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

171–180 of 182 posts

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

#171

Post by killface »

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 Outdated now.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 Spreadsheets are stronger than they've ever been and are never going away, let alone being "outdated."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'm convinced that every single business out there eventually gets run from an Excel spreadsheet. At the end of the day, they're just rolling up rollups all the way to the top, where some guy is looking at Scenario A vs Scenario B in Excel

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

#172

Post by frobozz »

danielscrubs wrote: post #152
frobozz wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not saying Jira is great. I'm just surprised that people, particularly ICs, hate it.

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

#173

Post by c3534l »

I personally found the main criticisms to be insightful reasons why Jira doesn't really add much value to a workflow, but most problems can be dealt with by taking those issues into account and continuing to use Jira. Then again, I'm not entirely convinced tools like Jira are ultimately much better than just managing with email and whiteboarding, which is probably why I feel so meh about it. Everything it does just feels unnecessary 99% of the time.

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

#174

Post by radegast »

sufyanadam wrote: post #133
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 Outdated now.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…

Pro-tip for engineers on spreadsheets: Org-mode & emacs is a great tool for the random spreadsheet you might want to scratch out to compare something or get some running totals or do cost-benefit analysis or whatever. Check out https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-spreadsheet-lisp-... and https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/org.html... I recently used it to find out how much a certain company ow…

Or you know, just use Excel like a normal person. :) Why bother hacking spreadsheets in a text editor from the 70s...

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

#175

Post by amai »

The problem with Jira is that a lot of useful features are only available as plugins. But your company won't pay for any of these plugins, or they simply don't want to maintain and install them for security reasons.

So you are stuck with the basic Jira version you company pays for and will never see any of the nice extensions that are available for it.

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

#176

Post by albertvila »

xmprt wrote: post #125
commandlinefan wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> engineer arrogance And this is the twilight-zone reality that software developers are forever stuck in: Manager: "I need you to integrate the TPS reports with JIRA for a client" Developer: "Ok, I can look into that" Manager: "How long is that going to take? Put some story points on the JIRA task." Developer: "Well, I've never done that before, so I'll have to do some research and I can't really say for sure-" Manag…

I've never seen a manager operate like that and if yours does then you should look into moving.

I've been in something like this recently. It's real.

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

#177

Post by laurent92 »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #75
laurent92 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud or Server? It seems a lot of companies’ reputation were broken by clients installing their software on 2GB/1.5GHz servers with HDD, and Cloud will help at least getting a consistent measurable experience of the same product for everyone.

In what universe is a few billion instructions per second not enough to respond to a single click?

In OSGi universe. Making software which does one thing well is the easy part. Making extensible software with plugins is super-hard.

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

#178

Post by CyberDildonics »

laurent92 wrote: post #177
CyberDildonics wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what universe is a few billion instructions per second not enough to respond to a single click?

In OSGi universe. Making software which does one thing well is the easy part. Making extensible software with plugins is super-hard.

It has been done many times over the last 25 years. I think that's a pretty thin rationalization to having a program freeze when you click a button.

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

#179

Post by phendrenad2 »

commandlinefan wrote: post #127
xmprt wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen a manager operate like that and if yours does then you should look into moving.

Maybe I've had a 30-year string of bad luck.

Considering the litte morality play you typed out includes the exact "developer arrogance" and "flow state" quotes from the OP, I'm guessing this is an exaggeration in anger and it's impossible to argue with until you provide a non-exaggerated example of your 30-year work environment.

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

#180

Post by linknfg182 »

seanjregan wrote: post #143

Hi Sean here. I work on Jira at Atlassian and I also met with Justin and the Jira Admin for his company prior to this article. I've also heard from him since. He was not consulted re the use of his comments. Generally, I'd encourage vendors to seek permission when citing a customer in marketing in this way. It's a simple respect that can be paid with low effort. I thought it might be helpful to share a few thoughts o…

Hey Sean, Dan here and I wrote this blog post.

Thanks for the effort on the detailed response!

We have a core value at LinearB to empower the dev community and I can see you share a similar passion. The tone of my blog post came off more critical of Jira than intended and it’s great to see the improvements your team is making.

Although LinearB is not a Jira competitor, the issue remains that once story planning ends and coding begins, development teams are left with a major gap to stay up to date in real time to support the hundreds of micro decisions dev teams have to make every day. We are eager to address this problem!

It takes hyper correlation between Git and project management tools combined with a developer first mindset (not project management).

Since you are open to partnership, I will reach out to you so we can meet and pursue!

Thanks again Sean.

(I also responded with the annotation tool you used here: https://hyp.is/A_Sb1N2gEeq1_E8AuivgVQ/dzone.com/articles/jir...)

Post reply on HN