Live data from Hacker News

A critique of project management software

erock.io

11–20 of 79 posts

Re: A critique of project management software

#12
Jira in particular is everything I dislike in software. It's feature bloated, overly complex and yet, despite the overwhelming complexity, it's hard to shape to your needs very often.

I want something much much simpler. Stick to the worse is better approach and adhere closer to the philosophy of doing one thing well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better?wprov=sfla1

Re: A critique of project management software

#13
post #2

Author here! Happy to answer any questions about the article or the product idea I'm thinking about building: wormhole. I'll be writing more articles about the product idea to make it more clear what I want to build. Happy to read any feedback or if I'm wasting my time!

Can one say that circles are/can be used like tags, in a way? That is, Can one task belong to multiple circles? Think of aspects..

it's something i have always been missing, the graph-like nature of all these things, always being bricked into some tree-or-list-like single-parent stiff structure..

Re: A critique of project management software

#14
There is usually some point several times a year where things get hairy, and I need to do an analysis within a spreadsheet (ie sort tickets by effort + value to evaluate priority). Still haven't seen a tool that lets me quickly evaluate many tickets easily without config hell.

Re: A critique of project management software

#15
post #12

Jira in particular is everything I dislike in software. It's feature bloated, overly complex and yet, despite the overwhelming complexity, it's hard to shape to your needs very often. I want something much much simpler. Stick to the worse is better approach and adhere closer to the philosophy of doing one thing well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better?wprov=sfla1

Atlassian is a blight. Developers are supposed to be informed consumers of software. Yet Atlassian applies an information hiding strategy to UX which means that their tools often have features that you simply do not know about because your role doesn’t allow that feature. How are we supposed to reason about the possible if people are hiding information? I have coworkers doing horrible manual processes or stuffing shell scripts into Bamboo tasks because they don’t know they just need to ask someone else to push a button for them or add them as admin permissions on a project.

It creates a class of salty user who go around doing things like calling you a blight in public.

Know your audience. UX != DevEx.

Re: A critique of project management software

#16
post #12

Jira in particular is everything I dislike in software. It's feature bloated, overly complex and yet, despite the overwhelming complexity, it's hard to shape to your needs very often. I want something much much simpler. Stick to the worse is better approach and adhere closer to the philosophy of doing one thing well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better?wprov=sfla1

Totally agree. Enjoying Clubhouse.io for that reason.

Re: A critique of project management software

#17
My biggest problem with using these tools is mandates forced by someone in the company that no one on my team has ever met. As another commenter pointed out, I just want a big checklist, with sub check lists, and a handful of properties, that i can create update and delete at will.

Instead of being a tool to help us do our job more efficiently, it has become a source of busy work, that requires extra employees to use properly.

After switching to Jira it was so locked down with arbitrary rules that I need to take a break every time I use it.

I'm seriously considering looking for a new job that doesn't use a corporately mandated system, or have daily stand ups.

Re: A critique of project management software

#18
post #12

Jira in particular is everything I dislike in software. It's feature bloated, overly complex and yet, despite the overwhelming complexity, it's hard to shape to your needs very often. I want something much much simpler. Stick to the worse is better approach and adhere closer to the philosophy of doing one thing well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better?wprov=sfla1

I'm hesitant to post the link as it's still very alpha, but I am developing a Jira alternative for exactly this reason! Check out https://tahsk.com and let me know what you think I'd love some initial feedback.

Re: A critique of project management software

#19

I've used Jira, Pivotal Tracker, Trello, Asana, Zenhub, and other project management software that was written internally. In my opinion, based on my needs on every project I've worked on, I've yet to use a project management software that did anything better than a simple Trello board or the like. At the end of the day, I want a list of tasks, a way to indicate the status on the task, a discussion section for the ta…

I agree that's there's lots of work that fits into a simple Kanban view well.

I do, though, often see stuff managed using Kanban when it's pretty clear that there are dependencies making the work out of sequence and inefficient. It seems there are fewer and fewer people that can break out a Gantt or Pert chart and identify stuff like "the critical path".

Post reply on HN