Plane: Open-Source Alternative to Jira • Hacker News Board

Re: Plane: Open-Source Alternative to Jira

#101

Post by marcus_holmes » Wed, May 31, 2023, 4:12 AM UTC

justahuman74 wrote: post #88

marcus_holmes wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem I see is that Jira encourages "management by looking at Jira" - effectively Jira becomes a second source of truth that is unconnected and unconstrained by the actual truth (the code). Jira acquires state that has to be carefully maintained as a separate operation by the developers to keep Jira's state in sync with the actual state of the project. Since most of the organisation are looking at Jira, the eff…

You can write glue for whatever hosts your repository to make api calls to Jira. Say you have some code that needs some changes but at a later time, you can put a comment above it (or really anywhere) // JIRA: MYPROJ-123 When the glue sees that comment disappear from the codebase, it can mark the ticket as done.

Useful, I guess, but that seems to be inverting the responsibility. The code needs to have comments inserted into it referring to the state of Jira, rather than the other way around.

The thing I'd like to see is that ticket "Write the login page" is automatically marked complete when the codebase contains a working login page, there are unit and integration tests for the login page, and maybe (depending on how you do your documentation) a set of comments on the API methods involved describing their use in the login process. All without those code elements ever needing to know the ticket exists.

Re: Plane: Open-Source Alternative to Jira

#102

Post by snthpy » Wed, May 31, 2023, 4:19 AM UTC

jupp0r wrote: post #75

"Alternative to JIRA" makes me cringe. Why would you put the most hated brand of all issue trackers in your pitch line?

That was my first thought as well. So glad someone else said it.

Re: Plane: Open-Source Alternative to Jira

#103

Post by throwawaaarrgh » Wed, May 31, 2023, 4:22 AM UTC

GuB-42 wrote: post #54

smallerfish wrote: post #4

I love seeing competition for Jira, because it needs to die, but I think you need to do a better job explaining your value prop. Your first bullet list of features doesn't really make it sound all that different. Why would I have a better time using this than Jira, bearing in mind that I'd be giving up custom workflows and probably a lot of integrations? (No shade intended. If you can answer that concisely, put that…

Is Jira that bad? It sure is a mess, but that's because its requirement are a mess. It is not SAP but that's the idea, something that sits between developers, testers, management, customers, etc... People who want different things, speak different languages, and somehow need to work together. If you just want an issue tracker, there are many options. Bugzilla, Mantis, GitHub, GitLab, Gitea,... Some of them customizab…

It's really not bad. It's gotten much simpler and faster in the past 5-ish years. If you take the time to learn it, it does pretty much everything you want, and there's always the API, extensions, automations, etc.

But it's an opinionated tool. Almost every person I have ever worked with has never read the docs, so they just sort of suffer and complain and never learn that they're using it wrong. I'm the guy on every job that has to teach the team how to use Confluence and Jira correctly. My biggest challenge in making Jira work well is convincing coworkers to stop using it wrong. (They'd rather come on HN and complain about it than read the docs or take a Udemy course)

All this is compounded by people who don't even know how to do Scrum or Kanban or even basic project management, so their complaints are also often just people who don't know how to work. Which, again, is most people I have worked with.

Re: Plane: Open-Source Alternative to Jira

#104

Post by umangrathi » Wed, May 31, 2023, 4:32 AM UTC

brightball wrote: post #31

simmanian wrote: post #6

I've been looking for a competitive open source alternative to Jira for a non-profit I volunteer at because they cannot afford to pay for any cloud service and Trello has its limitations. Does Plane offer all pro features for open source instances as well? Does it support login via Google or other identity providers?

You can do a lot on free ClickUp

Recommend Clickup highly for multi user flows on a free tier (infinite users), only issue you can not attach many files (have uses google drive link for that earlier)

Re: Plane: Open-Source Alternative to Jira

#105

Post by bombcar » Wed, May 31, 2023, 4:32 AM UTC

macintux wrote: post #85

throw0101b wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is Jira that bad? As someone who had to admin an on-prem installation of various Atlassian products, upgrades were always a nightmare: you could try multiple dry-runs to make sure data tables were updated, and plug-in upgrades were good, but invariably there would still be a good chance that something would still go wrong when you tried it with production. The workflow we settled on was basically leave the old vers…

Atlassian seems to be pushing hard to get everyone into their cloud. I’ve heard, but don’t recall details and have no direct knowledge, that the pricing for an on-premises install has gotten outrageous. Perhaps that’s because they’re spending too much money on supporting companies who are struggling with upgrades.

They eliminated the server-tier licensing so now you have to go cloud or go datacenter, which is much more expensive.

Re: Plane: Open-Source Alternative to Jira

#106

Post by jamesfinlayson » Wed, May 31, 2023, 4:32 AM UTC

sverhagen wrote: post #78

xp84 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having used Jira for only a modest 12 years, I have had multiple stages of feelings about it. I agree with the parent that “everybody” hates Jira because “it’s too complicated” — yet when developers try to use a lean, simple tool like Pivotal or Trello, inevitably other stakeholders demand something better for business users, these simpler tools can’t deliver that, and the replacement ends up being Jira 99% of the ti…

>because “it’s too complicated” I personally "hate" Jira because it's so dumb. I open an epic, to see the stories that still need my attention, it shows all the stories, so I hit the "Hide done". Then I thoughtlessly click on one of the stories, I edit it, go back to the epic, and now it shows all the stories again. Rinse and repeat. I open a screen, it loads slowly, when I think it's ready I click on whatever I want…

> which has often made me wonder: do these people use this software themselves, and if so, do they take any pride in it?

Agreed - Jira is functional but there are endless little annoyances like this. My usual problem is that I work across two project boards, and no matter what board you're on, the default project that Create Task picks is the last board that you created a ticket on, not the project for the current board that you're viewing.

Re: Plane: Open-Source Alternative to Jira

#107

Post by jamesfinlayson » Wed, May 31, 2023, 4:37 AM UTC

throw0101b wrote: post #57

GuB-42 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Jira that bad? It sure is a mess, but that's because its requirement are a mess. It is not SAP but that's the idea, something that sits between developers, testers, management, customers, etc... People who want different things, speak different languages, and somehow need to work together. If you just want an issue tracker, there are many options. Bugzilla, Mantis, GitHub, GitLab, Gitea,... Some of them customizab…

> Is Jira that bad? As someone who had to admin an on-prem installation of various Atlassian products, upgrades were always a nightmare: you could try multiple dry-runs to make sure data tables were updated, and plug-in upgrades were good, but invariably there would still be a good chance that something would still go wrong when you tried it with production. The workflow we settled on was basically leave the old vers…

I feel bad for the people that have to the Jira updates where I work - every time it happens it seems to take forever because it needs to "reindex", and they try and start it in the early evening but it still seems to bleed into business hours the next day.

Re: Plane: Open-Source Alternative to Jira

#108

Post by fijiaarone » Wed, May 31, 2023, 4:48 AM UTC

xp84 wrote: post #55

GuB-42 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Jira that bad? It sure is a mess, but that's because its requirement are a mess. It is not SAP but that's the idea, something that sits between developers, testers, management, customers, etc... People who want different things, speak different languages, and somehow need to work together. If you just want an issue tracker, there are many options. Bugzilla, Mantis, GitHub, GitLab, Gitea,... Some of them customizab…

Having used Jira for only a modest 12 years, I have had multiple stages of feelings about it. I agree with the parent that “everybody” hates Jira because “it’s too complicated” — yet when developers try to use a lean, simple tool like Pivotal or Trello, inevitably other stakeholders demand something better for business users, these simpler tools can’t deliver that, and the replacement ends up being Jira 99% of the ti…

Bad management demands bad tools.

Re: Plane: Open-Source Alternative to Jira

#109

Post by usrbinbash » Wed, May 31, 2023, 4:51 AM UTC

justahuman74 wrote: post #88

marcus_holmes wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem I see is that Jira encourages "management by looking at Jira" - effectively Jira becomes a second source of truth that is unconnected and unconstrained by the actual truth (the code). Jira acquires state that has to be carefully maintained as a separate operation by the developers to keep Jira's state in sync with the actual state of the project. Since most of the organisation are looking at Jira, the eff…

You can write glue for whatever hosts your repository to make api calls to Jira. Say you have some code that needs some changes but at a later time, you can put a comment above it (or really anywhere) // JIRA: MYPROJ-123 When the glue sees that comment disappear from the codebase, it can mark the ticket as done.

The code is the model.

The project management system is the view.

The model shouldn't have to change to accomodate the view.

Re: Plane: Open-Source Alternative to Jira

#110

Post by fijiaarone » Wed, May 31, 2023, 4:53 AM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #79

GuB-42 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Jira that bad? It sure is a mess, but that's because its requirement are a mess. It is not SAP but that's the idea, something that sits between developers, testers, management, customers, etc... People who want different things, speak different languages, and somehow need to work together. If you just want an issue tracker, there are many options. Bugzilla, Mantis, GitHub, GitLab, Gitea,... Some of them customizab…

The problem I see is that Jira encourages "management by looking at Jira" - effectively Jira becomes a second source of truth that is unconnected and unconstrained by the actual truth (the code). Jira acquires state that has to be carefully maintained as a separate operation by the developers to keep Jira's state in sync with the actual state of the project. Since most of the organisation are looking at Jira, the eff…

Code is not a source of truth, it is an attempt at partial realization of an incomplete understanding of a bunch of contradictory assumptions about what’s true at a particular point in time.