does anybody use monday.com ? it looks very capable at high level (and addresses some of those observability issues stated in the site)
Why Jira Sucks
41–50 of 530 posts
Re: Why Jira Sucks
#42Every bullet point says "Missing...", but I feel like the main issue about Jira is that it has waaay to many features, and that it's super slow! The only bullet point I do agree with, is that Jira is missing an easy (or IMHO a minimalist / simple) interface. The tool is a mess, and the people using it are probably also using it in the wrong way, making the whole situation way worse. Don't get me wrong, I like Jira to…
I think you are right: the SLOWNESS is a killer. In fact, I think it is THE show-stopper flaw.
I recently succeeded in an 18-month-long effort to coordinate moving off of JIRA at work. We moved to clubhouse.io and it's been great. We were also looking closely at GitHub Issues + something like ZenHub for the missing project-management features — and that would have been great, too.
As soon as we moved off of JIRA, the amount of communication that started happening in the most relevant place — the bug tracker thread — increased by like... I don't know, something like 20x or 50x.
In our years on JIRA (the hosted plan) virtually nobody every discussed the details of the bugs on JIRA. We filed tickets there, and checked them off when done, and used it to review what had gotten done after each iteration — but nobody used it day-to-day. If discussion was to happen about a bug, it happened on Slack (which is horrible for ever finding it again, but it is fast).
The reason, I believe, is simply that JIRA is waaaayyy tooooo slow. Nobody wanted to use it day-to-day. You made a list of stories at the beginning of the iteration, and you checked it again at at the end of the iteration, to mark the ones you did done. I did this too.
Now, all the discussions directly about the bugs/features in the tracker happen directly on the tracker. Which, I recalled, was how it used to be several years ago before we moved to JIRA (from GitHub issues).
There is a lot of other stuff that is clunky about JIRA but I think we could have probably dealt with it, if it wasn't so slow that every interaction — even simple things like "find and open the bug I was working on most recently" or "see what is assigned to me this iteration" — felt like rm -rf node_modules && npm install and you somehow find yourself checking twitter before it even opens...
Speed matters!
Re: Why Jira Sucks
#43Co-founder of Zepel.io [0] here. Thank you for giving Zepel a shoutout in the Jira alternatives section of the landing page. Would love to get feedback from the community regarding our App.
Re: Why Jira Sucks
#44Every bullet point says "Missing...", but I feel like the main issue about Jira is that it has waaay to many features, and that it's super slow! The only bullet point I do agree with, is that Jira is missing an easy (or IMHO a minimalist / simple) interface. The tool is a mess, and the people using it are probably also using it in the wrong way, making the whole situation way worse. Don't get me wrong, I like Jira to…
A former PM prioritized issues in the backlog by making a ticket and giving it a name like "Groom these next" or "Prioritized for January release", placing it in the backlog, then placing the tickets to be prioritized above it They also hid bugs from being counted in reports by marking them as stories but that's another conversation
So much project management is about gaming internal politics and managing information flow between lower and higher parts of the hierarchy.
These tools market themselves as creating transparency but they are in practice often used to hide or excuse things.
I suppose that is why they all take the tragic path from being heralded as new and fresh in the beginning to absolutely being hated in the end.
Goes for methodologies as well (I remember the agile manifesto ... look at where we are now).
Re: Why Jira Sucks
#45Every bullet point says "Missing...", but I feel like the main issue about Jira is that it has waaay to many features, and that it's super slow! The only bullet point I do agree with, is that Jira is missing an easy (or IMHO a minimalist / simple) interface. The tool is a mess, and the people using it are probably also using it in the wrong way, making the whole situation way worse. Don't get me wrong, I like Jira to…
If you want to try something in this space that's really snappy and responsive, checkout out Kitemaker (YC W21) [0]. I'm a founder and happy to chat with anyone that has any feedback/feature requests: hi@kitemaker.co
Re: Why Jira Sucks
#46What would you have us use instead? Trello?
Am I the only person who liked bugzilla?
Re: Why Jira Sucks
#47We are trying to unsuck Jira for users with an alternative UI, allowing them to manage Jira issues on a virtual whiteboard. [1]. [1] https://spartez-software.com/products/whiteboards-for-jira
Spartez rings a bell. Aren't you the very people who create software for Atlassian?
Re: Why Jira Sucks
#48They programmed it in Java, so its performance is sad
The nineties called, they want their java jokes back.
Re: Why Jira Sucks
#491. It is dog slow. 2. It is dog slow. 3. It is dog slow. ... When my team had an important as-quickly-as-possible sprint, we dropped Jira and switched to Google Docs as it was much easier and faster than Jira. My conclusion was that Jira doesn't do much for developers that can't be done in some Google Docs/Sheets.
Yeah, that's right. Before we escaped JIRA, my team would often do that, too, even for regular sprints. Make a checklist in a collaborative editor tool like Google Docs or Notion, and just do the day to day work there.
Then somebody would have to copy it to JIRA so the work would get tracked.
But very little of the planning, work breakdown, day to day updates, or discussion actually happened on JIRA because it was literally like a hundred times slower (with the convoluted UI compounded by incessant "wait... is it even loading?... oh, OK, it finally loaded" at each step of the way).
Re: Why Jira Sucks
#50Can someone - anyone - recommend a better product (non-cloud)?
Gitlab (self-hosted).
The community/FOSS version mainly lacks the kind of reporting that jira has (the paid/Enterprise version has some basic reports, such as burndown charts). It's not perfect, but it's fast, simple and has an easy API and webhooks.
In the field I work in (CRM/webdev/consulting), JIRA used to be everywhere. Now all those shops have moved to Gitlab.