Ironically, most of the stuff seems to be about Confluence. And almost all of the commentary is about bad company workflows and bad company processes and not really about the product itself at all.
I fucking hate Jira
191–200 of 539 posts
Re: I fucking hate Jira
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> Surely people aren't specialized in... Jira-ing or whatever.
There are people who build their careers on this. Their are consultants who do this, and only this. And the unfortunate reality is, Jira is so complicated, there actually is a reason for these people to exist.
Re: I fucking hate Jira
#193OK, 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…
In defense of complex permissions, this often ends up being necessary to avoid single points of failure. For example, if someone can turn off the setting preventing force push to the master/main branch, that person should not be able to commit code thereby requiring more than one person for a commit to be force pushed in practice. Even better would be to require a config change like that to be approved by more than one person, but that can be difficult to implement compared to adding in narrow permissions. Even if you just prevent force pushing in general, another common bypass would be disabling CI for certain commits (such as in cases where the CI infrastructure is down and the commit is necessary to fix some ongoing incident). Yes trusting developers is always going to be necessary to some degree, but that doesn't mean absolute trust is required all the time.
For your specific example of not being able to see tickets as admin, I imagine that feature was added for teams where sensitive information is stored in the ticketing system for things like user reported issues. User reported issues often has PII or other personal data and while developers need to see that information, admins often don't. When I worked at a bank, any remotely sensitive columns in the database were either inaccessible to developers by configuration or by encrypting them to and from client code when the DB didn't support column level permissions (while Sybase could manage column level permissions, Mongo and Elasticsearch didn't at the time).
Re: I fucking hate Jira
#194I can't take credit for this, but I also don't recall where I heard/read it from:
"Most teams would be better off using a shared spreadsheet for task management than they would using Jira"
Rings true to me to this day.
Re: I fucking hate Jira
#195I 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…
Yeah I've been defended Jira here in the past, too. My opinion is that Jira reflects the organisation that manages it. It's basically a whole lot of customizable UI and permissions hanging off a user-defined state machine. You can set it up so that individual teams can fully administer their own projects, or you can go all the way in the other direction and have centralized, locked-down management where you beg some…
"My opinion is that Jira reflects the organisation that manages it."
Came here to say EXACTLY this. I've used Jira across 3 companies, and in the first 2, I always felt like folks complaining about Jira were just being picky developers wanting the sun, moon and the stars, because Jira worked perfectly fine for me and my team (in fact, it was the backbone of our process).
Then in the third org, I felt like I was hit with a brick wall of every single issue folks complaining about jira point out. Needless workflows, Middle Managers wanting to "control" how stories/epics get closed, multiple levels of convoluted manual configurations, automated processes creating Jiras that for trivial non-issues which clogged notifications and team backlogs and brought jira to a crawl etc. Heck, at one point, the mess got so bad, that the company considered hiring a third party to "fix" our Jira workflows. And note that this was a On introspecting, I completely felt that in the first 2 companies, the organization was structured around "getting stuff done" and "keeping stuff as simple as possible, but no simpler" and that naturally flowed into how Jira was set up as well, while in the latter, the focus was entirely on top-down "process", and that showed in the Jira setup as well.
Honestly, I now think I can say a lot about a company's engineering/product culture just by spending 15 minutes on their Jira ;-)
Re: I fucking hate Jira
#196part of the hatred has to come from the fact that it's a tool used for hidden micromanagement. Whenever I experienced Jira being introduced into the workflow, human connection vanished, work became laboring and many times the better devs left the team due to lack of autonomy. Who remained were the people who didn't mind to just work and never question, like factory workers of the 1900's.
I don't mind using Jira as a verbose platform which aims to map project state and helps communication BETWEEN all participants, but this is rarely the case, especially with all those pseudo-agile practices that are part of mainstream software development.
Another part of the hatred may come from the fact that it's an overcomplicated tool for a moderately simple task. This complexity is standing in the way most of the time. I just want a simple board for a simple project with simple issues/user stories/whatevers and update their state which gets reflected on the board. For additional features i want to install/write a plugin and that's it. If I need a manual for software in 2022 it's either trash or something far from mainstream (in which case complexity and/or lack of ux might be acceptable).
Re: I fucking hate Jira
#197Jira need to fix their loading times
This
Re: I fucking hate Jira
#198The worst thing about jira is it leaves the door open for confluence which is the actual worst thing.
Re: I fucking hate Jira
#199I 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?…
Here's a better answer to that question:
Crowns don't come from inherent value. They come from monarchy.
Jira holds the crown because so many are convinced the "industry" in which it leads is worthy or valuable.
What value does a monarch provide? Order. Structure. Authority. Corporate environments value these because - art its core - that is what "Corporation" is: a new system of governance.
Most of the complaints about Jira can be turned to Corporatism itself.
Re: I fucking hate Jira
#200What are some alternatives to JIRA? Also, how much of the hate directed towards JIRA buried resentment towards Agile and other project management paradigms?
If self hosted is your thing I like taiga for kanban integrated with gogs for the issue tracking/VCS integration side of things. Didn't take me more than a day to get working and everyone signed up on it, isn't a lot of maintenance, just works, costs nothing.