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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

#61

Post by oneplane »

dijit wrote: post #36
oneplane wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

We don't have any instances with more than 500 users so perhaps that's the key difference here. We also don't have any PMs or 'admins' that do heavy handed top-down "you must use it this way" configuration.

We do have all product owners meet up at least once each month and the project collaboration methods are often on the agenda to make sure we don't end up with too many different workflows that are essentially duplicates of each other. Besides the workflows (mostly oriented around kanban boards and backlogs) we just make sure that collaboration across teams use compatible workflows and epics so you don't have to copy-paste information and instead just share stuff.

Each individual team is no larger than 8 people, most are smaller.

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

#62

Post by davinci123 »

DrBazza wrote: post #60
AndrewDucker wrote: post #34

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.

Atlassian has always been "enterprise-first" as far as I know. I can only assume that their free-tier which I've rarely encountered in the wild, isn't that successful in terms of conversion to the full-fat product or is costly in some way. I couldn't decide whether enterprise customers would be any worse off. I've maintained for a while that the bug-tracking industry is overdue a "v2" or "v3" product (e.g. IRC -> MSM…

I don't know which world you live in - it was never an enterprise first company. From the very beginning it catered to teams (not orgs) and refused to sell to the enterprise.

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

#63

Post by oneplane »

Macha wrote: post #54
oneplane wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I worked at a company that bailed on a JIRA Server to Cloud migration and went for enterprise instead because cloud's performance was so poor compared to the self hosted version.

We did have people actually migrate away from JIRA because they didn't need the features, not really because they were required to move to the Cloud instance. But the fact that they now had to move at all made it easier to switch (some went to Redmine for some reason, others went to Git-SaaS integrated boards).

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

#64

Post by hospitalJail »

world2vec wrote: post #10
hospitalJail wrote: post #4

I am the ultimate smart tech man at my company. Warned them about Jira. Warned them about M$/Sharepoint/Power Automate. Jira and New M$ services are at bait pricing. They will all be extortionary levels at some point. Kind of amazes me people are paying for inferior closed off services, but I imagine the people making the purchasing decisions are more concerned about which concert or sports game the sales person is t…

What would you recommend as Power Automate replacement?

Python.

I'm pretty uncompromising about that.

Maybe autohotkey in addition.

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

#65

Post by alostpuppy »

piva00 wrote: post #43
Aurornis wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Jira's UX is quite bad though, even when there's not much red tape from management on how to manage your tickets. The response time for a "Create ticket" flow gets in the way, I like how snappy Trello feels, I can create a ticket in seconds with just shortcuts and a few keystrokes so it's pretty effortless to split a task in multiple tickets to be worked on. The clickety-clicky nature of Jira gets in the way for that…

I’ve come to a similar conclusion. I linen using JIRA to going to the DMV. Most seem to agree with the comparison.

Looking into moving over to GH issues or linear.

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

#66

Post by deathtrader666 »

bombcar wrote: post #27
dsr_ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open Source project O will cost your team X hours of time to develop expertise in managing it. Enterprise product E will cost your team X hours of time to develop expertise. O requires install time. E either requires install time or integration time. When O breaks, it is likely that the community has already seen this problem and can provide suggestions via docs, mailing list archives, discussion fora, blogs... Your…

E will invite your execs to dinner at the E conference. O will never invite anyone to anything. This is the secret.

E will also conduct award ceremonies and invite the suits - "Best Practices Journey Award 2023".

O will have a virtual hackathon broadcast on their self-hosted Jitsi.

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

#68

Post by MenhirMike »

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…

It is one of the great tragedies that the Agile Manifesto - which is literally four sentences that fit on a cocktail napkin - got turned into thousands of pages of "standardized Agile", with the biggest abomination in the world being SAFe. I swear, SAFe was a prank, and when people took it seriously they decided to cash in on it.

That said, a good TPM is often worth more than a good engineer. Herding all the cats across multiple teams, projects, competing priorities, keeping track of stuff, holding and being held accountable. And part of a good TPM is to find the right way to work. Maybe it's Kanban. Maybe it's Scrum. Maybe it's Waterfall. Maybe it's a mixture of different methodologies, like waterboarding.

That was the whole point of "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools", finding the right way to work for your team. Jira has to deal with the fact that it's meant to be a tool that fits into any company, so it's generic/customizable, and I've seen too many teams go crazy on the customization, trying to model out a massively complicated process when the team really just needs Kanban with a few extra fields.

I don't hate Jira - I don't like it very much, but I acknowledge that a lot of Jira's issues boil down to mediocre PMs being in charge of it.

Having worked with a good TPM that can really make things happen was eye-opening - tools like Jira can work beautifully if they are setup properly.

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

#69

Post by manquer »

davinci123 wrote: post #52
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.

Funny anecdote - "Jira is still growing and I have personally talked to many developers who love it". There is an inherent bias in Hacker News on certain stories or perceptions getting amplified. This is primarily the silicon valley echo chamber. I have been reading about how Jira is going to die for the last 10 years. It has not happened yet. And I don't foresee it happening in the near future - there are so many co…

Jira will not die , even if every last developer on the planet hate it , they are not the buyers . I have never seen a manager express negative feedback let alone hate it . As long as managers keep liking it over anything else , nothing will change .

There are no realistic peers to Jira for, developers or knowledge workers have to use the product , it only has to designed for the buyer , which atlassian does very well

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

#70

Post by tanseydavid »

MenhirMike wrote: post #68
Aurornis wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It is one of the great tragedies that the Agile Manifesto - which is literally four sentences that fit on a cocktail napkin - got turned into thousands of pages of "standardized Agile", with the biggest abomination in the world being SAFe. I swear, SAFe was a prank, and when people took it seriously they decided to cash in on it. That said, a good TPM is often worth more than a good engineer. Herding all the cats acr…

>> Maybe it's a mixture of different methodologies, like waterboarding.

I'm going to be thinking a lot about this notion. Thanks for the choice wording.

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