Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I fucking hate Jira

ifuckinghatejira.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 539 posts

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#411

Post by ZainRiz »

bamboozled wrote: post #389
ZainRiz wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why don't you think some other company has come along and toppled the Jira crown? Jira is the way it is because Jira ISN'T built for developers. Devs may have to use Jira, but they're not the ones who have to pay for it. I wrote about this a while back: "Who is Jira’s target customer? It’s certainly not the poor developer who struggles to add a link to his bug report. (I’m still mad at them) Take a look at Jira’s s…

Which is funny because 99% of what project managers seem to be about is making sure work gets done. So the first thing they do is deploy a hurdle to this by ensuring they use a tool which is time consuming and confusing for the people who do the work (usually developers to use) and enforce it's usage. JIRA is so slow and the UI so clunky the project managers where I work use some type of spreadsheet upload mechanism…

> Which is funny because 99% of what project managers seem to be about is making sure work gets done

Unfortunately, from the project manager's perspective the emphasis is on the words making sure

And Jira lets them think they're doing that

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#412

Post by ZainRiz »

ratww wrote: post #314
ZainRiz wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why don't you think some other company has come along and toppled the Jira crown? Jira is the way it is because Jira ISN'T built for developers. Devs may have to use Jira, but they're not the ones who have to pay for it. I wrote about this a while back: "Who is Jira’s target customer? It’s certainly not the poor developer who struggles to add a link to his bug report. (I’m still mad at them) Take a look at Jira’s s…

Yep. We often talk about enterprise software, and how it's often bad and, has superfluous features and almost no UX design because it is made for buyers rather than for the real users. Well, guess what. We're the users now.

Exactly. I wonder what Jira engineers think of Jira

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#413

Post by snapetom »

enjoiful wrote: post #401
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #58

I feel like hating on Jira is the pastime that is now passed down from each generation of programmers to the next. I'm going to stick up for Jira. I certainly don't "love" Jira, though I do think they've made significant improvements with "new Jira" (I think they call them team-managed projects now). The problem I have with the incessant Jira bitching is that I rarely feel that bitchers have a true understanding for…

Honestly, the app called Shortcut is the Jira killer. It really is that good .

I really, really love Shortcut. Unfortunately our org is looking for a traditional Gantt chart, and Shortcut is a bit lacking in that.

However, up to this point in our company, it's been great. It's very deliverable-centered. Stories are the deliverables and are the centerpiece of the flow. Tasks just make up a to-do checklist for a story - there's no endless wrangling about that is a task, there's no credit for doing a task (shitty devs can't game the system). Shortcut feels like it hits a nice spot between the monster that is Jira and too-basic tools like Trello. Shortcut is made for developers.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#414

Post by bamboozled »

balls187 wrote: post #400
bamboozled wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People here aren't going to bother talking about alternatives because there are thousands, it's just if you work at a company has invested years in trying to figure out JIRA, no one is going to admit it sucks and just let you use something simpler. I've seen many brave soul suggest something different and it didn't end well.

I've seen several comments about alternatives, and many more replies that say they suck worse than Jira.

1. Have a competent trustworthy project manager work with product to come up with a roadmap, you then document the roadmap in a simple easy to read document which is hierarchical, and contains a list of initiatives to fit the roadmap. Under each initiative you can set a status and a target date and importantly, a team or individuals name who is in-charge of the roadmap. Project managers keep this document up to date.

2. Next, don't deploy JIRA here, just make sure everyone, and I mean everyone understands the roadmap and how they fit into it.

3. Work with those in-charge (who actually do the work) can choose their issue tracker of choice, or whatever method they like and the product management team ensures and trusts those they work with will have made the correct decision here.

4. Allow the dev teams to happily work in something simple like GH issues and be productive.

When the product team wants updates, humans get together and talk about each initiative and how it's going.

Simple.

You might ask about tracking cOmPlEx iNtErDePeNdEnCiEs!!! that killer feature JIRA is about solving...I think that can be solved easily by ensuring managers have situational awareness (they should anyway) and everyone having the same issue tracker. For example GH issues so issues can be easily referenced.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#415

Post by quickthrower2 »

audunw wrote: post #218
kerblang wrote: post #139

In my experience, Jira is the dog that begins to resemble its owner. If you are working in a toxic, dysfunctional organization, Jira will reflect that: - Giant forms with dozens upon dozens of nonsensical fields (preferably with abbreviations as names, like "IFE App.") half of which are required so you just stuff random words in them to make it shut up - Thousands of tickets that would probably take 30+ software devs…

> - Thousands of tickets that would probably take 30+ software devs 100+ years to implement I feel like the company I'm working for has a reasonable attitude towards Jira, and they recently just batch closed all tickets that were older than some date in many projects. So you'd have to actively re-open tickets you had created to keep them alive, if needed. Great decision IMO. It's an interesting exercise to be forced…

I worked somewhere where there were 500 backlog tickets that disappeared and reappeared depending on the ethos of the current team leader.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#416

Post by quickthrower2 »

phist_mcgee wrote: post #396
NonNefarious wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also ex-Apple here. Radar does suffer (to a lesser extent than Jira) from a profound defect, though: Searches are "exact match" for whatever text you put in the title. To find a bug YOU filed, you have to remember the exact words and sequence you used in the title. Did I say "resize window" or "resize a window?" I filed a bug against Radar for this behavior, and developers from other teams added comments expressing s…

Well it's obvious then. Apple needs to create a new and bespoke issue tracker just for radar.

Or you need a “Queen’s English” standard way of describing everything enforced to all users.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#417

Post by not2b »

It depends on how it is used. As a bug tracker it is perfectly adequate, and I prefer having all of the information connected to a given issue in one place. It took us some time to get the flows right, but what we have now seems to work well enough. It is certainly better than the crap system we had before we adopted Jira, though that isn't saying much.

Edit: weird that an honest description of personal experience with Jira was downvoted to zero.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#418

Post by subtledigital »

Ex project manager (few years Jira experience with local and overseas teams).

I believe a lot of the hate comes from the input rather than the software; aka what others are putting in. If you've got a really bad PM/BA your experience with the platform is going to be negative.

As far as everything else what are the alternatives? Most other platforms are horrible or lacking features.

Re: I fucking hate Jira

#420

Post by sirmarksalot »

To everyone asking "what else works better," I remember using Product Studio at Microsoft, which was a thin client over an SQL database. It had some flexibility problems, but it was so, so fast. It's the only ticket management system I've ever used that didn't feel like it was getting in the way. Unfortunately, about 10 years ago Microsoft chose to modernize/dogfood on Team Foundation Server, which was just awful, probably worse than JIRA. I have no idea what they're using nowadays.

I wonder if the performance we got out of Product Studio had more to do with having a locally hosted instance, vs. running in the cloud, and I wonder if teams that host their own JIRA/Confluence/Bitbucket servers have a better experience. I do find that one of the major gripes people have with planning tools is that they break flow, and I wonder how much of that comes just from the amount of stamina required to maintain focus while waiting for all the spinners.

Post reply on HN