Why Jira Sucks • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#121

Post by Can_Not » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

mulcahey wrote: post #36

wintorez wrote: post #5

All I want from Jira is to allow me to use Markdown.

It has a markup language that accomplishes the same thing effectively but has a completely different syntax. This is super annoying when you are bouncing between pull requests in Atlassian Bitbucket and JIRA tickets. I have tried to create a heading with # only to end up with an at least a hundred times. I imagine this is because JIRA (2002) predates Markdown (2004), or at least its mainstream popularity when GitHub…

It's like the features of markdown without the convenience and usefulness of markdown.

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#122

Post by Phelinofist » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

smcl wrote: post #95

papaf wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Native support for Markdown in comments would be a good win. In the Atlassian ecosystem, the markup languages are constrained by the following equation: JIRA Markup != Confluence Markup != Bitbucket Markup

Also even just within JIRA it can be inconsistent - I realised that to make monospaced text you need to use: - backticks when creating a Jira ticket, e.g. `hello` - double curly-braces when editing a Jira ticket, e.g. {{hello}} ... or vice versa. I cannot honestly remember which way round it is. Of the complaints I have about Jira this is probably the least annoying - but it really shows how irritating the product is…

Cannot confirm, I always create issues with {{...}}

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#123

Post by Can_Not » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 5:07 PM UTC

MatekCopatek wrote: post #38

jimbob45 wrote: post #11

What would you have us use instead? Trello?

My go-to options are the following: - Whatever GitHub/GitLab provides if I need the most basic level of tracking. - Trello for a more polished experience, a few additional ticket/board related features and easier involvement of non-developers. - Linear if there's a bigger team that needs more than a bunch of boards (backlogs, roadmaps, projects, teams etc.).

> Trello for a more polished experience

On android, returning from a screen unlock deleted all my unsaved text.

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#124

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 5:08 PM UTC

waylandsmithers wrote: post #99

What about the burn down charts? Every project I’ve ever worked on, features are finished, apps and websites are shipped, clients are happy and pay the bills, yet the burn down just goes straight to the right and never down. Sometimes right and up if people added more tickets during the sprint. We look at it at the end of the sprint and say ah well and continue on our way. Then sometimes a PM type decides it’s a prob…

[deleted]

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#125

Post by BlargMcLarg » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 5:09 PM UTC

paulryanrogers wrote: post #111

anotherevan wrote: post #74

RT @HackerNewsOnion: California has ruled it illegal to conceal a company’s JIRA subscription for the purpose of attracting engineers. https://twitter.com/HackerNewsOnion/status/98160924222131814...

Do people really avoid companies based on their choice of administrative services?

Choice of administrative services can definitely be a symptom of a larger problem. When most of the services used are unfriendly to the user and one is expected to use these every day, especially with alternatives available, that doesn't tell me they value their workers a lot.

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#126

Post by eplanit » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 5:09 PM UTC

Lazare wrote: post #119

There's a hundred small issues with Jira, but there's one huge one: It's slow. Really, really slow. Atlassian seems to make a lot of money, so I guess they're optimising for something that matters to someone , but from my point of view I have a simple process for evaluating tools: 1) Can I use it at all ? 2) How many of the features I want does it have? I'm pretty sure Jira would score great on the second question, b…

It's the mainframe app of our time.

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#127

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 5:10 PM UTC

mnd999 wrote: post #87

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #84

To me, what sucks about JIRA (and would suck about any well-designed tool that replaces it) is not "feature x" but the entire JIRA mentality. All of it. It encourages micro-management. It encourages more and more process. It is the enemy of getting better at the DORA metrics, which requires streamlining process. tickets in JIRA are not the work itself, never was and never will be, it is a LARP of the work, but it get…

100% this. JIRA is bad because it encourages managers to use it to do stupid things, not because it’s inherently bad software.

[deleted]

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#128

Post by smcl » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 5:10 PM UTC

Phelinofist wrote: post #122

smcl wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also even just within JIRA it can be inconsistent - I realised that to make monospaced text you need to use: - backticks when creating a Jira ticket, e.g. `hello` - double curly-braces when editing a Jira ticket, e.g. {{hello}} ... or vice versa. I cannot honestly remember which way round it is. Of the complaints I have about Jira this is probably the least annoying - but it really shows how irritating the product is…

Cannot confirm, I always create issues with {{...}}

"or vice versa. I cannot honestly remember which way round it is"

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#129

Post by gregmac » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 5:11 PM UTC

> Missing Easy Search Option for Finding Issues in the Project

Really? I think search is one of the most compelling features.

I find most of the time when I can't find something, it's because of different terms used, such as searching for "schedule task failing" vs the ticket saying "job run error". (Usually once I eventually find it I just edit the ticket to have the other keywords I tried)

The UI for selecting advanced search is acceptable.. it's not the easiest thing - for example searching open vs closed on GitHub is an much simpler - but it also exposes a lot more of the fields.

Personally I use the text-based JQL interface most of the time. It's very powerful, and as the name implies, anyone that knows SQL will find it familiar. A quick example, an easy way to find bugs closed in the version you're releasing but that weren't correctly tagged: `(type = bug) and (fixversion is null) and (status changed to closed after 2020-12-02)`.

And search you do is updated in the url (easy to share with others), and even better, if you paste that url into Confluence, it turns into an embedded dynamic list. This is great for release notes, or making category pages of certain types of tickets (eg: all open bugs related to feature x, or all bugs older than 6 months with more than a few comments, etc). Yeah you can build reports with this, but I find these are more accessible and used when they're organized within a logical structure in the wiki vs buried in a flat list of dozens or hundreds of other reports.

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#130

Post by 7thaccount » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 5:12 PM UTC

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #84

To me, what sucks about JIRA (and would suck about any well-designed tool that replaces it) is not "feature x" but the entire JIRA mentality. All of it. It encourages micro-management. It encourages more and more process. It is the enemy of getting better at the DORA metrics, which requires streamlining process. tickets in JIRA are not the work itself, never was and never will be, it is a LARP of the work, but it get…

I only used JIRA briefly and it took up way too much time to adequately document our work. I didn't want to leave any work out as I wanted to show all the work being done. Eventually my manager just wanted some very high level stuff absent of any detail and it mostly died out. My new manager just wants a few bullet points once a week on what you've been up to. I feel like I can convey the same information in like 3 minutes instead of using a complicated tool. The advantage is JIRA automatically tracks this stuff for you as opposed to email.

I think it mainly caters to micromanagers and allows them to justify additional head count "look at how large our back log is". It doesn't matter that 99% of the backlog isn't very relevant work and hasn't been touched in 2 years for a reason.