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I fucking hate Jira

ifuckinghatejira.com

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Re: I fucking hate Jira

#511

Post by CRConrad »

Judgmentality wrote: post #192
bee_rider wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't that surprising that a programming language has inertia, it has lots of 'mass' so to speak -- programmers have to specialize in the language, and an ecosystem of libraries has to be built. It is more surprising to me that an issue tracker like Jira does. Surely people aren't specialized in... Jira-ing or whatever.

> Surely people aren't specialized in... Jira-ing or whatever. There are people who build their careers on this. Their are consultants who do this, and only this. And the unfortunate reality is, Jira is so complicated, there actually is a reason for these people to exist.

> And the unfortunate reality is, Jira is so complicated, there actually is a reason for these people to exist.

So, easy benchmark for when something has become too complicated to be worthwhile: An industry of consultants is making a living off it.

SAP consultants, Oracle consultants, JIRA consultants... You don't see very many Excel consultants, do you? (Whaddoino, maybe there are.)

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#512

Post by aweiland »

colechristensen wrote: post #292
asfhagsdf wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have only ever seen servicenow used for… well, service requests. Reset my password, grant access, create this resource. Always administration, never product development.

I've seen it used for way more than that. Their sales (and customer support) people will gladly tell you it can, or soon will, do everything you may want it to do.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#513

Post by aaaaaaaaata »

CRConrad wrote: post #499
oneplane wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JIRA really doesn't encourage anything in any direction except writing down what you are up to in a reasonably friendly way. Anything beyond that is up to the implementors, and there is nothing in the world that can prevent bad top-down behaviour within a company.

> Anything beyond that is up to the implementors "Implementors". Anything that needs to be "implemented" is either a) not finished, b) too big and complex, or c) both. Dunno for sure how much less code Jira has compared to, say, MS Excel or Adobe Acrobat, but I could imagine it might be up to an order of magnitude. But you don't have to "implement" those; you just install them.

Better comparison product is MS Teams, not Excel.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#514

Post by djur »

felixgallo wrote: post #509
djur wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't these tools be used primarily at the team level? Large organizations don't necessarily have larger teams. I'm not sure why it should make a big difference if you have 2 or 200 teams of 5 using the tool.

it makes a difference because frequently, when you have (say) several hundred teams of 10-15 people, they need to interoperate (so that the fields used, and the meanings of the fields, are standardized and have a structured lifecycle), and also they need to be able to roll up to larger progress reports/status updates so that the org leaders can understand where everything is. If all the small teams organically choose…

Under that kind of top-down structure, each team will force their organic processes into the Procrustean bed of what the project management system expects. Aggregating that data heedless of any variation in meaning will result in garbage. Leadership can't do anything with aggregate metrics derived from day-to-day development anyway. That results in fantasy metrics like "velocity". They should be focused on conditions and outcomes.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#515

Post by ianbutler »

halostatue wrote: post #243
ianbutler wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pivotal was just a normal board based tracker when I used it. Better than Trello and less complex than Jira which is all I really want, I’ve never been in an organization that has any more context attached to a ticket than what the work is and who’s working on it.

I think I can count on my hand the number of times anyone has actually had a conversation on a Jira ticket for me.

It also helps that right now I don’t have tickets for my work, I’ve been lucky enough to work on exploratory/skunkworks work for my team at my current org.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#516

Post by IOT_Apprentice »

colechristensen wrote: post #118
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…

Jira doesn't just reflect, it drives convoluted unhelpful bureaucracy. The tool drives the organization to look like the tool wants it to, which is disorganized half broken "organization" with silly overcomplicated rules that give people something to discuss enthusiastically instead of the actual work that needs doing. Jira is organization poison, not just a reflection of what an organization is.

Lighten up Francis. Jira is simply a tool. if you care that much, apply to be on the team at your company that defines the workflow rules and strip away what isn't needed.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#517

Post by oehpr »

tommoor wrote: post #57
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a tool for the boring part of software engineering- I don't expect it to spark joy. I wish it were faster, scaled the full width of my monitor, allowed external editors, etc. Overall it gets the job done well. Everything else that I've used is horrible which makes it the best in my experience but that's still not saying much.

But what if it _did_ spark joy… https://linear.app/readme

I looked it over, but the properties provided prevent us from organizing and prioritizing the tickets on things that matter to us. Doesn't look like we can add properties to issues.

So, if we have some kinda numerical metric, call it "foo", we can't ask linear to give us all foo's over 6.

So if we wanted to do any kinda metrics, basically, we have to export our whole project as CSV and do the calculations there? I just checked the export system. It exports everything only. I don't think this is tenable for project management.

I can see it work for a personal task list or a small team doing simple sprints. But... I wouldn't see it used beyond that.

Maybe I'm off base on all this, I did just give the product a quick once over. If I missed ways to make all this work, then that's on me.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#518

Post by trilbyglens »

geysersam wrote: post #355
jedberg wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amusingly, it used to be great! When I first started using JIRA, it was just markdown. Then they introduced their WYSIWYG editor, but at least they still had the button to see the raw markdown and you could still edit the raw markdown (but the GUI made terrible markdown so if you wanted to use markdown you better start with that and never touch the GUI). And then I guess at some point they just removed the markdown p…

It boggles the mind. Who made that call? What were their reasons?

markdown is too hard for product people

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#520

Post by mattpallissard »

jtcruthers wrote: post #324
mattpallissard wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shortcut is pretty stripped down and lacks several features conducive to cross team collaboration. In particular I dislike shortcut's lack of internal comments. It's a much bigger annoyance than anticipated. I dislike atlassian products in general, but having some discipline with the config/workflows was much better than shortcut.

> lack of internal comments What do you mean by this? There's a section to comment in each card/epic/milestone and you can ping team members. Comments also sync with slack so you can get notifications there if you'd like. I don't have a ton of JIRA knowledge, so there's a chance I'm missing something.

In Jira you have the concept of internal comments, which aren't visible to people outside the team.

They are useful for putting triage and debugging information in. Or even as a play by play with specifics so your team mates or manager can follow along with your progress.

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