Jira works well for my organization. I think the simplicity of our setup is the key. We have just 4 issue statuses: Not Started, In Progress, QA, Done… also no restrictions on state transitions. Any status can move to any other status. Each team gets their own project so that they can easily manage their own issue backlog. That’s pretty much it. My team also uses a plug-in for async planning poker which is useful.
I fucking hate Jira
241–250 of 539 posts
Re: I fucking hate Jira
#242Jira does for software engineering what software engineering does for everything else.
Re: I fucking hate Jira
#243What are some alternatives to JIRA? Also, how much of the hate directed towards JIRA buried resentment towards Agile and other project management paradigms?
PivotalTracker, GitLab has pretty great project tracking and ticket management if you’re on them. These are the two I can think of off the top of my head. Personally I really like Pivotal.
Pivotal Tracker is only good if you buy into the way that it works and are willing to lose all knowledge that your tickets represent.
Pivotal is really only good at a particular type of project tracking (mostly building greenfield features and projects), and absolutely godawful at issue tracking.
I’ll use JIRA over Pivotal any day.
Re: I fucking hate Jira
#244I 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…
> the organization-wide problem Jira is trying to solve
Yeah that problem is that in many places management sucks and can't trust their developers to get shit done, so you have to put metrics on it to bring down anxiety brought about by incompetence.
There are large open source projects that don't use jira; the extreme complexity of managing a distributed team with all sorts of interests -geneally even more complex than what a company has to deal with- is empirically doable without jira.
When an organization pivots to using jira it is a sign that their managers are no longer capable of respecting the programmers that work for them. If an organization starts out using jira, that means they never were.
To be charitable I'm sure there are a few corner cases where a manager came up through the ranks and "only knew jira" but that really means they don't understand open source IC, especially in the era of GitHub and gitlab issues.
(Btw GitHub issues is absolutely the thing that is slowly replacing jira)
Re: I fucking hate Jira
#245I 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…
Jumping on the "Jira isn't the problem" bandwagon, 99% of what people hate about Jira now is that the people who manage it make Jira hard to deal with.
I'm at an early startup and we use Jira; it's great because I'm an admin and I can make Jira reflect whatever I need it to reflect.
It's also highly compatible with compliance nonsense -- if you can say, "Every change to code is tracked in Jira" (the decision process not the literal diff) the auditor's eyes glaze over and they just move on.
Re: I fucking hate Jira
#246I 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…
> building a generic project management and tracking tool is a really difficult, hard problem
I would say building a good one is an impossible problem, because of conflicting needs both across and within companies. The primary job of Jira isn't to help work get done. It's to give managers and executives feelings of knowledge and control even when that makes everything worse.
You don't need fancy planning systems to get good work done. Indeed, I think it's the opposite. I've done many years of work with only index cards. E.g.: https://williampietri.com/writing/2015/the-big-board/
As Poppendieck has talked about, we live in a "Tyrrany of the Plan" age, but that's not necessary and it often makes things worse: https://chrisgagne.com/1255/mary-poppendiecks-the-tyranny-of...
I think this has happened because of the rise of managerialism, where management becomes a self-justifying caste. : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managerialism
Re: I fucking hate Jira
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>Same here, I really don't get the cargo cult hate against Jira. That's funny, because I've always thought of Jira's most ardent defenders as a cargo cult. As this comment section indicates, Jira can do no wrong. It can only be done wrong. Cult.
Jira is like democracy, it isn't perfect and is full of flaws, yet it still is better than the alternatives.
Re: I fucking hate Jira
#248What are some alternatives to JIRA? Also, how much of the hate directed towards JIRA buried resentment towards Agile and other project management paradigms?
We switched to Quire (https://quire.io) - it has a generous free plan, it's simple yet very flexible, and, most importantly for us, quick enough to not be a chore to update (Jira was horrible). Some small UI bugs here and there, but inconsequential.
Re: I fucking hate Jira
#249Meh Jira is OK and people who hate Jira I feel like they really hate any process. I've used other tools and they are mostly the same.
Re: I fucking hate Jira
#250What are some alternatives to JIRA? Also, how much of the hate directed towards JIRA buried resentment towards Agile and other project management paradigms?
> Also, how much of the hate directed towards JIRA buried resentment towards Agile
it is kind ironic, yet pretty typical and very telling, that the slow as hell Jira is tightly associated with Agile