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Why Jira Sucks

whyjirasucks.com

131–140 of 530 posts

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#131
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…

Yes, it's slow as balls. I run my own Jira for ~100 users and, despite throwing as much hardware at it and its PostgreSQL database as possible, it's still extremely slow clicking around and trying to use it. Database operations that would have been fast against simple MySQL 15 years ago on a single core server take seconds. What is it doing that makes it so slow?? The PostgreSQL server has most of the working set of data cached into 64GB of memory, for pete's sake, and still it's not enough to make it fly.

Cloud Jira is unusably slow in comparison, too, and when the Atlassian server licenses are not available any more (soon!) and we're forced with having to migrate, I'm not sure what to do. Bite the bullet and just accept the abysmal performance for an easy migration, pay through the nose for the Data Center license, or get people running on a new tool?

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#132
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was looking at the homepage reading text that explained the Picture Gallery ("when users can reuse images... more likely to...") and then the whole page refreshed with a completely different design. I was on the page for probably about 30 to 60 seconds. Firefox 84 on Kubuntu Linux, no relevant addons.

Hi! That’s just a video playing on a loop taking you through the various screens. The “image gallery” is just showing our work item screen and then it jumps to some other screens. Thanks for the feedback though! It may be that this isn’t clear enough

Some constructive advice, your homepage is messy, the ratios and spacing are really off and makes it hard to digest and focus on your features. This will directly impact your actual product. Please don't be insulted , I've spend 20 years in design/branding and want you to succeed but this homepage isn't doing it, you need a brand book with some strict guidelines.

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#133

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…

Any better software to replace it ?

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#134

What’s killing Jira and the other tools in Atlassian’s suite for us is them killing off the on-premises server products. Some of the companies I work with have defense security requirements and just can’t use it in the cloud (unless they followed a lot of stringent requirements that are not on their roadmap, and I assume they would charge a lot more for that). The cloud versions are also far more expensive and while…

Jira datacenter is too expensive too?

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#135
post #93

I think, tools like Jira would be evaluated 10x more favourably if they just weren't so damn slow. Same goes for Asana and Slack.

Asana and Slack were both fast once upon a time.

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#136
We're getting off our old ticket/wiki project system this coming year as it's being sunsetted. Jira is one of the alternatives we're investigating, because several staff have used it in other jobs. I also used it for a brief time, and I was not in love with it. I often felt like it was arguing with me.

There are so many systems out there. Right now we're also evaluating YouTrack from JetBrains and OpenProject.org (which is a fork of a fork of RedMine).

We don't want to have to move again any time soon, so while we're evaluating features we're also trying to predict stability and viability. To that end, when available, I'm including in our evaluation notes 1) when the company making the system started; 2) when the system was launched; 3) how many staff the company has.

JetBrains started in 2000, YouTrack launched in 2009, and they have over 900 employees. OpenProject launched in 2012. Both seem to be stable and under active development.

ClickUp has a lot of features and looks nice (we haven't dug into it yet). But they launched in 2017, and raised Series A funding in June 2020. So they're young. That doesn't mean they're bad. It just means they're less known, and have not proved long-term viability. On the plus side, it also means they don't have the 18 years of cruft in the system that Jira (launched in 2002) seems to have.

In my experience the right project management system can really help developers, so I always want to hear everybody's experiences, good and bad.

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#137
post #85

I am reading this comment thread and honestly I don't know that I agree. I think JIRA, like most tools, is as good or bad as you make it. I've been at numerous companies using JIRA that don't seem to have most of the issues referenced here. The only thing I've ever felt like JIRA really lacked in was in a good UX for embedding code snippets or other technical details into issue comments. Native support for Markdown i…

There are three problems I notice with JIRA, of which two are entirely the product's fault. The first one you already mentioned: abysmal speed. The second is how JIRA forces certain ways of working which are clunky or intuitive (or by extension, out-of-the-box workflows are difficult to change). The biggest problem I have, by far, is just how easy it is to create bureaucracy-intense workflows in JIRA and make managem…

> is just how easy it is to create bureaucracy-intense workflows in JIRA and make management believe these are absolutely necessary

Omg, finally someone has said it, I thought I was weird. This is the imperative problem with JIRA, it is not made to help the developers but to satisfy management which is buying the software. +1 for this comment. I have seen its usage in 7 companies and in each and every case instead of simplifying developers workflow it was complicating it due to management wanting to have their data which, at the end, didnt bring anything for the product but were just enabler to make their cute graphs that enabled them to not be involved into development cycle (as they should be) but rather bring out statistics "out of their shoe - JIRA".

And this is also my only (ok, except the slowness which should be understandable for any web browser js application) comment over the JIRA, I dont care what the tool is, how much time it takes (at the end, I am not paying for it), but how much it diverges from the tool that SHOULD help the development while in its essence it mostly helps the management to track their data.

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#138
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…

> Atlassian seems to make a lot of money, so I guess they're optimising for something that matters to someone

My personal theory about Atlassian: they have realized (like SAP did before) that once you convinced management to use your product you no longer need to worry about what the users think.

You don't like that the ticket form has 50 fields you don't need? No problem! All you need to do is to convince your manager to contact support and tell them to track less data about your progress. I bet your manager will love that.

And once they got the foot on the door, who is going to convince the company to migrate away from them?

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#139
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 has that slowness that makes my soul die a little every time I bring up a page, every time I click on a link, every time I make an edit, every time I...

What’s the opposite of “delightful”?

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