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On the one hand, it's great to see a company do so well making solid basic development tools. On the other hand, I recall that everybody hated using JIRA. It w

by gohrt 11y ago

On the one hand, it's great to see a company do so well making solid basic development tools. On the other hand, I recall that everybody hated using JIRA. It was sooo slooow and so many little input boxes in the UI. Has it improved in the past 5 years?

johansch 11y ago
> Has it improved in the past 5 years? Not enough, IMO. It still feels like something from 10 years ago. How do you even make something this slow these days? Their strong points: + Solid super customizable issue tracking model that supports everything Their weak points: - UX (so much clutter by default) - Performance (both client- and server-side - everything feels "heavy" now that we are used to facebook/google-style ajax apps that are "instant") - Its design invites to what I like to call "bug tetris" - where people spend more time juggling/triaging/refining/classifying/validating/etc tasks than working on the product or whatever they are supposed to deliver.
- bbarn 11y ago
  It's also pretty much the best of the worst, when it comes to something big enough to deal with > 50 employees and software development. Trello is cute, but fails after about 10 contributors, and locks you into it's rather simplistic mode. Basecamp has crickets on it's servers these days. Rally is enjoying it's fat stacks of CA cash, and still sucking :) None of it's good. Project management can't be put into a box easily, but it isn't Jira that made them rich, it's Jira + confluence + hipchat + integration for your org. When dumping jira means decoupling all that documentation and it's fancy links.. you keep paying the jira bill, and keep adding subscribers. They've essentially mastered vendor lock in for companies making software.
joshstrange 11y ago
We use self-hosted so YMMV but I've never really considered it to be that slow. It's a solid tool and at the top of it's field IMHO. I'd love (seriously) to hear what others are using we looked at a few alternatives but none of them held a candle to JIRA and that's before you consider the integrations with other Atlassian products.
- johansch 11y ago
  Sadly this is because this field is seriously under-developed, I feel. I have found three serious contenders when surveying this area recently: 1. Jira - flexible, but slow and old 2. TargetProcess - if you have bought into the Agile hype machine, this is for you 3. Asana - this one is a bit special. They have the performance and scalability, but it all just feels too brittle. The UX is fancy, minimalistic but not intuitive. It's like a collaborative scratch-pad for people who are really into tool ergonomics. I feel it goes too far in the other direction as compared to Jira. Why can't someone just spend the 5 man-years required to build a Jira that's flexible, usable and fast?
- flavor8 11y ago
  I've started to use Youtrack on recent projects and like it. A few quirks, but it's a breath of fresh air compared to the most recent JIRA version. (As context, I've advocated and run JIRA installs as an eng lead for ~10 years.)
city41 11y ago
Compared to its competition Jira does rather well. Jira won't blow you away as an amazing, delightful app. But it gets the job done and is relatively painless.

by gohrt 11y ago

johansch 11y ago

> Has it improved in the past 5 years? Not enough, IMO. It still feels like something from 10 years ago. How do you even make something this slow these days? Their strong points: + Solid super customizable issue tracking model that supports everything Their weak points: - UX (so much clutter by default) - Performance (both client- and server-side - everything feels "heavy" now that we are used to facebook/google-style ajax apps that are "instant") - Its design invites to what I like to call "bug tetris" - where people spend more time juggling/triaging/refining/classifying/validating/etc tasks than working on the product or whatever they are supposed to deliver.

bbarn 11y ago
It's also pretty much the best of the worst, when it comes to something big enough to deal with > 50 employees and software development. Trello is cute, but fails after about 10 contributors, and locks you into it's rather simplistic mode. Basecamp has crickets on it's servers these days. Rally is enjoying it's fat stacks of CA cash, and still sucking :) None of it's good. Project management can't be put into a box easily, but it isn't Jira that made them rich, it's Jira + confluence + hipchat + integration for your org. When dumping jira means decoupling all that documentation and it's fancy links.. you keep paying the jira bill, and keep adding subscribers. They've essentially mastered vendor lock in for companies making software.

joshstrange 11y ago

We use self-hosted so YMMV but I've never really considered it to be that slow. It's a solid tool and at the top of it's field IMHO. I'd love (seriously) to hear what others are using we looked at a few alternatives but none of them held a candle to JIRA and that's before you consider the integrations with other Atlassian products.

johansch 11y ago
Sadly this is because this field is seriously under-developed, I feel. I have found three serious contenders when surveying this area recently: 1. Jira - flexible, but slow and old 2. TargetProcess - if you have bought into the Agile hype machine, this is for you 3. Asana - this one is a bit special. They have the performance and scalability, but it all just feels too brittle. The UX is fancy, minimalistic but not intuitive. It's like a collaborative scratch-pad for people who are really into tool ergonomics. I feel it goes too far in the other direction as compared to Jira. Why can't someone just spend the 5 man-years required to build a Jira that's flexible, usable and fast?
flavor8 11y ago
I've started to use Youtrack on recent projects and like it. A few quirks, but it's a breath of fresh air compared to the most recent JIRA version. (As context, I've advocated and run JIRA installs as an eng lead for ~10 years.)

city41 11y ago

Compared to its competition Jira does rather well. Jira won't blow you away as an amazing, delightful app. But it gets the job done and is relatively painless.