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.
I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)
71–80 of 287 posts
Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)
#72Jira 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…
Overly complicated processes are just patches to try to cover up for immature engineering practices.
Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)
#73I 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.
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 By the complaints own wording they had 2000 tickets because management refused to delete outdated and irrelevant tickets.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)
#74Never 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
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)
#75I 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.
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)
#76I 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.
Jira is just the tool management chooses because nobody-got-fired-for-buying-jira.
Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)
#77I 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.
Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)
#78Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)
#79I 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…
Re: I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)
#80I 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…