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I fucking hate Jira

ifuckinghatejira.com

231–240 of 539 posts

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#232
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean as hard as when Git obliterated every other VCS within the span of a few years? If products are better, they get adopted. How do you think every single company in the world started to develop for iOS between 2008 and 2010? When the upside is obvious and the path to transition is well-defined, there is very little friction.

I still don't understand how git won the source control battle so decisively. I respect git for what it's good at and its power, but from what I've observed it's far from clearly being the obvious choice of source control for closed source software shops. JIRA I can take or leave, it does the job - it's hard to imagine anyone being driven to hate it, but I can believe having it badly configured would be a serious dra…

I can only speak to the comparison with hg, but for large repos, git's performance is literally 10x better in our case (we have two parallel copies, one in hg and one in git, so as to smooth the transition to git). hg seems more usable, but certain decisions are poor (e.g. baking the branch name into each commit); overall I have no strong preference between the two except for the speed.

But the speed pretty much drowns out any other signal.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#233
Part of our company started using Click-up. If JIRA is really bad, Click-up is levels worse than it. I hate JIRA too, but maybe there is no a better thing out there?

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#234
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…

> 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.

This is a common antipattern that doesn't get talked about enough. It's very common in the era of interactive ads, websites with 3rd party web UIs layered on top, lazy loading, and just "rich" UIs in general. A user needs to be able to trust what they are about to click. This is fundamental.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#235
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean as hard as when Git obliterated every other VCS within the span of a few years? If products are better, they get adopted. How do you think every single company in the world started to develop for iOS between 2008 and 2010? When the upside is obvious and the path to transition is well-defined, there is very little friction.

I still don't understand how git won the source control battle so decisively. I respect git for what it's good at and its power, but from what I've observed it's far from clearly being the obvious choice of source control for closed source software shops. JIRA I can take or leave, it does the job - it's hard to imagine anyone being driven to hate it, but I can believe having it badly configured would be a serious dra…

Migration was easy, it was decentralised, had a famous original author & a huge famous project using it and had a lot of "hip" source code platforms such as github, gitorious, bitbucket (pre-atlassian) and gitlab.

I'm not surprised it won tbh.

Game companies are still using Perforce though.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#236
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with this. Absolutely, once Jira (or any particular project management tool) gets it's "tentacles" into a sizable enterprise, it's very difficult to dislodge. But I've seen tons of other examples in my career of companies making larger, more difficult transitions because they clearly felt the risk/benefit was worth it: moving from CVS/Subversion to git, moving from on-prem to the cloud, moving from Windows…

I think it's maybe a bit of both? I worked at an org that was using Trac for most things. It's probably fine for a small, engineering-driven company, but it's not very full-featured and isn't great for PMs and other business types. So once the company got large enough, management wanted to switch. Many of us essentially said, "ok, that's fine, but please please please not Jira". And yet, they went and hired some cons…

If you said "please please please not Jira", what other options did y'all suggest that you thought would be better?

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#237
post #142
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…

9. The text editor is still busted and I just don't understand why. It's one of the most important parts of the UX, please please fix it. Writing any kind of nicely formatted long form posts is a lost cause.

At the very least, use the same markup language for both Confluence and Jira.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#238
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…

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 o…

That's the thing about Jira.

I don't understand why I can't see a ticket on my board because some team in another company once requested a seemingly unrelated feature. It's trying to be too many things to too many companies all at the same time, and thus ends up as an unusable mess of complex settings.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because it attracts somebody 4 layers up to tell somebody 3 layers up to come up with a common Jira platform for everybody and then you don't control how your project is run and then Jira becomes the enemy, a faceless micromanager driving your work life that has strong opinions on how you do everything, a dozen steps that need to be done "right" or you get your half a dozen managers asking if you read the memo about…

So that is not a JIRA problem since you can do a

> it attracts somebody 4 layers up to tell somebody 3 layers up to come up with a common

with pretty much everything, including a spreadsheet or a plain text file.

Conflating bad business practises with tool configuration or products in general doesn't help anyone. If a business is very stiff and scared of its employees, they will try out all sorts of useless control methods hoping it will somehow make some metric 'better'. You can do that with Trello too. Doesn't make Trello a bad product, and it doesn't make JIRA a bad product.

At the same time, pretending a larger organisation with many teams can function without any form of state tracking is a nice dream but not a reality either, so it's not like you can do without anything at all. But like reposted a bunch of times, how you do it and who is responsible for it is pretty important.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#240
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…

> 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. This is a common antipattern that doesn't get talked about enough. It's very common in the era of interactive ads, websites with 3rd party web UIs layered on t…

The Vera functionality in Jira likes to move me ahead in a test sequence, so each time I touch something in a long test sequence I have to make sure I’m on the right test step.

Absolutely trash.

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