Jira Is a Microcosm of What’s Broken in Software Development • Hacker News Board

Re: Jira Is a Microcosm of What’s Broken in Software Development

#141

Post by hinkley » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 8:24 PM UTC

tus88 wrote: post #105

Yes. I remember the first time I encountered Jira, I assumed we would just login and start created cards and tasks etc. Except the first meeting we were introduced to a "consultant" who needed to "design" our process flow before we could do anything. I went back to Trac needless to say.

I think the problem is that Atlassian has designed their tools for information hiding.

I may not agree with Larry Wall on much, but he is credited with one of my favorite aphorisms:

Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible.

You can't pre-filter complexity for developers. That's our job. We have to know that there features available even if they have been turned off. Otherwise we're going to blame the tool for skimping on functionality. And we are perfectly right too, because how the fuck are we supposed to know that Bamboo has a feature if the button only shows up for full administrators?

Of course we're going to bag on it. And they deserve every bit of it.

Re: Jira Is a Microcosm of What’s Broken in Software Development

#142

Post by moretta » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 8:24 PM UTC

t0mbstone wrote: post #29

I hate plenty of things about JIRA, but I'm flagging this post because it's incredibly biased (written by a direct competitor to JIRA), and their site is also extremely hostile to users with their messaging notifications.

Yeah it almost reads like a comparison piece. Pretty much all of the points relate back to the fact developers are adding manual updates and how the competitor solves it by integrating Git PRs and commits. However that's easily possible in JIRA now via the integrations (e.g. GitHub) and automations to close tickets depending on the status.

Still, even then with the automations in any of this software to show VCS updates you're going to get managers asking for updates depending on your environment.

Re: Jira Is a Microcosm of What’s Broken in Software Development

#143

Post by seanjregan » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 8:26 PM UTC

Hi Sean here. I work on Jira at Atlassian and I also met with Justin and the Jira Admin for his company prior to this article. I've also heard from him since. He was not consulted re the use of his comments. Generally, I'd encourage vendors to seek permission when citing a customer in marketing in this way. It's a simple respect that can be paid with low effort.

I thought it might be helpful to share a few thoughts on the article. To do that I've added annotations on the article itself using Hypothes.is an open web annotation service. This lets us have a conversation right over the article. I've added a dozen or so comments, gifs and links to help add color from the Atlassian POV.

You can view my comments and add your own via this link or find me at @seanjregan on Twitter. https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdzone.com%2Farticles%2Fj...

Usually we don't engage in the annual articles by competitors that pin SW industry failures on Jira but in this case it seems a lot of what we've been shipping in Jira Cloud is perhaps still unknown. (And, this annotation tool seemed well suited to this sort of dialog.)

Much respect to the LinearB team. Anyone working to make SW Development better is good in our book. Great products will stand out on their merits among the dev community.

While riding the Jira coat-tails via blog titles is a common approach to generating traffic, I want to also note that Atlassian is very open and we're happy to partner with any vendor that can make dev life smoother.

We partner with GitHub and GitLab as an example. If they can do a better job or a customer prefers their tools then it is on us to 1.) Support them and 2.) continue to up our game.

-@seanjregan Add your feedback, comments or Jira tips to the article here. https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdzone.com%2Farticles%2Fj...

Re: Jira Is a Microcosm of What’s Broken in Software Development

#144

Post by idj » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 8:34 PM UTC

clairity wrote: post #77

jasonpeacock wrote: post #36

Usually Jira sucks because it's not setup correctly to support teams' workflows, instead it's used to impose workflows on teams. Jira can be as heavy or lightweight as you make it, but most of the suffering I see is because the way teams work isn't being supported by the Jira owners/admins.

exactly. if the process is broken, jira makes an easy scapegoat but that's misplaced. i've joined several teams (as PM) that hated jira until we were able to talk through the preferred workflow, and then reconfigure jira to support that workflow. then it was embraced, especially with automations that advanced tickets through the process where possible.

Agreed. I guess what make tickles my brain about it is that you can have a rather complex set of automation, integration etc. under the hood, while keeping the surface somewhat clean.

Re: Jira Is a Microcosm of What’s Broken in Software Development

#145

Post by fragmede » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 8:42 PM UTC

pianoben wrote: post #58

I recognize that this is a marketing blog, but it blames Jira for what are really culture problems and/or bad management practices. This is an emblematic quote: Take subtasks, for example. The invention of Jira subtasks is an affront to dev teams. Clearly someone who has never spoken to an engineer on a dev team created it. It’s the least dev-friendly way possible to get insight into what’s happening with a Jira stor…

My problem with subtasks in Jira, is that they're a constantly leaky abstraction. While an epic and task are different on multiple levels, but what makes something a subtask vs a task? This seems like a trivial question, and it's frustrating because it should be, but because Jira has encoded subtasks as a very-similar-but-also-very-different object than tasks, and some actions can only be done against tasks and others only subtasks.

Re: Jira Is a Microcosm of What’s Broken in Software Development

#146

Post by csours » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 8:47 PM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #118

csours wrote: post #91

To paraphrase many of the comments here: Most of the problems that devs have with Jira are not problems with base Jira, but with the implementation and usage of Jira. Jira is perfectly fine, just like ALM is perfectly fine, TFS (Azure Devops?) is perfectly fine, Trello is perfectly fine, etc... The problems come from the implementation, and the implementation is reflective of the culture. Any work planning tool becom…

It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the bottom. It is perfectly reasonable to blame the agent of chaos for the chaos that results.

ehh, but this is kind of like blaming the results on hitting concrete vs hitting a cornfield. Yes, you might have a slightly less bad time hitting the cornfield, but the height of the drop is the more determining factor.

Re: Jira Is a Microcosm of What’s Broken in Software Development

#147

Post by inetknght » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 8:57 PM UTC

jgalt212 wrote: post #82

AstralStorm wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's as dumb as clauses get. I'll try to get the legal team on it. It's a landmine as even a casual discussion of performance voids the license. Any discussion of outage may or may not involve this point. It is a devops prevention clause.

> even a casual discussion of performance voids the license Of course, that assumes such terms are enforceable. But, even if not, just having them in there is just so odious as to make one seek out other solutions.

Oh of course performance matters. But privacy? Atlassian's privacy policy is even worse.

Re: Jira Is a Microcosm of What’s Broken in Software Development

#148

Post by awinter-py » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 9:03 PM UTC

rgbrgb wrote: post #54

awinter-py wrote: post #5

yeah, there are a couple of up-and-coming tools that try to correlate product spec to tickets while maintaining a separation between the two hard problems like spec, estimation of work, and assignment of work to people are conflated in a ticketing-only universe

Interesting. Can you drop some links to your favorites?

haven't used any so wouldn't endorse, but the general category is 'roadmap' tools or what used to be called 'idea management'

there are some 'release management' or 'launch management' plugins for JIRA that address the other side of the pipeline, but solve similar problems -- also haven't used, but friends who are big-company PMs talk about them

IMO many saas products are inflexible, their strength ('we automate workflows') is also a weakness ('better not deviate from these workflows')

The only project management tool I've heard people rave about is airtable, which is basically an improved spreadsheet UX and not purpose-built for project management.

I suspect the future of project management saas is tools / plugins that provide summary views, but the tickets / specs exist in freeform spreadsheets like airtable. This 'view plugin' ecosystem is alread starting to exist for notion and roam.

Re: Jira Is a Microcosm of What’s Broken in Software Development

#149

Post by kickingvegas » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 9:06 PM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #145

pianoben wrote: post #58

I recognize that this is a marketing blog, but it blames Jira for what are really culture problems and/or bad management practices. This is an emblematic quote: Take subtasks, for example. The invention of Jira subtasks is an affront to dev teams. Clearly someone who has never spoken to an engineer on a dev team created it. It’s the least dev-friendly way possible to get insight into what’s happening with a Jira stor…

My problem with subtasks in Jira, is that they're a constantly leaky abstraction. While an epic and task are different on multiple levels, but what makes something a subtask vs a task? This seems like a trivial question, and it's frustrating because it should be, but because Jira has encoded subtasks as a very-similar-but-also-very-different object than tasks, and some actions can only be done against tasks and other…

I learned the other day that estimates/story points entered into subtasks do not rollup to parents unless specifically configured. Seems like initial thinking from Atlassian was that subtasks don’t affect scope. https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Core-questions/Subta...

Re: Jira Is a Microcosm of What’s Broken in Software Development

#150

Post by Simulacra » Thu, Aug 13, 2020, 9:09 PM UTC

Jira lost its usefulness around 2014. It became much too cumbersome to use, and Atlassian‘s help documentation was/is? out of date. We asked for training, something more than poorly written documentation, and we were quoted an exorbitant price for that training. That was the straw that broke the back and we left Atlassian for good in late 2015 and never looked back.