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I fucking hate Jira

ifuckinghatejira.com

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Re: I fucking hate Jira

#271

Post by BlargMcLarg »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #257
wpietri wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 g…

>>"You don't need fancy planning systems to get good work done" I mean, as a single individual, in some circumstances, sure. If we think a bridge or railroad or spaceship get built without fancy planning, we've taken our software engineering paradigm to new level of delusion. Why does engineer or constructor worker understand that you need planning to align thousands of people over many years to build a great big thi…

I'll ask you the reverse. What proof is there we absolutely need all this to function? If people are so sure of this, surely they can substantiate it with more than just rationality. If the similarities are fine, just pull that information from the other disciplines you insist know better than the "special snowflakes".

>Why does engineer or constructor worker understand that you need planning to align thousands of people over many years to build a great big thing

You're conflating "needing to align thousands of people" with "needing a fancy system which pulls everyone in its web to deal with multiple times a day". If anything, construction shows just how little ICs need to know to function. You don't boggle your construction workers with bureaucracy, you take it away and let architects, managers and foremen deal with it.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#272

Post by EnderWT »

audunw wrote: post #218
kerblang wrote: post #139

In my experience, Jira is the dog that begins to resemble its owner. If you are working in a toxic, dysfunctional organization, Jira will reflect that: - Giant forms with dozens upon dozens of nonsensical fields (preferably with abbreviations as names, like "IFE App.") half of which are required so you just stuff random words in them to make it shut up - Thousands of tickets that would probably take 30+ software devs…

> - Thousands of tickets that would probably take 30+ software devs 100+ years to implement I feel like the company I'm working for has a reasonable attitude towards Jira, and they recently just batch closed all tickets that were older than some date in many projects. So you'd have to actively re-open tickets you had created to keep them alive, if needed. Great decision IMO. It's an interesting exercise to be forced…

We've automated this in our propriety system. After an amount of time with no activity, change requests expire and someone can resubmit if they're still valid, otherwise they close after a number of days. They also get a notification in advance in case they want to investigate validity before expiration. Has worked well for us since our software is decades old and the number of change requests are substantial.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#273

Post by mm007emko »

After spending some time with Trac, Redmine and IBM ClearCase, I have to say that Jira and MS AzureDevOps are not THAT tragic. However it's a tool targeted at managers, not us, developers. At my previous company one of the KPIs was a number of closed Jira issues. Total BS, needless to say.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#274

Post by asah »

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…

+1 to all this. Plus, Jira *scales* - all the cutesy drag-and-drop tools are good for 100 tickets/issues/etc and then fall over.

JQL and bulk edit are just warming up at 1,000 tickets.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#275

Post by rozap »

outworlder wrote: post #69
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…

> 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…

Every time I'm highlighting and ctrl+c'ing something out of a ticket and it turns into edit mode, I tense up a little bit. Ugh.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#276

Post by 8ytecoder »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #257
wpietri wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 g…

>>"You don't need fancy planning systems to get good work done" I mean, as a single individual, in some circumstances, sure. If we think a bridge or railroad or spaceship get built without fancy planning, we've taken our software engineering paradigm to new level of delusion. Why does engineer or constructor worker understand that you need planning to align thousands of people over many years to build a great big thi…

It is an issue in all fields. The reason why we have delays in major infrastructure projects and why software projects are notoriously hard to plan both boil down to unplanned and unexpected changes to requirements. The fact that it’s easy to change software makes it that much more vulnerable to last minute requirement changes. If something is exactly the same we can just reuse existing software and we don’t call that “development”. It simply becomes “buying” instead. And that makes most software development explorative in nature. Now tell me how many explorative real world, non-software projects have a well-adhered to and exact plan.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#277

Post by ulkesh »

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…

For the most part, I agree.

But...

If the UX wasn't garbage I'd defend it, too. It has a lot of nice features and integrations. But the UX changes they have made in the recent past (few years-ish), made it worse, for me.

And, in my opinion, the reason some other company hasn't come along and toppled it: critical mass. It's the same reason Epic is king in the hospital IT world. The UI/UX can be garbage (and it's so much worse with Epic than with JIRA), but organizations will still stick with it, because it's what they know.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#278

Post by janaagaard »

I agree that Jira isn't wonderful, but I can't think of any of any task management system that I have used, that I would recommend.

Are GitHub Issues the answer? I have only tried those for small open source projects and not big enterprise projects.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#279

Post by shadowtree »

The people hating on JIRA never worked in a shop without it.

If you're old enough to remember before Atlassian came along - just how was it better? Spreadsheets? Trax?

You don't want structured workflow? Don't work in a company with more than 5 people.

"I am an accountant and hate ERP" .. tough shit, for real.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#280

Post by rightbyte »

travisgriggs wrote: post #154
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 don't use Jira. I'm aware of what it basically is. We're small, we use a pin board, 3x5 cards, and a drawer. Do open source projects of any size use Jira? If not, do they use a basic knock off? The few not-so-big ones I've contributed to seem to get by without it, but maybe I just don't have enough exposure with these. If the open source world can be semi-productive without Jira, I think that's telling. The interes…

Jenkins uses Jira. Only one I know of.
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