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I fucking hate Jira

ifuckinghatejira.com

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Re: I fucking hate Jira

#371

Post by djur »

oneplane wrote: post #189
steve918 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like a lot of great programming talent has been wasted by very smart engineers who felt the pain of their current ticketing system and spent years building countless startups only to end up with something occasionally marginally better than Trac (2004).

Back in 2008-ish a lot of projects I came across tried to use Redmine because their company had a sucky JIRA or sometimes even Mantis implementation. Redmine turned out to be highly unsuitable in a matter of a few months and after trying out a few options that are mostly just tickets+kanban boards, it turned out that the simplest 'fix' was just setting up an individual JIRA just for the team so it could be used prope…

What necessary features did Jira give you that Redmine and/or "tickets + kanban boards" didn't?

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#372

Post by Frost1x »

arcticbull wrote: post #353
lmm wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wan…

I find Jira isn't a tracker, it's a tracker construction kit. You can make it be pretty much anything you want - except, you know, fast.

I view Jira as the embodiment of the misguided software engineering practice of trying to generalize and abstract too high level of a task of something like "project management" and distill it down into one tool.

While the Golden perfect abstraction handed down for the heavens by the gods is what you seek, it ultimately passes down complexity to end users through its generic approach. You need to create opinions within the generic world and then your team needs to understand Jira's abstraction combined with the opinion your company builds around it that's probably not documented.

The end result is unless you're running a large project that really requires the functionality possible in Jira where creating the overhead or overloading something simpler isn't practical, then you're probably better off using something simpler and more opinionated--a nice simple solid framework to keep everyone on track.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#373

Post by xedrac »

lmm wrote: post #340
vosper wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wan…

I realize company-wide planning is extremely hard, especially when there are many inter-dependencies that can block entire departments if a single deadline slips. But in my experience, the only thing that Jira brings to the table is the ability to document, in a centralized place, the pieces of work that need to be done, and what stage they are currently in. In my field, anything software related is really hard to estimate accurately, which makes the whole aggregate estimation in Jira not only worthless, but actively harmful because management will treat it as truth. We could replace Jira with a big whiteboard of TODOs and we'd likely get things done faster, and with higher quality. My favorite excerpt from the site:

> Jira is not completely useless: it gives people who usually add negative value to the project a way to appear busy and productive, with associated rewards and promotion opportunities.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#375

Post by djur »

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…

Trac has been around nearly as long as Jira and I'd much rather use it.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#376

Post by phendrenad2 »

Not using Jira is a red flag for me, and I won't work for any company that doesn't use Jira. The reason is, Jira is so standard at this point, if a team uses a non-Jira product, they must have an overly powerful CTO or team lead who rules with an iron fist. Sure, it sucks, but working under such conditions is worse.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#377

Post by djur »

jsiepkes wrote: post #181
polotics wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Linus use JIRA on that little project called the Linux kernel? Why is git with good readmes and clear pull requests not enough project management? If you're not doing PR's you are just LARPing software development. I don't hate JIRA, I hate "IT" employees that can't program.

No Linus uses Bugzilla [1]. Have you ever used it? You'll be begging for Jira once you've used Bugzilla. Also Linux doesn't use pull requests. GIT doesn't even know the concept of a PR. You are supposed to generate a patch with 'git format-patch' and submit it to a mailinglist. [1] https://bugzilla.kernel.org/

What's wrong with Bugzilla?

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#378

Post by balls187 »

Came to the comments hoping to find some solid Jira alternatives "the community" recommends. Sadly not the case. Instead this is my take-away:

* Jira sucks big time, and people hate it.

* There are no other tools that do what jira does, that doesn't also suck.

* After trying Jira alternatives that suck worse, folks move away from the Jira sucks camp to no-longer minding using Jira.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#379

Post by ketzo »

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…

Additionally, people's associations with Jira are not strictly related to the software itself.

Jira is often the domain of PMs, management, and other leadership; if you have bad people / product leaders, you're used to Jira being a source of great stress.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#380

Post by eikenberry »

yamadapc wrote: post #252
macintux wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Jira/Confluence Cloud use the same markup and editor.

But neither supports a markup language AFAIK. They used to support Markdown but they dropped that long ago and never replaced it. Now the only choice is their garbage WYSIWYG editor.
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