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I fucking hate Jira

ifuckinghatejira.com

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Re: I fucking hate Jira

#201

Post by oneplane »

Ensorceled wrote: post #176
oneplane wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it isn't. We have plenty of setups in multiple organisations where even within the org only the administrative settings of the server are locked down and everyone else is free to do whatever they need. Lots of teams just use it as a kanban board, while others setup a state machine-based funnel to process user/business input into usable tickets. JIRA in its default configuration essentially lets you create anythin…

> JIRA in its default configuration essentially lets you create anything, anywhere in any state. Anything beyond that is just bad product configuration. That's kind of the point, JIRA has been made into monstrosity at many organizations because the "create anything" mindset.

How does that make it a monstrosity? Unless we're talking about things that are shared across multiple teams, does it really matter how people use it? Nobody is going to care what someone else does in JIRA when they aren't touching that part anyway. Even with 1000 differently configured projects, your 1 or 2 projects you actually work with and configure are the only ones that matter.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#202

Post by exyi »

lp0_on_fire wrote: post #109
outworlder wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish the comments were more specific about which features they don’t like. I have a very specific complaint: the ease which all sorts of custom fields can be added for _everyone_. Sales will want to add a field to hold their contract status. Lo and behold, engineering now has it. It can be done in the proper way, but it seems that doing it at a global level is easier since that's how multiple Jira installations a…

> Tickets should not be THAT easy to edit. How often do we want to change a ticket's description, or title? I'd say, not often. If we do, there's really no harm in having an "edit" button. It's very useful for when the user submits a ticket with "My computer isn't working" as the title and "excel is broken" as the description.

I'd not mind to press edit to change it.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#203

Post by colechristensen »

bragr wrote: post #163
colechristensen wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jira doesn't just reflect, it drives convoluted unhelpful bureaucracy. The tool drives the organization to look like the tool wants it to, which is disorganized half broken "organization" with silly overcomplicated rules that give people something to discuss enthusiastically instead of the actual work that needs doing. Jira is organization poison, not just a reflection of what an organization is.

Jira is highly flexible and customizable, almost to a fault. One Jira can look and operate almost totally different to another with enough customization. If Jira feels inflexible and bureaucratic to you, I'd argue that's only a reflection of how your Jira admins operate or the rules they are forced to implement.

>customizable, almost to a fault

Customizable, absolutely to a fault. It is the infinite customizability of a tool targeted towards middle management which is why Jira can go to hell.

It is indeed possible to not be in Jira hell, but inflation of complexity is inevitable and almost entirely irreversible. It encourages and accelerates the path towards bureaucratic hell. Any avoidance of this is a temporary aberration.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#204

Post by cotillion »

pjmlp wrote: post #175
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…

Same here, I really don't get the cargo cult hate against Jira. Before I got to use Jira for the first time around 2006, everything I used before was crap, either in-house solutions out of CGI scripts or crap like ClearQuest. Stuff like Trello just seems too basic for typical enterprise workflows that overlap sprint planning, with project roadmap, milestones and change requests, mapping of tickets to source code, pul…

I think those of us who have had to suffer through ClearQuest, Lotus notes etc have an entirely different scale on how bad things can be compared to those who appear to really really hate Jira today. I'm not a fan of Jira but atleast it loads, eventually.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#205

Post by halostatue »

bee_rider wrote: post #184
cogman10 wrote: post #95

Earlier 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.

You get a few projects in JIRA…and you’re stuck. Then you add JIRA Service Desk or Service Management or whatever the hell it’s called these days…and you’re stuck. Then you add some Confluence docs linked to your tickets…

Unless one is really willing to throw institutional knowledge out, changing tracking systems is extremely costly.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#206

Post by spullara »

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?…

We start new companies all the time and nothing has been able to replace JIRA past the 5-10 engineers who know exactly what they are supposed to do stage.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#207

Post by hancholo »

Thankfully my company built its own internal tool similar to Jira. Unfortunately this is not the case for other companies or smaller companies since it can be cost-prohibitive.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#208

Post by oneplane »

ryanbrunner wrote: post #186
oneplane wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That is indeed what happens with the simpler JIRA clones. On top of that, usually the org has no idea what is going on, who is working on what or what is still waiting to be looked at by anyone.

Normally those issues would be handled with a simple 5 minute meeting (DSU or some variant thereof) where everyone shares their current state, and then a few times per month some form of "where are we and where are we going" type of planning. (Be it a sprint planning or something like it) Combining that with a state tracker seems like a fairly obvious thing to do, and having the tools to then report on that over time (graphs can be a helpful visualisation that simple tools usually lack) gives everyone some context as to how healthy the team is.

But even that last bit, the concept of periodically having a bit of a check up to see how things are going is often lacking in "we can do it better and simpler" types of setups. In then end, it gets reduced back to the manager walking around with a whip shouting "work harder!" instead of teams having some autonomy and figuring their own state out themselves.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#209

Post by colechristensen »

oneplane wrote: post #161
colechristensen wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jira doesn't just reflect, it drives convoluted unhelpful bureaucracy. The tool drives the organization to look like the tool wants it to, which is disorganized half broken "organization" with silly overcomplicated rules that give people something to discuss enthusiastically instead of the actual work that needs doing. Jira is organization poison, not just a reflection of what an organization is.

No, it isn't. We have plenty of setups in multiple organisations where even within the org only the administrative settings of the server are locked down and everyone else is free to do whatever they need. Lots of teams just use it as a kanban board, while others setup a state machine-based funnel to process user/business input into usable tickets. JIRA in its default configuration essentially lets you create anythin…

And how long is this going to last before someone further up decides that Jira needs to be unified for reporting purposes?

Eventually somebody with the organization obsession is going to get hired and put somewhere important and their goal is going to be making something complicated and unified and dissent will be "discouraged".

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#210

Post by midasuni »

cogman10 wrote: post #71
sefrost wrote: post #4

I wish the comments were more specific about which features they don’t like. For me a particularly frustrating aspect is the way the UI moves around a lot. I’m quite anxious to click anything until all the loading spinners have stopped in case I click the wrong thing. Then I could be taken to a page or feature I’ve never seen before. Also it’s really annoying when I try to copy something from a ticket description but…

What I hate about jira is it's flexibility. The biggest issue I have with jira is it's so dead simple for braindead process zombies to cram another field, another label, another required text box, 4 new transition states, 20 difference confusing priorities, etc. Then, require everyone to follow through with this (with 90% of the time putting some form of "not applicable" in the boxes they added). It is built for anal…

Isn’t there problem the people cramming those things in?

We use jira as a way to track ongoing tasks, we use subject, description, comments/attachments, and assigned to.

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