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I fucking hate Jira

ifuckinghatejira.com

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Re: I fucking hate Jira

#181

Post by jsiepkes »

polotics wrote: post #135
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #58

I feel like hating on Jira is the pastime that is now passed down from each generation of programmers to the next. I'm going to stick up for Jira. I certainly don't "love" Jira, though I do think they've made significant improvements with "new Jira" (I think they call them team-managed projects now). The problem I have with the incessant Jira bitching is that I rarely feel that bitchers have a true understanding for…

Does Linus use JIRA on that little project called the Linux kernel? Why is git with good readmes and clear pull requests not enough project management? If you're not doing PR's you are just LARPing software development. I don't hate JIRA, I hate "IT" employees that can't program.

No Linus uses Bugzilla [1]. Have you ever used it? You'll be begging for Jira once you've used Bugzilla.

Also Linux doesn't use pull requests. GIT doesn't even know the concept of a PR. You are supposed to generate a patch with 'git format-patch' and submit it to a mailinglist.

[1] https://bugzilla.kernel.org/

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#182

Post by arnvald »

I've used Jira in my last 3 jobs. I tried to like it, I tried to tolerate it, now I just try to spend as little time using it as possible.

I'm an engineer, I'm a problem solver. I want to add a task, move task to "doing" and then "done" and that's it. But Jira is not created for me. Jira is created for SAFe expert who wants to create workflow so complex nobody understands it. Jira is created for Scrum master who wants to create 25 reports to show their boss how beautifully our burndown looks sprint after sprint. Yes, Jira doesn't force anyone to do this stuff, but it enables it, because Jira is created for process managers, for people who just report things.

But that's not me. Jira is not for me and the best I can do it to use it as little as possible.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#184

Post by bee_rider »

cogman10 wrote: post #95
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #58

I feel like hating on Jira is the pastime that is now passed down from each generation of programmers to the next. I'm going to stick up for Jira. I certainly don't "love" Jira, though I do think they've made significant improvements with "new Jira" (I think they call them team-managed projects now). The problem I have with the incessant Jira bitching is that I rarely feel that bitchers have a true understanding for…

> why don't you think some other company has come along and toppled the Jira crown? Because it's really hard to kill off the market leader when the market leader is embedded into the core of how a company works. I don't buy that it's a matter of competitors not being better. It is more about inertia. The argument you have here could equally be applied to C++ or Cobol "Why is new code being written in these languages?…

It isn't that surprising that a programming language has inertia, it has lots of 'mass' so to speak -- programmers have to specialize in the language, and an ecosystem of libraries has to be built. It is more surprising to me that an issue tracker like Jira does. Surely people aren't specialized in... Jira-ing or whatever.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#185

Post by snowstormsun »

greenthrow wrote: post #114

Jira is as good or bad as you configure it to be. It's a tool. We long ago learned how to use JavaScript effectively despite its numerous flaws. If you're at an organization where you have to use Jira, surely you can find a way to make it work. That said, it's certainly not the Right Answer for everyone. But unilaterally hating on it is just kinda childish.

You cannot really configure Jira so that the interface is free of lags and loads faster, though. Or that it does not make tons of network requests in the background. It's a tool, but there are bad also tools.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#186

Post by ryanbrunner »

oneplane wrote: post #173
colechristensen wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The problem I have with the incessant Jira bitching is that I rarely feel that bitchers have a true understanding for the extreme difficulty of the organization-wide problem Jira is trying to solve. I think the core problem with Jira is organizations trying to use it to solve complex organization-wide problems. It is an enormous time sink, and using Jira to rule the workdays of employees is the problem. Anything muc…

If a company is trying to use JIRA for more than state communication they are doing it wrong IMO. Planning goes into calendars, ephemeral stuff goes into chats and calls, and code and code-level issues goes into repositories. I have seen plenty of attempts to make a product like JIRA the 'interface' between some management person and 'the subordinates' and it never works, simply because trying to place an 'interface'…

I think what other tools miss that JIRA did well is giving engineering managers tools to communicate with upper management. You're right that actually attempting to use JIRA as the medium of communication with people outside the product org is hopelessly, fatally flawed, but being able to visualize an issue like an unmanageable backlog, or team productivity, or quality issues is invaluable, and a lot of simple tools throw the baby out with the bathwater by completely failing to give any tools to analyze how your team is doing.

If it's configured properly, JIRA can be a fairly effective tool that mostly stays out of the way of developers but can help team leads and managers communicate things about the team.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#187

Post by ch_123 »

Jira is a product which serves two masters - one are development teams which use it to track bugs, tickets, projects, etc. The other one are middle management types who use it for project tracking, reporting to upper management, tracking metrics of different teams (no matter how dubious) etc.

The people who decide which software gets adopted internally generally care about the latter, and thus Jira is selected, and thus Jira grows to their needs - where complexity is often a bonus, and poor day to day performance a minimal concern.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#188

Post by exyi »

devoutsalsa wrote: post #111
blowski wrote: post #93

OK, so what don't I like about Jira? 1. It's extremely slow. 2. It's difficult to predict the effect of making any kind of change. 3. The permissions system is so convoluted, I can be the admin of a board, and yet not have permission to see a ticket on it. 4. It relegates the conversation to a second-class UI element, when this is the most important part of any project management system. 5. Trying to operate on a bun…

I still can’t figure out how to search it

I just wrote the search query to our PM, since I was unable to find anything myself... I don't understand why just couldn't use, IDK, a shared spreadsheet, even that would be more productive (from my perspective)

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#189

Post by oneplane »

steve918 wrote: post #96
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #58

I feel like hating on Jira is the pastime that is now passed down from each generation of programmers to the next. I'm going to stick up for Jira. I certainly don't "love" Jira, though I do think they've made significant improvements with "new Jira" (I think they call them team-managed projects now). The problem I have with the incessant Jira bitching is that I rarely feel that bitchers have a true understanding for…

I feel like a lot of great programming talent has been wasted by very smart engineers who felt the pain of their current ticketing system and spent years building countless startups only to end up with something occasionally marginally better than Trac (2004).

Back in 2008-ish a lot of projects I came across tried to use Redmine because their company had a sucky JIRA or sometimes even Mantis implementation. Redmine turned out to be highly unsuitable in a matter of a few months and after trying out a few options that are mostly just tickets+kanban boards, it turned out that the simplest 'fix' was just setting up an individual JIRA just for the team so it could be used properly instead of some heavy handed top-down "use this tool in this specific way" approach. Once more teams started to do it, the 'company-wide' JIRA essentially just contained managers and a few product owners and it got deleted in a year or so.

Afterwards, all the 'team JIRAs' got merged into a normal JIRA again, but this time everyone had full control over their own projects and boards, problem, solved.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#190

Post by halostatue »

thfuran wrote: post #126
CSMastermind wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do think they've made significant improvements with "new Jira" (I think they call them team-managed projects now). I feel totally the opposite. If you've ever had to administer Jira at a large company than team-managed projects are the bane of your existence. If you think, there's even a small chance that your company will grow to 300+ engineers any time in the next several years then do yourself a favor and turn…

What fails to scale?

We added a team-managed project a while back, and built a really good workflow around it that satisfied the needs of everyone who works in that project.

We can’t easily replicate that workflow anywhere else. This isn’t the end of the world, but I should be able to create a new team-managed project based on another team-managed project and then modify its workflow separately. So far, I can’t figure out how to do that.

I’d love to take the team-managed workflow and promote it to a company-managed workflow now that we’ve experimented with it. So far, I can’t figure out how to do that.

Don’t get me wrong, I really hate JIRA. I’ve written my own bug tracking system. I’ve tried lots of other tracking systems. JIRA is wrong on so many levels, but eventually you hit something in one of the other tools that you cannot address with those tools, but is possible (but painful to configure, and it might cost you extra money) in JIRA.

The only other tracking system I really like is GitHub issues, but it also has problems and limitations. And then you have things on GitHub that actively make things much worse (the autoclose bots; forms like the ones that Vue puts up, etc.).

I’ve never seen any organization need the level of complexity that they end up using in JIRA (especially the access permissions, which consistently get borked sideways), but most organizations eventually need something better than Bugzilla, Trac, or Github Issues.

The other difficulty is that switching bug tracking systems is tough. I want to really try Tara, or ClickUp, or Monday or a few different ones, but adding another tool is literally adding another tool. This is the same reason we’re using Confluence, even though it’s objectively the worst wiki in existence.

I hate Atlassian products with a passion. There’s nothing better, and the cost of switching is too high.

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