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I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

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Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

#261

Post by circusfly »

blueskythinking wrote: post #181
circusfly wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some places, any story higher than 5 gets split, an Epic is created and the 2 (or more) new stories are added to the new epic. I really don't get the online disdain for JIRA unless it's Microsoft employee astroturfers, almost as bad as Jetbrains and Red Hat astroturfers.

Ah, that explains why I keep being asked to split a complex feature into pointless pieces that don’t stand alone. No wonder we need so many team hours in sprint planning, to keep track of them all.

No system is perfect for sure. It's a rule of thumb. If it doesn't fit then stick with the really large story that simply cannot be broken down into manageable chunks but it should be a super rare corner case that some piece of work is so huge yet atomically consistent that there is absolutely no human way to break it down, at all, in any way shape or form.

Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

#262

Post by ch4s3 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #53
ch4s3 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until someone comes along and tries to put some scrum into your kanban.

Ahh, someone woke up and chose violence today.

hilariously someone hated my joke enough to downvote it, but I think there's a kernel of truth.

Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

#263

Post by psunavy03 »

kortex wrote: post #207
zac23or wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Jira is brilliant” I've never read that sentence before! My feeling is... developers hate Jira, managers love Jira. And that is expected. The tendency is for things loved by managers to be hated by developers, such as meetings, metrics, etc. An example of a very misused metric: In one of my jobs, managers started using Scrum Poker results as a productivity measure. “My team scored 100 points in the last sprint.” Ima…

I'm a developer, and while I don't love it, I certainly don't hate it, and I don't see it worse than any other task-tracking tool. I haven't used trello or asana in a hot minute, but they were way worse in terms of UI and UX. I'm not totally sold on the whole points poker process though, but that could be a criticism of agile as a whole.

"Agile as a whole" does not require planning poker, or story points, or burndown charts, or Fibonacci estimates, or Kanban boards, or any of that. Neither does Scrum. Google "Agile Manifesto" and "2020 Scrum Guide."

If it isn't in the 4 values and 12 principles, it's not required in Agile. If it isn't in the guide, it isn't required in Scrum.

Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

#264

Post by passivegains »

ta1243 wrote: post #248
cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s why I just can’t take some dev communities seriously. Too many immature / inexperienced people will talk eachother into thinking that their “I should just be able to sit here and code!” mentality is justified or even viable. Who the hell else gets to work like that? The utter hubris.

I work like that, but I love occasional meetings to catch up with peers. My immediate team of 3 people has a twice-weekly "standup" meeting, and communicate through the rest of the week in a slack channel. I have a weekly catchup with another team and a monthly with a couple more, and once every 3 months a large pan-org community get together in person, typically with a beer and curry. Of course there are terrible me…

It sounds like you don't work like that, you talk to other humans at occasional meetings. I do mostly "just sit down and code" and it's a problem. Your situation sounds healthy and productive to me, I want to be more like that.

Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

#265

Post by zac23or »

psunavy03 wrote: post #206
zac23or wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Jira is brilliant” I've never read that sentence before! My feeling is... developers hate Jira, managers love Jira. And that is expected. The tendency is for things loved by managers to be hated by developers, such as meetings, metrics, etc. An example of a very misused metric: In one of my jobs, managers started using Scrum Poker results as a productivity measure. “My team scored 100 points in the last sprint.” Ima…

> The tendency is for things loved by managers to be hated by developers, such as meetings, metrics, etc. There's an unfortunate tendency for some people to scoff at the immutable fact that to write software, you have to talk to other human beings. And that if a company is paying you good money to do it, they are going to want to know when it will be done and what ROI they are getting on your salary. Sure, there are…

> But to lump "meetings" and "metrics" into a "hated" category is the mark of an immature dev

To me, these things are normal occurrences in organizational theater. I ignore that. But after sitting in a few 12-hour meetings, participating in some metrics-based programming (MBP) and filling out 100 fields in a deployment request tool, I UNDERSTAND if someone hates this kind of thing, is not only 'immaturity'.

And I'm not try to change anything, my experience is that if we can convince those in charge to stop having unnecessary meetings or using metrics incorrectly, something worse will replace those things, like no meetings, but super micromanagement. ... because the nature of the organization that does these things is to continue doing them, in other ways.

Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

#266

Post by neilkk »

n4r9 wrote: post #153
Supermancho wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My primary problem with JIRA, is that there is very little support for dependency trees. I have tickets X and Y linked to A,B,C,D and nothing but an ad-hoc way of determining how they are related. A visualization and tool to assign places in a tree, are part of what keeps JIRA from being excellent...ok that AND the horrid UX.

If Jira could take a dependency tree and estimates against each item and build out a timeline and display it like a Gant chart, that would be incredible. Even better, factor in employee working hours per week and bank holidays. Even better, dynamically update the timelines based on estimate updates, delays in external dependencies, or sick days. But actually my biggest grievance is the terrible search function. You c…

Didn't our whole software industry come to a consensus to stop doing things like this because the results were fundamentally inaccurate and the invariable outcomes were stakeholders feeling hard done by and/or ICs being victimised by middle managers?

Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

#267

Post by neilkk »

paiute wrote: post #148
sa46 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been pretty happy with Slab. Straightforward shared wiki with a good editor, governance, and integrations. https://slab.com/ I tried using README files in the repo but there’s far too much friction to get most folks to bother. Google Docs tend to disappear content due to a lack of structure.

At my current job, i need to make a jira ticket, a branch, do a live review… all to change a minor thing in a README

That sounds bad, but sometimes it makes sense to optimise the process for midsize changes. The vast majority of useful work is done in midsize changes.

Lots of people like to generate a flurry of tiny commits but it's not necessarily the most productive way to work, even without much overhead per change. You can always bundle tiny changes together until it's worth it for you and other people like the reviewer to do the parts that don't scale downwards.

Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

#268

Post by ta1243 »

passivegains wrote: post #264
ta1243 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work like that, but I love occasional meetings to catch up with peers. My immediate team of 3 people has a twice-weekly "standup" meeting, and communicate through the rest of the week in a slack channel. I have a weekly catchup with another team and a monthly with a couple more, and once every 3 months a large pan-org community get together in person, typically with a beer and curry. Of course there are terrible me…

It sounds like you don't work like that, you talk to other humans at occasional meetings. I do mostly "just sit down and code" and it's a problem. Your situation sounds healthy and productive to me, I want to be more like that.

I talk to other humans at productive meetings - about 2-3 hours a week on average. Those that need updates don't need my time -- they're stored in the jiras. Crucially that information is still available months and years later.

If I didn't communicate, how else would I know where the problems are, or what other people are working on so I don't duplicate effort.

90% of my week is not in meetings though, and about 0% of my week is in business metrics (plenty of metrics on things like availability from monitoring systems, but nothing out of jira, because what's the point in trying to record metrics which nobody cares about)

Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

#269

Post by n4r9 »

neilkk wrote: post #266
n4r9 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Jira could take a dependency tree and estimates against each item and build out a timeline and display it like a Gant chart, that would be incredible. Even better, factor in employee working hours per week and bank holidays. Even better, dynamically update the timelines based on estimate updates, delays in external dependencies, or sick days. But actually my biggest grievance is the terrible search function. You c…

Didn't our whole software industry come to a consensus to stop doing things like this because the results were fundamentally inaccurate and the invariable outcomes were stakeholders feeling hard done by and/or ICs being victimised by middle managers?

Possibly, but in my experience a lot of software development happens effectively like what I described above, except in a more manual way with more potential for error and way more effort to update dependencies when things get delayed. I'm currently working for a business-to-business company and the POs are continually pressured to come up with roadmaps plus timelines. They therefore continually ask senior ICs to give "rough estimates" of feature sets that will take months. Those roadmaps are then handed to the client, who will moan about the length of time and demand it gets shortened somehow. In some cases the product manager (who is also the MD) will make something up to tell the client, or will tell the dev team to get something done "as much as possible" in one month because the client is going live with a new contract.

Obviously it's broken and inefficient, but I'm sure it's how it goes in a lot of places.

Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

#270

Post by ta1243 »

kortex wrote: post #207
zac23or wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Jira is brilliant” I've never read that sentence before! My feeling is... developers hate Jira, managers love Jira. And that is expected. The tendency is for things loved by managers to be hated by developers, such as meetings, metrics, etc. An example of a very misused metric: In one of my jobs, managers started using Scrum Poker results as a productivity measure. “My team scored 100 points in the last sprint.” Ima…

I'm a developer, and while I don't love it, I certainly don't hate it, and I don't see it worse than any other task-tracking tool. I haven't used trello or asana in a hot minute, but they were way worse in terms of UI and UX. I'm not totally sold on the whole points poker process though, but that could be a criticism of agile as a whole.

> I'm not totally sold on the whole points poker process though, but that could be a criticism of agile as a whole.

My understanding of agile is give your developers the tools they want, the information they want, and the ability and incentive to communicate widely, quickly, and frequently however they want, and get out of the way. You have to devolve responsibility and accountability for meeting business goals down to the team level though, and that team has to act as one.

None of that has anything to do with "points poker process", or any process. Obviously everyone has a process, even solo developers working on their own hobby, but that process is "what works best".

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