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Why Jira Sucks

whyjirasucks.com

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Re: Why Jira Sucks

#251

Post by xxpor »

aplummer wrote: post #201
runarberg wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A git commit is a process document. Developers don’t like JIRA. I’ve already left traces of my process when I pushed the code. Developers love GitHub. A robot will associate my git commit with the ticket and mark the ticket accordingly. As a developer I don’t like repeating my self. A robot should be able to catalog my process documents. If middle management wants to use JIRA it needs to be set up so that a developer…

You can complete JIRA tickets just by using a commit title format, and I don’t buy that there is a better system for QA to report the bugs or feedback themselves...

The real disease is everyone having this separate QA step. QA is part of developing a feature. Do it yourself.

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#252

Post by joegahona »

kjd1231 wrote: post #190
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…

What bothers me is if I use JIRA, why do I have a meeting every single day telling you what I'm working on. If you care, look at JIRA.

To discuss blockers and what you'll be working on that day. Also many engineers aren't good about updating tickets, ruining it for everyone.

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#253

Post by Closi »

benzible wrote: post #215
Terretta wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you read David Allen’s Getting Things Done and looked at that system? You have stuff to do today, stuff to do tomorrow, and stuff you might or might not do. Each day you roll the active lists forward. Squint, and it’s just personal Kanban, with TODO and DOING, along with PARKING. These core mechanics work . Where everything goes sideways is when anyone tries to turn those core mechanics into a work breakdown str…

I agree with your larger point but pointing to GTD as evidence that the "core mechanics" work is questionable. Many of its biggest advocates have abandoned it. > Just as G.T.D. was achieving widespread popularity, however, Mann’s zeal for his own practice began to fade. [...] Productivity pr0n, he suggested, was becoming a bewildering, complexifying end in itself—list-making as a “cargo cult,” system-tweaking as an a…

It doesn't sound like Mann is disagreeing with the core mechanics of GTD in those posts, it sounds like he is saying that there are diminishing returns with applying 'personal productivity' methodologies, and you can get obsessed with tweaking your personal workflow to an extent where you no longer get payback.

This is a trap I have fallen into before - where you are effectively procrastinating by trying to optimise and system-tweaking your personal GTD system rather than just actually-getting-stuff-done.

Having said all that, GTD helps me personally massively. It's not for everyone, but for lots of people in senior jobs that gets so much 'stuff' in that they struggle to keep up, it's really important to have a systematic way to process it all and not drop anything. I find people who don't have a system like GTD or similar will tend to work from their inbox and end up dropping stuff.

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#254

Post by xxpor »

probably_wrong wrote: post #138
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…

> 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 manag…

>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.

That's all enterprise software in a nutshell. And a huge reason why things like Slack and Trello became so popular. They targeted users first without having to get the enterprise to buy it up front.

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#255

Post by kiksy »

orzig wrote: post #249
gurkendoktor wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And developers are expensive as hell. Not expensive enough apparently, because management will happily tolerate meetings where nothing happens except the whole team fighting Jira. I recently had to replace my web browser because it reduced the time to load a ticket from 4 minutes to 10 seconds due to some caching issue. Entering a date/time on a non-English locale never works. Whenever I try to leave a comment with…

My primary advantage over the Scrum Master that I replaced was hand writing all the required JIRA changes during the meeting, and doing them on my own time later. I was a hero! Highly recommended.

Nice. This would likely solve a huge chunk of push back against JIRA.

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#256

Post by guenthert »

xeromal wrote: post #193
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are an assembly line robot.

Pretty sure that's what the majority of programmers are. I know I am. My identity isn't wrapped up in programming. I build stuff for a company that pays me lots of money and then I go home and do stuff I like. We need to get rid of this wild west mentality where disorganization is lauded.

> My identity isn't wrapped up in programming.

Fair enough and quite common I suppose. Generally for some a job is just that, for other (perhaps just some lucky few) it's a calling. I'd think the share of the former was large among programmers ("coders") in the early days of computing, when that wasn't a highly regarded job (seen alike data entry). Then a few years after the micro computer revolution, many of those who grew up and where fascinated by home computers entered the work force. Those you essentially just needed to feed and perhaps point in a direction. Then the Internet bubble happened and many realized that there was hard cash to be earned. There we have the career IT guy (who's just as happy to do something else which pays at least as much). It's not that they perform worse (in situation where discipline and organization is paramount they can be expected to outperform geeks), but the work style is quite different.

> We need to get rid of this wild west mentality where disorganization is lauded.

I don't think people celebrate their lack of discipline, but rigidity stymies creativity (and don't ask me how long it'll take me to fix a bug). I don't think Silicon Valley happened accidentally in California rather than in Prussia.

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#257

Post by Closi »

ogre_codes wrote: post #240
Closi wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume one of the use-cases for this is that they found a bug, quickly fixed and wrote a test case, and then pushed it to Git without raising a ticket themselves and then solving the ticket. With an 8 person team all sitting together, someone can just shout across the table and ask someone else to resolve an issue without raising a ticket too. Are you solving ticket A but need another person to help you with a bug…

> someone can just shout across the table and ask someone else to resolve an issue without raising a ticket too. I rarely see my team-mates in person at the moment to shout at them. If I did, they would likely tell me to fuck off because they are busy with some other task. The only sort of issues where it's appropriate to drop what you are doing and immediately fix it are the most severe issues which need to be fixed…

> If I did, they would likely tell me to fuck off because they are busy with some other task.

Great team dynamic if one of the members is blocked or has an issue because of something that another person wrote, and they get told to fuck off.

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#258

Post by DeBraid »

Sucks indeed. Ended up using the CLI for most JIRA related activities in my previous job. https://www.npmjs.com/package/jira-cli

Some utils to add to `bashrc`:

    alias jo="jira open"
    alias js="jira show"

    jos() {
      ticket="$1"
      if [ $# -eq 0 ]
        then
          jira open
        else
          jira open PROJECT_NAME_HERE-"$ticket"
      fi
    }

    jss() {
      ticket="$1"
      if [ $# -eq 0 ]
        then
          jira show
        else
          jira show PROJECT_NAME_HERE-"$ticket"
      fi
    }

    jqlf() {
      jql="$1"
      chrome https://__PROJECT_NAME_DOMAIN_HERE__.atlassian.net/issues/?jql="$jql"
    }

    alias jm="jira mark"

    alias jcs="jira create --project PROJECT_NAME_HERE --type 10001 --priority 3" # create story
    alias jcb="jira create --project PROJECT_NAME_HERE --type 10004 --priority 3" # create bug
    alias jce="jira create --project PROJECT_NAME_HERE --type 10000 --priority 3" # create epic

    alias jjq="jira jql" # custom query
    alias jql="jira jql" # custom query
    # example:
    # jjq 'project = PROJECT_NAME_HERE AND sprint = 158 AND "Epic Link" not in (PROJECT_NAME_HERE-4695, PROJECT_NAME_HERE-4373) AND status in ("Push to PROD") ORDER BY cf[10008] ASC'

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#259

Post by eriktate »

tootie wrote: post #153
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 100% disagree. Fixing a bug or delivering a feature where you haven't documented the process, (how the criteria were decided, when it was tested and deployed) is as good a running a web site nobody visits. JIRA hate comes from the bottom up. Developers don't like having to have their work parceled out so specifically. But it's not for them. It's for managers and stakeholders who have to report progress and who are…

While I agree that it's for managers and stakeholders, I wonder how much of it ends up being a net value-add. Where I work, we have a million and one different kinds of reports that pass through the chain of command (admittedly not all of these are derived from Jira, but they exist for the same reasons). We then end up with arbitrary, company-wide reporting requirements that for a lot of teams are like fitting a square peg in a round hole. Then, when you show up as non-compliant on the report that doesn't actually say anything valuable about your team or project, you have to drop everything and shoehorn some solution to make the report happy even though there's precisely zero value added (I would argue a net loss because time and effort is wasted while adding zero value). All because inconsistencies in the reporting aren't tolerated since upper management can't be bothered to understand even the smallest amount of nuance.

I know most of the people in these positions aren't _actually_ stupid, and would agree if you were able to explain to them why some specific thing is completely irrelevant, or even detrimental, to your team. At the end of the day, though, at big orgs no one cares. They'll waste as much time and effort as necessary in order to look good on metrics. Even if the metrics are worthless.

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#260

Post by tlapinsk »

tristor wrote: 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…

I have to very much agree with this comment. I thoroughly enjoy using JIRA and Confluence. The two go hand in hand very well.

As many others have mentioned thought, it is abysmally slow. At least their Cloud offering is, which is the core product we use at my job. I've used older on-prem deployments though and they were lightning fast. Seems that they're deprecating this solution by 2024 though.

I recently completed a JIRA survey, and slowness was my number one complaint. Hopefully the Product teams read through those surveys or peruse HN. Everything else about JIRA works great for our Software Development needs.

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