Live data from Hacker News

I fucking hate Jira

ifuckinghatejira.com

431–440 of 539 posts

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#431
post #213

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…

JIRA is the medium that cranky devs interact with disinterested managers. It's just a vessel for data and metadata. And as far as I'm concerned it's one of the best at doing what it does. There's no tool I prefer to JIRA. Asana is a joke by comparison. TFS is just Bad JIRA. Issue trackers like Trello or GitHub issues are fine for creating a dumping ground for ideas but not for organizing. If you can get away with les…

> Issue trackers like Trello or GitHub issues are fine for creating a dumping ground for ideas but not for organizing.

There’s an argument that you should use an issue tracking system for tracking issues and not planning. Features and stories don’t necessarily neatly subdivide into tasks and issues. Issues don’t always neatly fit into a story or feature.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#432
post #2

I'm sometimes kind of surprised at how often I see people say they don't mind it. It's by far the tool I like the least out of everything I've used at any job I've ever been in.

Jira is terrible until you try other tools for managing dev work.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#434

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…

>The problem I have with the incessant Jira bitching is that I rarely feel that bitchers have a true understanding for the extreme difficulty of the organization-wide problem Jira is trying to solve.

The problem being: "how to create BS data and metrics to satisfy a bureucracy"?

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#435

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…

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.

The Kernel isn’t managed solely through patches and README files. There is often a lot of up-front communication and documentation.

My takeaway is that the planning and the issue/bug-tracking and the patch submissions are three seperate somewhat independent processes. There are no managers trying to group all the tickets into patches and patches into projects in some sort of neat (but illusionary) hierarchy.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#436
This site is courtesy of folks that never used bmc remedy or ivanti heat.

I was similarly shocked when people bitched about confluence. First, do you have a better alternative? Second, do you undrstand the nightmare before jira and confluence?

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#437

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…

> why don't you think some other company has come along and toppled the Jira crown? Because it's really hard to kill off the market leader when the market leader is embedded into the core of how a company works. I don't buy that it's a matter of competitors not being better. It is more about inertia. The argument you have here could equally be applied to C++ or Cobol "Why is new code being written in these languages?…

> It is more about inertia.

Can't agree more. A few years ago, I joined a large healthcare organization to take a break from the startup grind. During my tenure, I witnessed the selection process of an issue tracking system and a chat platform.

They picked Teams for chat even though Slack ruled, and Teams was way behind in features. Why? Because it was the easy choice. They had the typical Microsoft stack just like every other large company, so go with Teams even though it sucked.

They picked Jira for issue tracking. Why? Because it was the easy choice. No one knew how to fully leverage it, and there was no way workflows would get buy in across the whole organization.

In large companies, especially non-tech ones, tooling decisions are driven more by laziness and CYA than what's the superior product.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#438
Ticket := (title, description, time, tags, links, *Comment)

Comment := (name, time, text)

…and everything else is culture or auxiliary tooling. It’s a schema as old as Web 2.0 and it works because most people just want to talk to each other and search for stuff they think or know is there.

100% of the time I just want to announce either what I want to do, or comment on something that’s in progress. The communication and progress tracking are the most important things for keeping me and my team aligned.

What does Jira get wrong? Bureaucracy. Modern day online triplicate form filling disguised as “agile” is still pen pushing.

Pro-forma for bugs is friction — I should be able to file a bug without having to think about how to categorise it. Have another tool / view for nagging me about that, not the create-bug workflow.

Epics / stories / tasks / sprints / bugs: what if I make a task when I wanted a bug? What if made a spike that’s really a task? Why does this matter so much at the top level of the “task” entity — it should just be a tag on a task and nothing more fundamental than that. Let me modify the structure of my task tree myself.

Clutter, of course. Jira has 15 fields of stuff per issue that could just all be tags once we’ve spent the first week shaking out what kind of patterns are appearing in our own team’s workflow.

Projects: why is it a three stage process to move an issue between projects, and why should the issue id change when it moves? What if a piece of work is small but spans two projects? Tagging not taxonomy please.

Jira feels like it was designed for contributors and teams with zero discipline. Tech teams with any kind of serious hiring bar and leadership structure should have zero problem with trusting their staff with being succinct and meaningful with communication, including with how they track tasks. If you need Jira to enforce this, then I feel sorry for you as I pass you by to join a different team who know how to and want to work together without form filling.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

MariaDB does too, I have a feeling I've noticed others at some point, but that was one that came to mind.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Jira isn't great but the Confluence editor causes me more frustration than anything. And good luck getting anything in or out of Confluence with their document model.
Post reply on HN