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Jira Is Turing-Complete

seriot.ch

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Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#131

Post by danudey »

encom wrote: post #122
amai wrote: post #113

Try Azure Boards instead and you will love JIRA. Because there is no software in the world that Microsoft can't make worse.

I've always hated Gmail. I still do. But I switched jobs last year, and the new place uses Outlook instead. I struggle to find a word that adequately describes my disdain for Outlook; hate doesn't even begin to cover it. It struggles at the most basic of tasks: receiving and sending email. I'll get a notification on my phone about an email. I open the app and there's nothing. Pull down to refresh does nothing. It tak…

> I've always hated Gmail. I still do. But I switched jobs last year, and the new place uses Outlook instead. I struggle to find a word that adequately describes my disdain for Outlook; hate doesn't even begin to cover it. It struggles at the most basic of tasks: receiving and sending email. I'll get a notification on my phone about an email. I open the app and there's nothing. Pull down to refresh does nothing. It takes about 1-15 minutes to appear usually. Everything I do in Outlook is tedious as fuck.

The number of times at my last job I had to tell someone to re-send me an e-mail because Outlook search couldn't find anything with "GitLab Upgrade" in the subject line (let alone the twelve message thread it was part of) was staggering.

Also, my most hated functionality in Outlook: distribution groups (or whatever they call them). Instead of saying "devops@corp.com forwards to this list of people", you say "Devops is this group of people", so when you send an email to "Devops" it goes to all of those people. Sure, great.

Except that it means that you can't filter by that. Saying 'Devops' is just shorthand for saying "This guy, this guy, this guy, and this guy" explicitly. If you say "e-mails sent to Devops" Outlook interprets that as "e-mails with any of this group of people in the To or CC field", meaning that Outlook filters couldn't distinguish between "e-mails sent to me" and "e-mails sent to my team". Since I almost always had someone from my team CC'ed on e-mails I sent, it meant that my "e-mails sent to Devops" filter just matched every e-mail coming or going.

It ended up being that the alerting and monitoring e-mails we got I was only able to filter because the relevant tools put various headers into the e-mail (like X-Nagios-Alert or whatever) or they came from specific e-mail addresses (which was not always reliable but was often reliable enough).

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#132

Post by jdgoesmarching »

LazyGooze wrote: post #39
Groxx wrote: 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 colleague of mine said it even better, its like an old blanket filled with patches, small fixes and workarounds, so much that no one even remembers to how the patching was done ages ago!

The funny thing is that Atlassian themselves uses “custom fields” so it’s not even clear which are actually org-specific. The new JSM uses a lot of them, for example. It smells like things got so convoluted internally that even first party features are just velcro’d on top.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#133

Post by eddythompson80 »

halapro wrote: post #67
hyperhello wrote: post #3

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

The worst part is that every company with a tasks product works right towards Jira. Compare what GitHub issues were in 2014 to what they are today: https://github.com/features/issues and they keep. adding. redundant. features

I'm 90% those features were among the top issues on github/github repo back when it used to be there. The joke was always about how barebones github issues were was a common thing troughout the 2010s. Once they added that whole "Projects" thing, the joke became how complicated it is.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#134

Post by danudey »

mavamaarten wrote: post #103
unconscionable wrote: post #24

Woof. JIRA is so slow, and managers never seemed to set it up correctly. I have trauma from using it!

Yeah the slowness is what always gets me. Like in essence a ticketing system isn't more than just a database of tickets and relations between tickets and states. And okay you can kinda make it explode by having tons of interconnected tickets and custom fields and plugins. But I will never understand how something that just works with simple textual data and attachments can be so unbearably slow.

Presumably it has to do with:

1. All the checks it has to do to see if there are relations between tickets, states, triggers, actions, reports, etc.

2. Accessing separate subsets of data for each ticket from different locations and bringing it all together (epics, sprints, user lists, comments, reactions, linked issues, linked PRs and branches, etc)

3. The code is apparently a complete dumpster fire, from what I've heard from people at Atlassian.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#135

Post by danudey »

danielcasper wrote: post #110
zombot wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that count as "you can play Doom on Jira"? Does Jira supply the pump action shotgun required to kill the resulting demons?

I'll need you to submit a ticket to fire the shotgun.

Sorry we're out of ammunition but I created "get more shotgun ammo" as part of the "supplies and buffs" epic and put it in the next sprint at one story point. This might result in DOOM-212 "Shoot Demons" getting bumped to next month but if you think it won't affect scope we can pull it in after all. LMK what you think as I'll need to get exec buy-in on this before we pull the trigger on this, literally and figuratively.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#136

Post by stackedinserter »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #101
Cockbrand wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Linear. By far and away, linear. The task tracking features you actually use, it’s fast, you don’t waste a billion years playing “who knows how to do this and has the permissions hell” that you would with Jira. The integrations work properly. The layout and UX makes sense, and all the nontechnical people I’ve used it with liked it and had no issues with it.

What's so special about Linear? I tried it, it's the same crap but bit faster (for now).

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#137

Post by l72 »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #121
l72 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds… political. You have cross-functional teams interfacing via a tool. It would be reasonable to co-design this interface, so that all user goals are taken into account. When engineering owns the tool, do they approach the configuration of JIRA the same way as they build the product?

We approach tickets that match with our development strategy. A ticket is tied to and represents a branch of code. When that code is merged the ticket is done. It cannot be reopened, you open a new ticket and link it and there will be a new branch.

I know everything that is in our main branch by looking at jira.

Product mangers and executives often want a very different view or workflow and it is hard to bend jira to work for everyone. Jira would need to have things like parallel workflows on a ticket and that would just get confusing and complicated.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#138

Post by moralestapia »

encom wrote: post #122
amai wrote: post #113

Try Azure Boards instead and you will love JIRA. Because there is no software in the world that Microsoft can't make worse.

I've always hated Gmail. I still do. But I switched jobs last year, and the new place uses Outlook instead. I struggle to find a word that adequately describes my disdain for Outlook; hate doesn't even begin to cover it. It struggles at the most basic of tasks: receiving and sending email. I'll get a notification on my phone about an email. I open the app and there's nothing. Pull down to refresh does nothing. It tak…

You open an email, you READ IT.

But it remains unread until you open another email and read it ... and only then, not immediately but after like 1-2 seconds, the previous email gets marked as read ...

Why?

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#139

Post by 12_throw_away »

graypegg wrote: post #117
0xffany wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I like to think of it as a Torment Nexus SDK. Start with a punishing UI (the web UI work and become unresponsive frequently, always wait at least 1.5 s before responding to interactions, etc.), add infinitely customizable bureucratic rules on top, and then make people's jobs dependent on making the numbers go up in the correct manner.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#140

Post by MiddleEndian »

moralestapia wrote: post #138
encom wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always hated Gmail. I still do. But I switched jobs last year, and the new place uses Outlook instead. I struggle to find a word that adequately describes my disdain for Outlook; hate doesn't even begin to cover it. It struggles at the most basic of tasks: receiving and sending email. I'll get a notification on my phone about an email. I open the app and there's nothing. Pull down to refresh does nothing. It tak…

You open an email, you READ IT. But it remains unread until you open another email and read it ... and only then, not immediately but after like 1-2 seconds, the previous email gets marked as read ... Why?

There's a setting to fix this. But it's criminal that this is the default
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