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I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

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Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

#71
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in a mid-to-large org. The more agile part use tools like jira and slack. The older part (established in the 1920s) use Remedy and Teams. Jira is brilliant. It is team-led. Different teams have different approaches, some love all the features like components, versions, issue types, assignee, kanban boards, scrumms, reports etc etc. Others like my team use it with subject/description/comments. You make the tool…

I can personally vouch that Jira can be inflicted on engineers in a “KPI led” way.

yes same, in fact the access to metrics (for use in part in KPIs) was a primary driver of our adoption of Jira

Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

#72
post #38
post #7

Jira tries to solve everyone’s problem. It tries to incorporate everyone’s idea of how and what’s needed to be tracked. I can just say from my own experience that the one that created the workflow and what fields that they absolutely must have to do some sort of follow up, have never worked as a developer or anything near a software project, and yet enforces all this garbage for their illusion of control. And yet the…

I share the sentiment and frustration of having to fill useless boxes. However, as a manager, things go south very quick if you're not tracking what's being changed and by whom. You won't know what's included in your release, nor if it was tested properly. You won't know who to reach for fixes after testing or even what to tell clients when they ask if a feature/fix was shipped. I hate overly complicated processes, b…

Continuous deployment is the solution to that. You always know what is in a release because it's the one thing that you were trying to change when you clicked merge.

Overly complicated processes are just patches to try to cover up for immature engineering practices.

Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

#73
post #8

I always wonder how much of this sort of thing is disdain for the specific tool vs. disdain for what working in a mid-to-large org. is like and the overhead it usually brings with it.

When I clicked on the site the very first opinion called Jira shit because they had 20 different boards for the same thing, 2000 tickets in the backlog and 20 different mandatory fields for each ticket.

Which is absolutely not the fault of Jira. Jira does not make you create 20 boards and per default a Title is all you need to create a Ticket. By the complaints own wording they had 2000 tickets because management refused to delete outdated and irrelevant tickets.

A new tool would not fix this since I would bet that management would insist that all 20 boards with all tickets in the backlog would need to be transitioned to the new tool. The mandatory fields are obviously also highly important to management, those need to be configured in the new tool as well.

Instead of complaining about the obviously bad management they just complain about Jira. That is, I think, very common when complaining about jira.

Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

#74
post #24

Never heard about it. You mean this product? https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/ While I have not heard about Jira, Atlassian rings a bell. Not sure why.

i wonder how common this is, and why havent you heard of it, specially that you know about this site hacker news this is almost on the same level as someone saying he never heard of subversion

People working on open source "hackery" stuff are probably much more likely to be familiar with Github / Gitlab issues, or Bugzilla. I can only think of one open source project that uses Jira; it's my only encounter with the program, and it's without question the single worst experience I've ever had reporting a bug to a project from a technical point of view.

I'm not so sure about the subversion comparison. Maybe it's out of date - someone who got started programming in the last ~10 years has probably only ever used Git, whereas plenty of organizations use Jira, as far as I know.

Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

#75
post #8

I always wonder how much of this sort of thing is disdain for the specific tool vs. disdain for what working in a mid-to-large org. is like and the overhead it usually brings with it.

Trust me it's distain for the tool. Jira is bad on three fronts:

1. It's too configurable. It's like the company wiki. People come in, set up some random projects, processes, fields, statuses, etc. and then move on. There's rarely someone making it all consistent and sensible. This results in task statuses that can be TODO, BACKLOG, PENDING, WAITING, TO DO, etc. etc. etc. You also end up with waaaay too many fields for tasks. Arbitrary distinctions between "Tasks" and "Stories", etc. You're at the mercy of your Jira admin who will definitely make worse decisions than e.g. the developers of Phabricator or Gitlab. Hiding useful fields, adding pointless ones, etc.

2. Despite being super configurable, it can't do some really basic things you'd expect from something whose sole job is task tracking. For example you can only parent tasks 2 or 3 levels deep. A task can't have two parents. Subtasks can't be in different sprints. You can't reorder tasks by priority in the backlog.

3. Most offensively it is just incredibly slow. The main way you add tasks to a sprint is drag and drop on the backlog, but it performs so badly (100% CPU all the time) that they've had to add context menu options to move tasks to the top/bottom or to a sprint. I believe there's also an option to disable animations. A simple web page should not consume 100% of my CPU.

It's by far the worst issue tracker I've ever used.

Companies still pay for it though because PMs love the pretty burndown charts and being able to add a gazillion fields to tasks. How will they report project status to their bosses if they can't have Jira work out the exact-to-the-second estimated delivery time automatically? And by "automatically" I mean by making someone else do all the work.

Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

#76
post #8

I always wonder how much of this sort of thing is disdain for the specific tool vs. disdain for what working in a mid-to-large org. is like and the overhead it usually brings with it.

Yeah 100% the root pain is from low agency/trust dynamics of a large org.

Jira is just the tool management chooses because nobody-got-fired-for-buying-jira.

Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

#77
post #8

I always wonder how much of this sort of thing is disdain for the specific tool vs. disdain for what working in a mid-to-large org. is like and the overhead it usually brings with it.

I've wondered the same thing about Microsoft Teams. Is Teams as horrible as people say, or do they just hate it because it's what they happen to use for video meetings at work? Conversely, I don't hear much hate for zoom.

Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

#78
I really don’t understand the disdain for jira, it is not great but mostly fine. Basically every other tool I have used has been worse. Heard good things about Linear but have a hard time believing that the effort to switch from jira to linear would be worth it for an org.

Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

#79
post #59
post #8

I always wonder how much of this sort of thing is disdain for the specific tool vs. disdain for what working in a mid-to-large org. is like and the overhead it usually brings with it.

I work in a mid-to-large org. The more agile part use tools like jira and slack. The older part (established in the 1920s) use Remedy and Teams. Jira is brilliant. It is team-led. Different teams have different approaches, some love all the features like components, versions, issue types, assignee, kanban boards, scrumms, reports etc etc. Others like my team use it with subject/description/comments. You make the tool…

[deleted]

Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

#80
post #8

I always wonder how much of this sort of thing is disdain for the specific tool vs. disdain for what working in a mid-to-large org. is like and the overhead it usually brings with it.

Trust me it's distain for the tool. Jira is bad on three fronts: 1. It's too configurable. It's like the company wiki. People come in, set up some random projects, processes, fields, statuses, etc. and then move on. There's rarely someone making it all consistent and sensible. This results in task statuses that can be TODO, BACKLOG, PENDING, WAITING, TO DO, etc. etc. etc. You also end up with waaaay too many fields f…

Re. your third point, Confluence is also slow as shit. Using both together is like returning to the age of dial-up.
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