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Jira Is Turing-Complete

seriot.ch

71–80 of 160 posts

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#71

Jira is popular and has good API wrappers for your favorite language. I'm surprised corporate programmers with the hacker spirit haven't automated most of the things they are asked to do in Jira with Python command line scripts or whatever. If you can make Jira an order of magnitude easier to use for yourself than for the people pushing it, suddenly the script flips and Jira is something you push to protect yourself.…

> I'm surprised corporate programmers with the hacker spirit haven't automated most of the things they are asked to do in Jira with Python command line scripts or whatever.

Not a single of the many organisations that I worked for which used JIRA would give the credentials to do anything of this sort.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#72

Jira is popular and has good API wrappers for your favorite language. I'm surprised corporate programmers with the hacker spirit haven't automated most of the things they are asked to do in Jira with Python command line scripts or whatever. If you can make Jira an order of magnitude easier to use for yourself than for the people pushing it, suddenly the script flips and Jira is something you push to protect yourself.…

Our entire company is basically ran through Jira. Most processes rely on Jira and certain transitions fire of webhooks for automation. One of the first things we did when we got access to AI was make a Jira MCP. I try not to touch Jira anymore. I get Claude to just create the Jira issues, write comments, create subtasks, link issues together, etc. I used to dread having to investigate how to implement something and b…

This sounds so dystopian. I mean of course it does, we are talking about Jira here, an Atlassian product. But what I mean is the constant plastering over. This is how Jira became so astonishingly bad in the first place. But imagine people plastering over these idiotic tools, Jira, Slack, Confluence with LLMs. And at some point in the future someone gets fed up with having to instruct the LLMs and writes their own tool on top of the LLM, that you use to use Jira. And the stack of crutches continues to grow endlessly, just because some suits have heard some pseudo wisdom at some point in their lives that rewrites are expensive. Well guess what's even more expensive than rewrites ... the mindset to never rewrite. This one will literally destroy the fucking planet with ever higher compute demand and requirement.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#73

Jira is popular and has good API wrappers for your favorite language. I'm surprised corporate programmers with the hacker spirit haven't automated most of the things they are asked to do in Jira with Python command line scripts or whatever. If you can make Jira an order of magnitude easier to use for yourself than for the people pushing it, suddenly the script flips and Jira is something you push to protect yourself.…

I can see very naive points here:

* "Corporate hackers" is a... not a very common thing. In the corporate world most programmers do what they are told to do and nothing more. Initiative is punishable.

* API wrappers aren't actually good. Not to mention that the API itself is very poor. JIRA has a tradition of arbitrary changing things, especially removing things, or not exposing the useful functionality. It's not a well-designed or well-executed product.

* AI is too immature and too non-deterministic to be useful for most of the things you want from a bug tracker. Also, for most companies, it's going to be too expensive to do it this way.

* QA is usually an afterthought, unless... we are talking about budget cuts and cutting corners, then it's left, right and center. Most companies see QA as a liability. They don't see it as producing value. They just have to pretend to have QA so that they can tell their customer they have it. When it comes to making QA do meaningful things, that require hiring good engineers, allocating development time, allocating compute resources... well, good luck with all that! Most QA I've seen, especially in international huge corporations was all for show, to produce appearance of work while following the same, mostly useless and mostly manual process.

I had a bunch of ideas about how QA can be made more efficient, both in terms of resource use and in terms of problem space it tries to address. Doing things like RCA automation or exploratory dynamic* testing... and after trying to see if any of such ideas would have any luck of becoming an actual successful product, I realized that nobody wants to improve QA. If a product made the "certification" (the ability to claim to have tested the product) cheaper, then it could be viable... but this is neither the direction I wanted to go, nor is it really all that feasible to improve a bug tracker in this direction.

----

* What I mean by exploratory testing is a sort of "fuzzing", however one that's more structured. Fuzzing, typically, is applied to the input, which then tries to explore all possible ways through the program under test. Exploratory testing is a test made up of modules that can be combined to produce longer tests. This addresses the problem of difficult to reach "corner" cases in the program, also the problem of reaching code paths that aren't directly (or at all) dependent on input.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#74
post #19

Jira is popular and has good API wrappers for your favorite language. I'm surprised corporate programmers with the hacker spirit haven't automated most of the things they are asked to do in Jira with Python command line scripts or whatever. If you can make Jira an order of magnitude easier to use for yourself than for the people pushing it, suddenly the script flips and Jira is something you push to protect yourself.…

> Hook it all together with a custom script and have the AI do all the Jira crap for you. As if the bloat on Jira isn't big enough already. Adding more text will make it even slower since it will somehow automatically run everything over all that text all the time. If you need heating at your company, use Jira.

See, it goes perfectly together with using Jira through LLMs. LLMs also need more time the fuller their context window is.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#75
post #55
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite a few have, the issue is that every Jira instance is a fractal shit snowflake of custom properties several layers deep through old failed migrations to new organization strategies. And many times the API can do stuff that the UI doesn't allow, and everyone's relying on the UI to drive things, so you end up in weirdly broken corners because you didn't notice that you need custom_field_5537 to be paired with cust…

Simpler setup is perhaps - have a the pm-informed list of req of what your teams' needs and habits, and implement from scratch. Perhaps would take less than customizing JIRA. With history and all.

Sure, just gather all requirements upfront and hope they never change. Customers know what they want /s

If it was about the ticket system, it'd be solved already. But it isn't.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#76
post #71

Jira is popular and has good API wrappers for your favorite language. I'm surprised corporate programmers with the hacker spirit haven't automated most of the things they are asked to do in Jira with Python command line scripts or whatever. If you can make Jira an order of magnitude easier to use for yourself than for the people pushing it, suddenly the script flips and Jira is something you push to protect yourself.…

> I'm surprised corporate programmers with the hacker spirit haven't automated most of the things they are asked to do in Jira with Python command line scripts or whatever. Not a single of the many organisations that I worked for which used JIRA would give the credentials to do anything of this sort.

nowadays you can vibecode some half-ass headless browser automation using your email-password or even weird corporate sso.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#77

Woof. JIRA is so slow, and managers never seemed to set it up correctly. I have trauma from using it!

You see, it's not the tool's fault. There is simply no one on this planet, who can set up the tool correctly... Surely we cannot hold the tool responsible for human incompetence. For whom it is built then, you ask? Well, that's an entirely different question, that shall not be discussed at this point.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#78
post #70
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst part is that every company with a tasks product works right towards Jira. Compare what GitHub issues were in 2014 to what they are today: https://github.com/features/issues and they keep. adding. redundant. features

The engineer is not the target user

> The engineer is not the target user

yes, but:

1. not anymore

2. That's the price you have to pay if you want the tool you like to have corporate buy-in

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#79
post #29

I think at least 60% companies that use Jira could do better with just Trello. I dont know how it is possible to create such a horrible mess with task manager and some reports. But it probably keeps the managers and POs bussy so :D

I'm sure Atlassian knows this as well. When you setup a basic Kanban board in Jira, it is basically a Trello board. It is offered as one of the default options.

I was actually surprised they offered such simple options. Of course the complexity is there, the moment you start wanting an extra column, you're in the rabbit hole.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#80
post #16

Jira is popular and has good API wrappers for your favorite language. I'm surprised corporate programmers with the hacker spirit haven't automated most of the things they are asked to do in Jira with Python command line scripts or whatever. If you can make Jira an order of magnitude easier to use for yourself than for the people pushing it, suddenly the script flips and Jira is something you push to protect yourself.…

Quite a few have, the issue is that every Jira instance is a fractal shit snowflake of custom properties several layers deep through old failed migrations to new organization strategies. And many times the API can do stuff that the UI doesn't allow, and everyone's relying on the UI to drive things, so you end up in weirdly broken corners because you didn't notice that you need custom_field_5537 to be paired with cust…

> Quite a few have, the issue is that every Jira instance is a fractal shit snowflake of custom properties several layers deep through old failed migrations to new organization strategies.

This is key, Jira is fantastic so long as you have an angry commissar enforcing discipline, otherwise its a total free for all wasteland.

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