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Atlassian cripples’ Jira automation for all but enterprise customers

community.atlassian.com

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Re: Atlassian cripples’ Jira automation for all but enterprise customers

#31

Post by oneplane »

cassianoleal wrote: post #25
vertigolimbo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can make it as useless and as powerful as you want. I have worked on many projects and developers loved it (no joke). But it was down to having it properly setup and using just the bare minimum that enabled to do work. What often happens, is that JIRA "experts" (usually incompetent PMs or Scrum masters) let JIRA dictate your workflow. That's where discontent arises. (No affiliation to Atlassian).

You can make good workflows on Jira, yes. That doesn't fix the horrible UX, sluggishness, confusing options, forms that present a lot of useless fields but don't give you the option to present other, more useful ones, ... I could go on. Jira is a terrible tool.

Sounds like your experience mostly revolves around older self-hosted JIRA versions?

The UX on modern JIRA has been fine for years, and the options and forms are easy to use. Granted, you can add useless restrictions and weird field configurations, but if someone configures it until it's broken, that would be on them, not really on the product.

Re: Atlassian cripples’ Jira automation for all but enterprise customers

#32

Post by SamWhited »

vertigolimbo wrote: post #22
xvilka wrote: post #12

GitHub and GitLab workflows are much more convenient in my opinion. They were made with actual workers in mind: developers, QA, release managers, DevOps, etc. Jira, on the other hand, is purely manager's toy with all it's useless features that often stand in a way of daily routine. I never saw any developer who was happy about Jira.

You can make it as useless and as powerful as you want. I have worked on many projects and developers loved it (no joke). But it was down to having it properly setup and using just the bare minimum that enabled to do work. What often happens, is that JIRA "experts" (usually incompetent PMs or Scrum masters) let JIRA dictate your workflow. That's where discontent arises. (No affiliation to Atlassian).

I used to work for Atlassian (not on Jira) and the Jira "experts" that worked there set it up in such a way that everyone there hated it too. If your product has such bad defaults and is so flexible that this can happen, you've made a bad product whether it's technically possible to use it right or not.

Re: Atlassian cripples’ Jira automation for all but enterprise customers

#33

Post by Aurornis »

xvilka wrote: post #12

GitHub and GitLab workflows are much more convenient in my opinion. They were made with actual workers in mind: developers, QA, release managers, DevOps, etc. Jira, on the other hand, is purely manager's toy with all it's useless features that often stand in a way of daily routine. I never saw any developer who was happy about Jira.

> I never saw any developer who was happy about Jira.

We did a clean Jira setup from scratch as set up by developers for developers. It was fine.

It wasn’t until the company hired full time TPMs who made it unnecessarily complicated with an endless list of plugins and processes that it got to be miserable.

The real killer was the way they wanted us to use it: They declared that only TPMs could move tickets, and only in meetings. So instead of us moving our own work along we had to queue it up and wait for an hour long meeting where we waited our turn to tell the TPM which tickets needed to be moved, then sparred with him in debate for 5 minutes as he tried to debate the done-ness with us through a game of 20 questions.

Repeat those meetings 3X a week and I developed a visceral objection to Jira. Only later did I realize that what I hated most was actually the pomp and ceremony that came with Jira-toting TPMs.

Jira itself wasn’t too bad when we used it efficiently on our own. The modern versions are much faster than the sluggish experience of the days of old

Re: Atlassian cripples’ Jira automation for all but enterprise customers

#34

Post by AndrewDucker »

Lots of discussion here of whether Jira is any good or not. Almost none about the actual contents of the article.

None at all about how the changes are bad for all but enterprise customers. It's not obvious to me - and it would be nice to have an explanation.

Re: Atlassian cripples’ Jira automation for all but enterprise customers

#35

Post by bachmeier »

mellosouls wrote: post #29

I don't use Jira but any bad faith move (as claimed) is a serious concern for users of other Atlassian products. I've always been a champion of Trello and really don't want to be having to add cautionary notes about corporate sharks owning it, and functionality taken for granted being whipped away. Not cool.

Bad faith move? They gave ownership of my Bitbucket account to someone else and initially refused to even tell me what they did:

https://lancebachmeier.com/trivia/atlassian.html

Re: Atlassian cripples’ Jira automation for all but enterprise customers

#36

Post by dijit »

oneplane wrote: post #31
cassianoleal wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can make good workflows on Jira, yes. That doesn't fix the horrible UX, sluggishness, confusing options, forms that present a lot of useless fields but don't give you the option to present other, more useful ones, ... I could go on. Jira is a terrible tool.

Sounds like your experience mostly revolves around older self-hosted JIRA versions? The UX on modern JIRA has been fine for years, and the options and forms are easy to use. Granted, you can add useless restrictions and weird field configurations, but if someone configures it until it's broken, that would be on them, not really on the product.

This is so divorced from my experience. The only Jira setups I have been with that worked were ones where we were actively diminishing its use in the company.

Small companies where only a small(er) unit of people use Jira (cloud) is fine, large teams, large workflows, selfhosted or cloud: doesn’t matter. It was always terrible.

We actively discriminate against Jira in our company at the moment, and for us it works pretty good. But that is because it is not essential and we do not lean into it.

Re: Atlassian cripples’ Jira automation for all but enterprise customers

#38

Post by jollyllama »

RamblingCTO wrote: post #8
hd4 wrote: post #3

https://alternativeto.net/software/jira/?license=opensource

While Jira and everything else by Atlassian has and will always be garbage, it looks way better than Redmine at least.

Redmine sucks; upgrades are painful unless you're very good with managing Rails. We are looking to switch to YouTrack.

Re: Atlassian cripples’ Jira automation for all but enterprise customers

#40

Post by calvinmorrison »

Aurornis wrote: post #33
xvilka wrote: post #12

GitHub and GitLab workflows are much more convenient in my opinion. They were made with actual workers in mind: developers, QA, release managers, DevOps, etc. Jira, on the other hand, is purely manager's toy with all it's useless features that often stand in a way of daily routine. I never saw any developer who was happy about Jira.

> I never saw any developer who was happy about Jira. We did a clean Jira setup from scratch as set up by developers for developers. It was fine. It wasn’t until the company hired full time TPMs who made it unnecessarily complicated with an endless list of plugins and processes that it got to be miserable. The real killer was the way they wanted us to use it: They declared that only TPMs could move tickets, and only…

I still absolutely miss the really early iterations of JIRA. better than a bug tracking system but none of the complexity on top. we were still managing our projects as waterfall using Microsoft Project Planner but devs were doing all their work in Jira. we had complex workflows that were managed really well, approvals built in all sort of good stuff.
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