GitHub and Jira Software Integration • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub and Jira Software Integration

#121

Post by chii » Fri, Oct 05, 2018, 6:50 AM UTC

kasey_junk wrote: post #96

chii wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

all of those problems you have aren't inherently a problem with the Jira product. They are organizational problems, management problems, and communication problems. If you have any of those problems, replacing Jira with another issue tracker will not solve it. Jira gets the flac, because but the problems isn't Jira.

But most other systems don't sell that they can solve this problem. If I gave you a web form with a title, a description, a comment section and some tags, would you argue that you could solve those org problems? Would you spend any time trying to solve the problem in the system?

> But most other systems don't sell that they can solve this problem.

Don't the simpler (more opinionated) systems also tout the same?

All software is sold with the same promise in one way or another.

Re: GitHub and Jira Software Integration

#122

Post by derefr » Fri, Oct 05, 2018, 6:53 AM UTC

hardwaregeek wrote: post #41

memset wrote: post #26

I don't understand the negativity in this thread. Or why people are using this post as an impetus to (ostensibly) move to gitlab. Or lament the decline and fall of github. Nobody is forcing anyone to use Jira. Nobody is forcing anyone to use Github. You can continue to use both without adopting any of the UX or design or workflows or whatever of the other. This blog post is just saying "now we have an officially-supp…

> Nobody is forcing anyone to use Jira. Nobody is forcing anyone to use Github. I agree that the negativity doesn't seem warranted, but plenty of people are being forced to use Jira or GitHub in their daily routines.

I think in this text a corporation is being modelled as a single being with a single decision-making capacity.

Sort of like how "my brain" forces spicy food on "my intestines", but when you model the two things together as a single human being, then you can confidently state that nobody is forcing me to eat spicy food.

Really, all the GP is trying to say is that neither Github nor Jira has any external market forces colluding to push those products onto "software-buying entities" (like individual freelancers, or whole corporations) that don't want to use them. They're just products, in the market, with freely-available alternatives, and any entity who would normally have the power to choose which software to buy, isn't having that decision made for them by market-distorting forces. There's no Github or Jira monopoly that has come along and crushed the alternatives out of existence, such that they're the only options even if you, a software-buying entity, wanted to buy an alternative.

Re: GitHub and Jira Software Integration

#123

Post by derefr » Fri, Oct 05, 2018, 6:58 AM UTC

chii wrote: post #92

kasey_junk wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JIRA in its out of the box configuration is an adequate issue tracker. Thats never the problem. The problem falls into a few broad categories: - conflating how you interact with issues (bugs, security events, new client on-boarding, etc) and how you do product development (prospecting, requirements analysis, systems design, etc). These activities only have a passing relationship with each other. Designing new product…

all of those problems you have aren't inherently a problem with the Jira product. They are organizational problems, management problems, and communication problems. If you have any of those problems, replacing Jira with another issue tracker will not solve it. Jira gets the flac, because but the problems isn't Jira.

Other issue trackers "solve" the problem in that they're technically incapable of faithfully representing objects like design specifications, adding enough friction that the process is pushed back from "technical solution" land to "social/organizational solution" land where it belongs.

Jira is a crutch, in the most literal sense: it makes things that should be hard because of your lack of {personal, organizational} health, easy, in a way that makes people avoid doing the "healthy" thing (facing their problems and rebuilding said {personal, organizational} health) indefinitely.

Re: GitHub and Jira Software Integration

#124

Post by Cogito » Fri, Oct 05, 2018, 7:04 AM UTC

p2t2p wrote: post #118

paulddraper wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JIRA Core is a good issue tracker. However JIRA Agile is a dumpster fire, partly because JIRA Agile reinvents JIRA. Summary field? Yes, but also "Epic Name" field. Status field? Yes, but also "Epic Status" field. Priority field? Yes, but also "Rank" field. Subissues? Yes, but also "Epic Link" field. And then boards and sprints are weird. Boards are supposed to be just views, but then access permissions for closing sp…

I'll tell you a secret, there are no "subissues", there are only issue links and UI represents different kind of links differently ;-).

Subtask issuetypes are a real thing, and are different to issue links.

Different parts of the UI and some functionality works differently for subtasks than for linked issues.

For example, you can set it up so that you can't close a 'user story' until all subtasks under it have been closed. Not possible out of the box with linked issues.

Re: GitHub and Jira Software Integration

#125

Post by derefr » Fri, Oct 05, 2018, 7:05 AM UTC

ahi wrote: post #52

bpchaps wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because many of us have worked at companies that use JIRA extensively. It's a tool that marks the sign that a company cares more about the management of staff as units, instead of caring about employees as breathing and creative forces. It makes management's job easier, but it does nothing for the managed, except lead to frustration and hundreds of emails that have to be waded through for that 5% chance of relev…

I work in a shop that had effectively no project management. When jira was introduced it was a godsend. Obviously email and slack requests aren't better, so what is the alternative system that has people hating on jira? Honest question.

The worst shoes in the world are a godsend to a person who's been walking across the desert in bare feet. Doesn't mean they're good shoes.

Good project management systems are simple and frequently not completely technically automated. Trello, or its older cousin "index cards on a whiteboard" are popular. Regular GitHub issues handle much of what needs to be handled, as long as you impose an organizational policy for how you'll go about triaging and updating status in them. Scrum stand-ups are just... regular meetings. None of this is very fancy; none of it needs to be.

Re: GitHub and Jira Software Integration

#126

Post by erik_seaberg » Fri, Oct 05, 2018, 7:10 AM UTC

Cogito wrote: post #111

To wade in on the JIRA wars going on, I was once a JIRA consultant (among other things). I ended up telling people I worked on business process design because once you see 100 different ways people are using a tool you learn most of the wrong ways to do it. The primary issue with any task tracking or workflow tool is that the people implementing it have never learnt what is effective and what isn't. Worse, what is ef…

> Every time you add a gate to a task (this person must accept this before it progresses …

This seems to be the standard failure mode. When a ticket is wrong, I try to fix it only to find I'm not allowed to, because the workflow presumes the actual state of the project today can't happen.

Re: GitHub and Jira Software Integration

#127

Post by setquk » Fri, Oct 05, 2018, 7:14 AM UTC

memset wrote: post #26

I don't understand the negativity in this thread. Or why people are using this post as an impetus to (ostensibly) move to gitlab. Or lament the decline and fall of github. Nobody is forcing anyone to use Jira. Nobody is forcing anyone to use Github. You can continue to use both without adopting any of the UX or design or workflows or whatever of the other. This blog post is just saying "now we have an officially-supp…

Really it’s the cynical engineers, me included, being skeptical about an unholy alliance of two tools known for their occasional slinging of hand grenades into the workflow.

In fact both tools effectively compromise the underlying concepts they encapsulate.

GitHub for example ties you to a very centralised model. The moment there’s a github problem, the whole “post push” workflow falls to its knees. Forget CI, PRs, everything. It’s down or working incorrectly or inconsistently until github find the poo and shovel it. When your old self served SVN server had downtime measured in seconds in a year and your build infrastructure was several orders of magnitude more reliable. Genuinely, it’s worse and needs more humans to keep it ticking on medium sized teams. That’s less humans on adding business value.

JIRA itself is an interesting tool. The tool itself has its own problems (abysmal performance mainly) but the main problem is that it has a propensity to be configured by people who don’t know or understand it. That results in many staff effectively running around in a hamster wheel every time they have to do something trivial.

These two together multiply and you end up with thousands of hours of developer time thrown out of the window. This is seen as the status quo of development but it doesn’t need to be.

We need better more reliable tools, not better integrations between pits of despair. Also we need a firm stick to beat the workflows into shape.

Re: GitHub and Jira Software Integration

#128

Post by wizardofmysore » Fri, Oct 05, 2018, 7:17 AM UTC

bpchaps wrote: post #62

ahi wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in a shop that had effectively no project management. When jira was introduced it was a godsend. Obviously email and slack requests aren't better, so what is the alternative system that has people hating on jira? Honest question.

How long has your company been using JIRA for? JIRA has a tendency to.... decay. New ticket types are created with custom fields that aren't ever kept up to date. Everyone starts to choose random entries because they have no choice, and no way to add new ones. Once that starts, things fall into chaos because nobody knows the "right" way to file tickets. Tickets soon become immeasurably immeasurable. Projects become c…

Dev here. I worked in the company that used Jira. Used it for 4 years. It was really useful.

It is anyday better than getting tasks over email.

We had very minimal customisations. A simple set of swimlanes that we update throughout the product development process.

From what you are telling it looks like your team had other problems in delivery. You tried to solve it via Jira by adding new custom fields and forcing people to update them. Solving the deeper issue would have helped there.

I have been able to track my deliverables. See how my team is performing. Plan for the next sprint. Perform retrospectives and capture action items. The tool hasn't broken while doing this. UI is decent. I really don't see a problem with the tool, it serves its goal.

Re: GitHub and Jira Software Integration

#129

Post by benatkin » Fri, Oct 05, 2018, 7:19 AM UTC

BigJono wrote: post #88

benatkin wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a lot of respect for Pivotal Tracker. It's a really elegant design, it is just missing a good detail view on issues, like GitHub's with history, comments, convenient deep linking, markdown, syntax highlighting, integrations, etc. Trello has a good detailed view for its cards, but not as good as GitHub.

PT has hands down one of the worst UIs I've ever seen in a tool. It's an absolute clusterfuck next to something like Trello.

I disagree, if the project is organized the way PT is intended, it's nice. If you have too many cards, or too much information with each card, it gets cluttered, and handles clutter worse than JIRA or Asana.

Re: GitHub and Jira Software Integration

#130

Post by sumedh » Fri, Oct 05, 2018, 7:22 AM UTC

CodeSheikh wrote: post #44

tootie wrote: post #14

JIRA is the top project management platform for good reason. I know a lot of people complain that it's complicated, but every time I've something simpler we end up hitting a wall. JIRA just needs a sensible workflow configured for your project and it's great. All that being said, I don't get this move. Atlassian has a very capable git product. GitHub should have attempted to anoint a new tool.

People complain not only it's complicated but it is slow and overloaded with unnecessary features. Can you open up create a new ticket window and how many features and fields do you count?

> Can you open up create a new ticket window and how many features and fields do you count?

Not sure what is the point of asking that question, it depends on what you have configured.