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I fucking hate Jira

ifuckinghatejira.com

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Re: I fucking hate Jira

#331

Post by axlee »

cogman10 wrote: post #256
axlee wrote: 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.

> You mean as hard as when Git obliterated every other VCS within the span of a few years There's not a concept impedance mismatch going from CVS->SVN->GIT. The concepts are so similar that git-svn exists to convert a SVN repo into a git repo (and a similar conversion tool exists for CVS->SVN) Jira is so flexible and configurable that no such tool could exist. Migrating to a new tracking system requires that you eith…

How about when every single company rewrote their frontend stack in React after angular.js was done, circa 2015? Or when everyone moved to k8s within 2 years around 2017-2019? Hell, now even companies that definitely wouldn't benefit from anything related to k8s are diving into it.

What I am trying to show by these examples is that things can move fast, very fast, and that in our industry there are no such thing as well-entrenched tools. Yarn got adopted within a year above npm, the "default node package manager". Everything is always up for grabs, if you can show the benefits, however small they are. And the history aspect of Jira isn't an unsolvable problem, pretty much every single issue tracker in the world offers a Jira import, and losing issue history is far less damaging than it was losing "commit" history when everyone was moving to git back in the days. If a company can show that their alternative to Jira solves a percentage of common complaints against Jira, while offering the same capabilities of scaling that Jira does, people will follow. Nobody wants to deal with crappy products. Especially since the ones suffering the most from Jira are usually the ones in charge of setting up the very processes that Jira is supposed to help with, and to procure the tooling.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#332

Post by wheresmycraisin »

cogman10 wrote: post #256
axlee wrote: 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.

> You mean as hard as when Git obliterated every other VCS within the span of a few years There's not a concept impedance mismatch going from CVS->SVN->GIT. The concepts are so similar that git-svn exists to convert a SVN repo into a git repo (and a similar conversion tool exists for CVS->SVN) Jira is so flexible and configurable that no such tool could exist. Migrating to a new tracking system requires that you eith…

Migrating very large SVN repos to Git is far from trivial.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#333

Post by wpietri »

8ytecoder wrote: post #276
NikolaNovak wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>"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 tha…

You're exactly right about software being exploratory, but I think the whole notion of fixed, up-front requirements is part of the problem.

In the lean analysis, the problem isn't changing requirements, which is a natural consequence of changing circumstances and people learning over time. The problem is building up a large inventory of poorly-tested, underinformed plans and then doing a lot of work based on them without taking advantage of the opportunities to learn.

Especially here on HN, we know that startups don't succeed because they come up with a fixed initial plan and then spend years marching to it. Instead we have all set of techniques for releasing early and often so we can see what really works for users. A key competitive advantage for startups is how their fast OODA loops allow them to run rings around larger companies that slowly drift into being very plan-based.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#335

Post by fmakunbound »

meibo wrote: post #142
blowski wrote: 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.

Definitely this 100% I proposed for company game night: Predict where the Jira cursor goes next in response to right arrow. There’s so many possibilities: right left up down, teleports, disappears. My favorite is when the cursor splits into two at two different seemingly unrelated locations. Two cursors?? How do you even do that in a text area?

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#336

Post by spc476 »

cogman10 wrote: post #289
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #141

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…

> moving from CVS/Subversion to git Was that really painful? We did that transition and it amounted to having teams one by one run the "git-svn" script on their repos to port over to git. Even with over a million commits on our central SVN server, the whole process generally took around 5 minutes per project. Even in the worst cases, it was something like 1 hour. The most painful part we had was putting a rate limite…

It depends upon how SVN is used, and for the team I'm on, it's going to be painful. SVN allows you to checkout a subdirectory of any given repository, and because of our history, we have everything my team writes (10 programs) in two repositories, with a lot of sharing between the two repos. This is something that is ... not easy ... to replicate with git [1].

As far as Macs go, the company I worked for was 50/50 Mac/Windows, with the majority (if not outright all) of the developers using Macs. We got bought out, and our new corporate overlords were purely Windows, and didn't know what to do about our Macs. Personally, I ended up with a fully manged Windows laptop that I never used [2] for three years before I could send it back and send me a "semi-managed" Mac laptop.

As for Jira, eh. I didn't mind it that much, except when management mandated that every team use the same queue for everything. That queue didn't match our preferred method of working, so we kept our old queue purely for internal stuff. Our time tracking system is way worse than Jira by far.

[1] Not to say I love SVN---I hate it actually, and would prefer to use git. But having used SVN for over a decade on these two repos, and given their structure, it's going to be interesting.

[2] Except to turn it on to have it autoupdate when I got "the email". What a colossal waste of resources. My team kept on using the Macs.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#338

Post by blacksmith_tb »

asfhagsdf wrote: post #269
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…

It amazes me how much hate Jira gets compared to ServiceNow. My last two roles have been heavy on the ServiceNow, and I'd take a fresh breath of Jira any time. My guess is it's because Jira actively targets SMB, while ServiceNow is almost strictly enterprise, and folks in enterprise have already resigned to their fate.

Well said. I have to deal with both of them in my current role, and while Jira is... not great, ServiceNow is next-level-clunky.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#339

Post by wpietri »

silisili wrote: post #268
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…

I agree, but wish/think this can change if the product is good enough. Meaning, if someone could write a super fast, easy to use, minimal planning/task tracker, with a good set of reporting, I feel it could coerce companies to adjust their models to use it. It's a risky venture, but products like Slack, Docker/K8S, git, and VS Code gained wide adoption without trying to cater to existing organizational processes.

I hope you're right, but I'm suspicious. For the ones I know well there, they worked because the didn't need permission from the powerful Git, Slack, and Docker were definitely like that in the early days. But planning systems are chosen by the powerful and cater to their needs first.

There are plenty of minimal planning tools out there. Github issues, for example. Or I use KanbanFlow quite a bit. But having driven adoption of simple tools, I think you at least need an environment of benign neglect, as with a skunkworks project, or a tech project at a non-tech company. From what I've seen, in a lot of companies systems like Jira are too entrenched and too visible to management to allow for guerilla-style adoption of something that's more developer/worker friendly.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#340

Post by lmm »

vosper wrote: post #107
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…

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…

It's not a neutral tool. Jira makes micromanagement easy and trusting people hard; you can use it for good, but you're working against the grain of it the whole time. Everything is default deny (issues can only go through approved transitions, by default regular users can't change the available transitions), the default issue forms have way too many mandatory fields, and a bunch of reports that only micromanagers want or need are front and center in the UI.
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