint. I do tickets in order of priority. Rarely been a problem, so surprised to hear it brought up.

At my current gig, the PM has been there a decade and I only a year, so a great majority of the time I am asking/he is telling me how things should work at a high level. I value the advice.

I did work for one disaster project about ten years ago. Constantly interrupted for fires, tens of hours of meetings per week, and rarely finished sprints. We were overloaded on tickets because sprint planning never took interruptions/meetings/bugfixes into account. We used bugzilla there, but it wasn't the culprit.

Annoyances: just thought of one. The issue page has a ton of stuff I don't care about and de-emphasizes the comments which I'm most focused on. I also don't like how when you click on things it switches to edit mode.

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

#152

Post by danielscrubs »

frobozz wrote: post #114
pianoben wrote: post #58

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 stor…

Yes. I've used Jira for years and never understood the hate. The only times I have had real problems have been with particular idiosyncratic configurations or conventions that someone at my end has put in.

Have you tried the alternatives like YouTrack?

The Jira UX is amongst the worst in the business.

And yet... there it is, on every workplace with an useless operations team.

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

#153

Post by hinkley »

csours wrote: post #146
hinkley wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the bottom. It is perfectly reasonable to blame the agent of chaos for the chaos that results.

ehh, but this is kind of like blaming the results on hitting concrete vs hitting a cornfield. Yes, you might have a slightly less bad time hitting the cornfield, but the height of the drop is the more determining factor.

My point is that people love to let Atlassian off the hook. They set up the conditions for failure. You can't blame all of the consequences on the person who touches it last.

It's really the same class of externality that we used to blame Microsoft for. You can try to collect all the cash and all the fame and then blame stability and usability problems on third parties, but not everyone is going to buy it.

If you weren't pandering in the first place, you wouldn't have all that cash or fame. You knew what you were doing. Even if you don't want to say it out loud.

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

#155

Post by scrozart »

vosper wrote: post #92

> This blog is not about how Jira is too complex and over-engineered with features I don’t need. This blogpost is a microcosm of engineer arrogance (it's also an ad for their product, so all of this is basically a strawman to drive sign-ups. Great content marketing, to bash on a tool people love to hate). The world is not all about engineers. Jira is a tool for whole companies, which have lots of other departments th…

This is spot on in my experience. My company is 2+ years into JIRA adoption and it's been messy because everyone tried to bend it to be like the best previous tool, interested of starting with, and honestly evaluating, the default configurations. Now, most teams are slowly circling back to defaults. I find the PM stuff, like Plans, to be fairly well implemented, as are the notifications.

If JIRA has any core issues, it's that it may be _too_ flexible; you can definitely overcomplicate things and get yourself into trouble.

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

#156

Post by johnnyfaehell »

I think the post hit the nail on the head with the question paraphrasing „Why do companies buy project management software that only project managers love But engineers hate?“ The answer is project managers manage projects so need project management software.

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

#157

Post by dijit »

yodelshady wrote: post #65
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…

Funny, from non-dev roles I'd probably put spreadsheets as the the platform for "no-code app dev". Or rather, the platform for "this is the only b *d tool IT have allowed me to run, and no, I don't have a spare year for them to scope out what could be bodged by a couple of VBA scripts, and doing so would very obviously make my job better. So, for good or evil, it's going to be bodged with a couple of VBA scripts." I…

Never underestimate the art of the bodge, it's quite literally keeping the world ticking over, perfection has a place but it is rare and fleeting.

I saw a good talk on it from Tom Scott some time ago[0] which I think is relevant.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIFE7h3m40U

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

#159

Post by Supermancho »

desc wrote: post #132
pianoben wrote: post #58

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 stor…

This. Jira is a framework for building something which approximates your actual processes. > Justin said “I wish Atlassian would sit down with real-world developers and design this product the way we need it to work.” The way 'you' need it to work. The process 'you' use. I suppose it's possible to build a business on creating a completely bespoke ticketing system for each company which uses one. Over time, that busin…

I'm not sure why nobody provides a task tracking tool that has tasks organized hierarchically (with chord/circular dependency. This is the real world, regardless of the argument about subjective processes. If you can't see where in your workflow, that 1 task (even from another team's workflow) is impacting multiple other workflows at-a-glance, the tool is too primitive. Subtasks don't cut it.

JIRA is the most popular of all tools on the market, which are glorified gantt points across disparate fragmented views. This is an element of modern tech that makes large organizations hilariously inefficient.

Post reply on HN