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> The thing that made the product challenging to learn was what developers loved most about it—that it did everything needed for issue tracking, and they could

> The thing that made the product challenging to learn was what developers loved most about it—that it did everything needed for issue tracking, and they could customize it to work precisely the way they needed it to for their specific teams and projects. I don't believe this. There were plenty of competing Open Source tools out with the same problems. I hated every single one of them and so did other developers I know. Perhaps developers preferred Jira because the management could be told they'd have to pay a qualified contractor for customization instead of torturing the developers with that kind of work?

matt_s 9y ago
Every dev I know has never liked any ticketing system. Maybe its psychological though, makes us feel like we work at a deli counter?
- hinkley 9y ago
  Someone observed a very long time ago that you can only count on devs to put the information into the ticketing system that is useful for their day to day work. I've only had luck with management (analysis and planning) of ticketing systems when we treat this observation as law. Either you measure what you have the data to measure, or you convince the developers that maintaining some part of the data is useful to them on a daily basis. The third leg of that stool is realizing that graphs and trends are for asking better questions, not for making decisions. Everything else comes down to a weak appeal to ethics. The problem is that a lot of devs either have or think they have a richer sense of ethics (not necessarily better, but more considered) than the people who want the data. So these appeals come across as tone deaf.
- lazyjones 9y ago
  I wrote and used a minimalistic one to save me time: plain e-mails to people with "[t]" in the subject got put in a database, recipients got modified e-mails with URLs to a web interface in the body (in addition to the original e-mail). When the task was completed, you only needed to click on one link in the web interface (or in the e-mail) and the original sender would get a confirmation by e-mail (i.e. you didn't need to write that e-mail yourself). The web interface provided an overview of open tickets and statistics. Later, comments, re-assigning tickets, priorities and other stuff was added. This was used for > 10 years (for a few 10000 tickets) AFAIR until it got replaced by Jira. It worked well and was accepted (or so it seemed) because it didn't really interfere with the typical way of doing things till then (e-mails) and offered minimalistic features on top.
noarchy 9y ago
Is it developers who are pushing for Jira? I've always seen it as a management-driven thing, effectively cementing the dominance of management methodologies like Scrum.
- dasmoth 9y ago
  I’ve encountered developers who appear to advocate for JIRA. Pretty sure it’s not driven by “this product is a delight to use”, though, but rather a badge of honour saying “look, we’re professionals doing things properly.” Like the sibling comment, my own encounters with it have made me think more of the deli counter...
  - noarchy 9y ago
    >but rather a badge of honour saying “look, we’re professionals doing things properly.” I don't doubt that this is the case. I worry that this begins to approach a "cargo cult" manner of thinking about development. I can't help but wonder if this trend favours younger developers, who may not remember the days before Scrum became such a widely-practiced management style. >Like the sibling comment, my own encounters with it have made me think more of the deli counter... No doubt. Instead of being judged by lines of code, the deli worker now has to concern themselves with things like "velocity" (in which case, Jira has become a prime tool).
hinkley 9y ago
This is the lie the industry keeps telling itself, especially in print. Vendors come in and bullshit your bosses and the purchasing authority about how awesome their tools are and all the things it can do. By the time the developers catch wind of it the check has already cleared, and they -have- to use this tool because someone with firing authority paid for it and you're not going to get away with embarrassing them by calling them on their bullshit (young me tried, young me failed). I'm not aware of any development team that consciously picked Atlassian. Atlassian gets picked for them. Their success is in selling to the management chain, not in being a good product. Because they aren't (but then neither are many of their commercial competitors).
- braderhart 9y ago
  Couldn't agree with you more.
- jimnotgym 9y ago
  I think this is formally known as The Oracle Sales Method

matt_s 9y ago

Every dev I know has never liked any ticketing system. Maybe its psychological though, makes us feel like we work at a deli counter?

hinkley 9y ago
Someone observed a very long time ago that you can only count on devs to put the information into the ticketing system that is useful for their day to day work. I've only had luck with management (analysis and planning) of ticketing systems when we treat this observation as law. Either you measure what you have the data to measure, or you convince the developers that maintaining some part of the data is useful to them on a daily basis. The third leg of that stool is realizing that graphs and trends are for asking better questions, not for making decisions. Everything else comes down to a weak appeal to ethics. The problem is that a lot of devs either have or think they have a richer sense of ethics (not necessarily better, but more considered) than the people who want the data. So these appeals come across as tone deaf.
lazyjones 9y ago
I wrote and used a minimalistic one to save me time: plain e-mails to people with "[t]" in the subject got put in a database, recipients got modified e-mails with URLs to a web interface in the body (in addition to the original e-mail). When the task was completed, you only needed to click on one link in the web interface (or in the e-mail) and the original sender would get a confirmation by e-mail (i.e. you didn't need to write that e-mail yourself). The web interface provided an overview of open tickets and statistics. Later, comments, re-assigning tickets, priorities and other stuff was added. This was used for > 10 years (for a few 10000 tickets) AFAIR until it got replaced by Jira. It worked well and was accepted (or so it seemed) because it didn't really interfere with the typical way of doing things till then (e-mails) and offered minimalistic features on top.

noarchy 9y ago

Is it developers who are pushing for Jira? I've always seen it as a management-driven thing, effectively cementing the dominance of management methodologies like Scrum.

dasmoth 9y ago
I’ve encountered developers who appear to advocate for JIRA. Pretty sure it’s not driven by “this product is a delight to use”, though, but rather a badge of honour saying “look, we’re professionals doing things properly.” Like the sibling comment, my own encounters with it have made me think more of the deli counter...
- noarchy 9y ago
  >but rather a badge of honour saying “look, we’re professionals doing things properly.” I don't doubt that this is the case. I worry that this begins to approach a "cargo cult" manner of thinking about development. I can't help but wonder if this trend favours younger developers, who may not remember the days before Scrum became such a widely-practiced management style. >Like the sibling comment, my own encounters with it have made me think more of the deli counter... No doubt. Instead of being judged by lines of code, the deli worker now has to concern themselves with things like "velocity" (in which case, Jira has become a prime tool).

hinkley 9y ago

This is the lie the industry keeps telling itself, especially in print. Vendors come in and bullshit your bosses and the purchasing authority about how awesome their tools are and all the things it can do. By the time the developers catch wind of it the check has already cleared, and they -have- to use this tool because someone with firing authority paid for it and you're not going to get away with embarrassing them by calling them on their bullshit (young me tried, young me failed). I'm not aware of any development team that consciously picked Atlassian. Atlassian gets picked for them. Their success is in selling to the management chain, not in being a good product. Because they aren't (but then neither are many of their commercial competitors).

braderhart 9y ago
Couldn't agree with you more.
jimnotgym 9y ago
I think this is formally known as The Oracle Sales Method