Live data from Hacker News

Jira Is Turing-Complete

seriot.ch

111–120 of 160 posts

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#111
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would tickets need to have a user assignment to be considered refined? It should be up to whomever picks it to work to get assigned to, not a part of the refinement.

He moves unassigned tickets to backlog. That is correct, when a dev is done with their tickets they take a new one off the backlog.

Ah, of course, I haven't worked with non-Kanban boards in more than a decade where having a swimlane for the "Todo" items picked for next-in-line work is common, and in that lane there are no users assigned.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#112
post #16

Jira is popular and has good API wrappers for your favorite language. I'm surprised corporate programmers with the hacker spirit haven't automated most of the things they are asked to do in Jira with Python command line scripts or whatever. If you can make Jira an order of magnitude easier to use for yourself than for the people pushing it, suddenly the script flips and Jira is something you push to protect yourself.…

Quite a few have, the issue is that every Jira instance is a fractal shit snowflake of custom properties several layers deep through old failed migrations to new organization strategies. And many times the API can do stuff that the UI doesn't allow, and everyone's relying on the UI to drive things, so you end up in weirdly broken corners because you didn't notice that you need custom_field_5537 to be paired with cust…

Reminds me of automating FiServ in VBA. Omfg, but still worth it.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#114

I came back to a workplace, that still used JIRA. Obviously during the interview I was like oh JIRA yeah yeah yeah you still use that? I can use that. Anyway yes, I can use JIRA. But it was a real shock to see the latest version of JIRA. It has a thousand papercuts, one of the worst is double clicking on text select stuff suddenly kicks fields into editor mode. What I was remembering was JIRA Server 4.0, you can walk…

My day job doesn't require using Jira or similar tools any more, so from a perspective of genuine curiosity: what's the consensus among entire project teams (not just the nerds) for a better alternative?

Ekso - https://ekso.app with docs at https://ekso.dev. Docker installed with PostgreSQL or SQL Server, your choice of where to host it, with a Render install. 103 MCP Tools with manual or AI-assisted resource planning. Oh, and a CLI that effortlessly migrates projects from Jira.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#115
post #78
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The engineer is not the target user

> The engineer is not the target user yes, but: 1. not anymore 2. That's the price you have to pay if you want the tool you like to have corporate buy-in

It seems like bad engineering culture though. If it was well engineered, then there would be simple concepts as a basis, upon which the product builds higher level, more complex things, that those targeted users think they need. Then there would be one API that is for the simple concepts, that lets people simply have tasks and get things done, potentially building a simpler UI on top of that API. The product itself could have a simple mode or higher level concepts mode.

If you read other people's comments here though, this is not what Jira APIs look like. Instead you have cruft built upon cruft, ever increasing in complexity, and seemingly no engineer was allowed to look back and fix things, find good concepts to represent things on a lower level. Lets build more features, accumulating more cruft on top, instead of fixing a broken design.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#116
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite a few have, the issue is that every Jira instance is a fractal shit snowflake of custom properties several layers deep through old failed migrations to new organization strategies. And many times the API can do stuff that the UI doesn't allow, and everyone's relying on the UI to drive things, so you end up in weirdly broken corners because you didn't notice that you need custom_field_5537 to be paired with cust…

A dysfunctional organization will project its failures to everything it touches. I personally have not seen such mess, likely because working in regulated industries means there‘s usually some SOP or work instruction that is regularly updated, so the setup is driven by the compliance process. Nowadays, I opt in for Atlassian because it works fine out of the box, I avoid heavy customization (which would mean tool lock…

I find the problem is that engineering wants one work flow, product wants another, another department wants theirs, and so on.

As a CTO I have declared that Jira is owned by engineering and it is our developers’ process.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#117
post #7

Jira is completely awful and thus has the potential to take on any other form of awfulness.

Or is it Awfully-Complete? :)

I don't think JIRA is fully capable of being truly awful without people adding most of the awfulness to it. A awfulness-vessel rather than awfully-complete, but it is certainly part of the torment nexus humanity is building for ourselves.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#119

Jira is popular and has good API wrappers for your favorite language. I'm surprised corporate programmers with the hacker spirit haven't automated most of the things they are asked to do in Jira with Python command line scripts or whatever. If you can make Jira an order of magnitude easier to use for yourself than for the people pushing it, suddenly the script flips and Jira is something you push to protect yourself.…

AI is the only way to reasonable interact with my employer's Jira board. The form for ticket creation had 206 fields across the tabs last time I checked. 10 are mandatory, including freetext that isn't really free, as the ticket goes to the shadow realm if you didn't match your team's valid values.

So it's a world where it's not just that one wants simple automation for ticket creation, but you might want to ask an LLM to update it. Dear Claude, I need to put a request with team X. I know John Doe works there. Please figure out what the hell their intake looks like, and what we have to fill out for the last few sprints and write it down, because I sure don't have time for this.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#120

I came back to a workplace, that still used JIRA. Obviously during the interview I was like oh JIRA yeah yeah yeah you still use that? I can use that. Anyway yes, I can use JIRA. But it was a real shock to see the latest version of JIRA. It has a thousand papercuts, one of the worst is double clicking on text select stuff suddenly kicks fields into editor mode. What I was remembering was JIRA Server 4.0, you can walk…

My day job doesn't require using Jira or similar tools any more, so from a perspective of genuine curiosity: what's the consensus among entire project teams (not just the nerds) for a better alternative?

Another vote for Linear. The absolute craft that has gone into building this product and company I truly believe is second to none. Once you start using Linear you start seeing how strong their design and UX influence is on so many other companies. This has certainly been the case for us.

Linear is quite seriously one of the best products (in any category) I’ve ever used.

Post reply on HN