Why Jira Sucks • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#361

Post by donio » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 9:36 PM UTC

gurkendoktor wrote: post #238

tootie wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 100% disagree. Fixing a bug or delivering a feature where you haven't documented the process, (how the criteria were decided, when it was tested and deployed) is as good a running a web site nobody visits. JIRA hate comes from the bottom up. Developers don't like having to have their work parceled out so specifically. But it's not for them. It's for managers and stakeholders who have to report progress and who are…

> And developers are expensive as hell. Not expensive enough apparently, because management will happily tolerate meetings where nothing happens except the whole team fighting Jira. I recently had to replace my web browser because it reduced the time to load a ticket from 4 minutes to 10 seconds due to some caching issue. Entering a date/time on a non-English locale never works. Whenever I try to leave a comment with…

Hey now! I have fond memories of my Linux desktop from 20 years ago, I believe I was using GWM around that time. Please don't compare the abomination that is Jira to that.

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#362

Post by donkeyballs » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 9:37 PM UTC

cowmix wrote: post #158

I'm old enuff to remember when Jira was brought in through the back door and was forced on management.

Those were the days.

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#363

Post by ryandrake » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 9:43 PM UTC

adrr wrote: post #360

tootie wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 100% disagree. Fixing a bug or delivering a feature where you haven't documented the process, (how the criteria were decided, when it was tested and deployed) is as good a running a web site nobody visits. JIRA hate comes from the bottom up. Developers don't like having to have their work parceled out so specifically. But it's not for them. It's for managers and stakeholders who have to report progress and who are…

I worked at an org where you couldn’t do anything without and being assigned a Jira ticket. Want to refactor some code so the feature your working on is maintainable, nope you need an assigned Jira ticket. The fact that work units are called tickets and Jira was built originally for desktop support is the foundation of the problem. Don’t think, just code attitude. Anything is better than Jira including post it notes…

Why is this a problem? Was it difficult to create a Jira ticket? When last i used Jira, it took a few seconds to create one. Less time than it takes to write a commit message.

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#364

Post by ratherbefuddled » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 9:45 PM UTC

1. Unbearably slow. 2 -> n. Whatever.

None of the missing features matter in the slightest in the face of the completely unusable performance.

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#365

Post by Closi » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 9:46 PM UTC

ogre_codes wrote: post #262

Closi wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I did, they would likely tell me to fuck off because they are busy with some other task. Great team dynamic if one of the members is blocked or has an issue because of something that another person wrote, and they get told to fuck off.

So... "shouting across the room" for a ticket which is so trivial it doesn't need to be documented is OK, but telling someone to "fuck off" for doing it is not? Your priorities are backwards. I would not work at a place where interrupting me during coding to fix a trivial bug is considered acceptable.

Each to their own, I wouldn’t want to work at a place where we were just working on our own stuff and if you need something from someone you have to raise a jira ticket before you talk to them even though you are in the same room.

The best teams I have worked with tend to be more collaborative.

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#366

Post by magicalhippo » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 9:46 PM UTC

aqme28 wrote: post #219

mdoms wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fixing a bug or delivering a feature where you haven't documented the process, (how the criteria were decided, when it was tested and deployed) is as good a running a web site nobody visits. Sorry but what? You might need to expand on this. As far as I'm concerned, when a bug is fixed then the value of that fix is realised by the users. I don't see how this is not valuable just because you manager didn't get to eye…

Elaborating on your point. When has JIRA actually been effective as the documentation for a bugfix? JIRA in its most effective will just tell you whether we agreed to do this work and the state the work is in. It is not "documentation."

> When has JIRA actually been effective as the documentation for a bugfix?

We use JIRA specifically for this. Commit messages are JIRA ticket numbers and a short message to provide some context.

In JIRA we document what was requested/reported and which customer the issue affects/came from. We attach relevant documents and link it to possible related tickets. If a case is unclear we send it back to support and get additional info.

Once we commit we comment if needed to provide additional details. Our build pipeline then updates the ticket with build numbers after the issue is resolved so we know which versions has the build, which is pulled by our update distribution mechanism.

This way customers will get a notification when a new version is available that has a fix for one of their issues.

We then assign it to someone on support so they can follow up with the customer and verify that the issue is resolved, or we get the issue back with more details.

This way it's easy for both support, devs and management to see what's going on, and it has the needed context in case someone else has to take over.

Not saying JIRA is perfect by any means, but this works quite well for us. I should mention though that we use on-premise install so speed is not an issue for us. By the sound of things we'll be finding some alternative once that option is gone...

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#367

Post by elric » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 9:47 PM UTC

dyeje wrote: post #164

Jira sucks but it's not because of these reasons. In fact if you fixed each item here, it would be worse. Jira sucks because it is unopinionated and infinitely customizable. As a result, everybody who believes they've discovered the perfect project management setup (spoiler: they haven't) is empowered to cook up their vision via an inscrutable set of customizations. This leads to a bunch of inconsistencies between pr…

There is no magical one-size-fits-all project management setup. Having a tool that is customizable to match your team's workflow is a great win in my book. I've never encountered any organizations where there is endless bikeshedding regarding Jira. Would you care to give an example?

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#368

Post by jabo » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 9:49 PM UTC

ccwilson10 wrote: post #348

nlh wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on everything I've sorta-kinda-summarized here, the #1 thing you guys could do is speed up Jira Cloud. My company uses it and tolerates it, but at this point it now takes 8-10s to load a single issue from the board view, and ~5s to toggle the edit state. There is basically not a single action I can perform that takes less than 5s to execute, and some take more (backlog, etc. view take upwards of 30s to load a f…

Whew. At 8 seconds I'd probably call for the tool to be removed. I had a similar experience while at Atlassian at one point and then we found a way to speed up the (Jira Core) boards by ~5 seconds after changing some JQL for the board logic. That change should be in effect for your org but you'd need to use Classic Business projects. Fun fact, next-gen might actually be a reason why your instance is running slower. A…

I appreciate you jumping into a thread like this and it's great to hear that effort is being invested to speed up Jira Cloud.

However:

> we've been able to load about 100 issues in ~1-2 seconds.

I'm sure there are a ton of things that go into speeding things up and I don't mean to diminish the amount of work involved, but might I suggest raising the performance bar even higher?

Is there a world where loading 100 issues takes 300ms for example? Anything over that typically tends to give users the impression of things being slow.

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#369

Post by offtop5 » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 9:50 PM UTC

Jira is just fine.

But if you find a company where they want to create their own ticket tracker in house, run. It means they're pennywise pound foolish

Re: Why Jira Sucks

#370

Post by bww » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 9:51 PM UTC

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #84

To me, what sucks about JIRA (and would suck about any well-designed tool that replaces it) is not "feature x" but the entire JIRA mentality. All of it. It encourages micro-management. It encourages more and more process. It is the enemy of getting better at the DORA metrics, which requires streamlining process. tickets in JIRA are not the work itself, never was and never will be, it is a LARP of the work, but it get…

I also don't particularly like Jira. The problems you have, however, seem to be with the very idea of tracking what needs to be done, has been done, or really having any kind of process at all by which a team coordinates their efforts.

That's a very different kind of problem. Unless you spend your career work on projects where you're the sole engineer and the PM/PO doesn't know what they're doing, I think that you're probably going to have a difficult time if you can't reconcile yourself to the utility of this sort of process.