7 ms·

I'm out of the loop. What's the story here? Why are devs sad about Atlassian and Jira?

by bmer 8y ago

Tade0 8y ago
For one thing JIRA tends to lock the UI while it's processing some of the requests.
8chen 8y ago
I don't think it's any specific event. Many of us are forced to use Jira for everything at work and it has grown from a simple bug tracker to a confusing one-place-for-everything mess.
- nickbarnwell 8y ago
  My favourite part of interning at Google was learning that tickets for Sev0 globe-spanning outages and "the bathroom tiles are too shiny and let you see into other stalls" lived in the same issue tracker. When all you have is a hammer…
corndoge 8y ago
Jira has some asinine design issues, e.g. the only way you can link a git commit to a ticket is by putting the ticket ID into the commit message, generally has confusing choices for UI, code blocks {code}are annoying to add{code} and don't follow any existing conventions, integration with Confluence sucks, basic functionality is locked away in paid extensions, the list goes on
- gonzo41 8y ago
  MVP Jira just needs to present a list of stuff to do. But now it's used like a panopticon of social control where I work. And I'm thinking I'm not the only one with stuff like Scaled Agile being out there.
  - reassembled 8y ago
    My previous QA manager tried to get the QA/engineering/product management groups to "do agile", heavily because of the agile board functionality added to JIRA. Nobody ever got any training on how to "do agile" but the fact that we were becoming an "agile company" was heavily pushed as the internal narrative, all the way up to execs. Most of product teams still don't function with any kind of actual agile process. Many try to fake it by endlessly throwing all of their work into the JIRA agile boards, which constantly have sprints rolling over, and are impossible to track any kind of actual velocity with. On our team we just said screw this and went back to getting things done, and tracking things how we wanted to track them. Don't even get me started on the nightmare that is JIRA TCM, which my company is currently still stuck with for test case management.
    - bestCauliflower 8y ago
      In my company they outright refused to pay for a test case management solution, so we are using this free plugin for Jira: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1214038/qaspace-test-management?hosting=server&tab=overview https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1214038/qaspace-test-... It works alright.
  - modeless 8y ago
    > a panopticon of social control Thanks for putting this into words for me. This is exactly how I feel about Jira. Incompetent middle management automates their micromanaging and enforces bad ideas about how their subordinates should do their jobs.
  - _jal 8y ago
    Jira doesn't have to be evil. It is intrinsically awful due to that tendency enterprise database products have of growing the flexibility to reimplement various wheels inside of them, poorly. But using it for evil depends on managerial intent. At my gig, everyone grumbles about Jira, because it sucks; see above. But, we have workflows built primarily around it with various integrations, and it works for coordinating ~200 folks in a starting-to-get-there "Agile" model. It is actually the worst for the managers - they spend a surprising amount of time noodling around in Jira to feed the workflows. For individual contributors, it works and isn't too much overhead. From an administration standpoint, it is OK (we run the on-prem version). More stable than some enterprise monstrosities, but the with occasional problem. The plugin-store-thing is annoying - somehow it manages to entice nearly every new business-side user into asking for some random thing, they usually get what they want, and then they sit unused aside from occasionally breaking things.
- erichurkman 8y ago
  My biggest complaint is the nonsensical UI. I never know when I click a ticket if I'm going to get a) a split screen view, b) a modal pop up, c) a full screen view, or d) sirens in the distance. When I click the 'back' button, I never know if I'm a) closing the ticket I have in a split screen, b) going back to the search results, or c) going back to Confluence and losing my search results and wondering how I was in Confluence to begin with.
  - Domenic_S 8y ago
    Things could be worse. Nothing made me miss jira like using Rally.
    - ChristianGeek 8y ago
      I spell it Raly, just to make it a four-letter word.
  - wool_gather 8y ago
    +1 You'd think this would mean there was a healthy market for native client apps using the JIRA API with a more pleasant UI (as there certainly is for Git, e.g.), but strangely not.
- yyx 8y ago
  > the only way you can link a git commit to a ticket is by putting the ticket ID into the commit message Is there any other way?
  - kemayo 8y ago
    Presumably after the fact by linking them entirely within Jira. You could mention the commit in the ticket, but that wouldn't make a back-link from the commit if someone's browsing from that direction. That said, I don't really mind mentioning the ticket in the commit. It's relevant to what one is doing when one makes the commit. But then I use gerrit at my job, so I don't have room to complain about others' systems.
    - corndoge 8y ago
      It sucks when you work on public open source code with internal forks.
  - dvlsg 8y ago
    I think naming the branch and/or the pr title after the jira ticket works too. I think it just needs to contain it, too. My feature branches usually look something like feature/proj-123-short-description. But to be honest, my extended commit descriptions usually contain the ticket number too, so I may be remembering wrong. Not sure if that's better or worse, though.
- zerb 8y ago
  It's also daaaamn slow. And when you paste formatted content into it (at least from vim on a mac), lol, have fun cleaning up your newly-unformatted content.
- apersona 8y ago
  What happened to their UX designers?
Rexxar 8y ago
I think the reality is that the software is not bad. But it is very often customized to fit ridiculous management desire and it then become difficult to use. And it's always simpler to blame the tool than your boss.
- ohnoesmyscv 8y ago
  Just like Zendesk and other outdated enterprise level software out there
nameless912 8y ago
Jira is Turing-complete. Let me repeat that. Your ticketing system is Turing-complete. I don't remember where I heard this first, but someone at my company (at least supposedly) proved it once. Jira has managed to grow into such a bloated, complex, incredibly pointless piece of software that I've never met someone who likes it. It's like software design by committee, where every manager involved had some pet project that NEEDED to be included for some asinine reason. Personal anecdote time: I had my interns start on Jira this summer. Three days in, I realized they weren't "getting" it because of how many damn buttons and knobs there are in the Jira UI. So, I switched all their issues to GitHub issues, and they went from having ~20 tickets in the project to over 100, and began adding, grooming, and closing their own without any input or direction from me. Sure, it's lackluster from an automation perspective, but they developed their own tagging system in the span of a few days and maintained their own board all summer. I loved Atlassian for BitBucket in college, but when I entered the workforce and was forced to use Jira and Hipchat, I lost all love for them.
- cam3ham 8y ago
  it's really not that complex at all...
  - mcny 8y ago
    From my limited experience, Jira workflow at a company reflects the culture. Maybe jira can be a tool to surface organizational defects and deficiencies...
- sundvor 8y ago
  Can't read this thread without remembering the following nugget: https://twitter.com/HackerNewsOnion/status/981609242221318145?s=19 https://twitter.com/HackerNewsOnion/status/98160924222131814... It's funny because it's true. GitHub Issues is just so much more straightforward to use; throw Waffle on it for added functionality and your team is good!
noelsusman 8y ago
Honestly, it's just enterprise software. The problems I have with Jira are largely the same problems I have with any software developed exclusively for enterprise customers. Enterprise customers always get what they want, so every piece of enterprise software is a bloated piece of shit that does 900 more things than any sane person should ever want it to do, and nobody gives a shit because the people using the software are rarely the people deciding to buy it.

I'm out of the loop. What's the story here? Why are devs sad about Atlassian and Jira?

by bmer 8y ago

I'm out of the loop. What's the story here? Why are devs sad about Atlassian and Jira?

Tade0 8y ago

For one thing JIRA tends to lock the UI while it's processing some of the requests.

8chen 8y ago

I don't think it's any specific event. Many of us are forced to use Jira for everything at work and it has grown from a simple bug tracker to a confusing one-place-for-everything mess.

nickbarnwell 8y ago
My favourite part of interning at Google was learning that tickets for Sev0 globe-spanning outages and "the bathroom tiles are too shiny and let you see into other stalls" lived in the same issue tracker. When all you have is a hammer…

corndoge 8y ago

Jira has some asinine design issues, e.g. the only way you can link a git commit to a ticket is by putting the ticket ID into the commit message, generally has confusing choices for UI, code blocks {code}are annoying to add{code} and don't follow any existing conventions, integration with Confluence sucks, basic functionality is locked away in paid extensions, the list goes on

gonzo41 8y ago
MVP Jira just needs to present a list of stuff to do. But now it's used like a panopticon of social control where I work. And I'm thinking I'm not the only one with stuff like Scaled Agile being out there.
- reassembled 8y ago
  My previous QA manager tried to get the QA/engineering/product management groups to "do agile", heavily because of the agile board functionality added to JIRA. Nobody ever got any training on how to "do agile" but the fact that we were becoming an "agile company" was heavily pushed as the internal narrative, all the way up to execs. Most of product teams still don't function with any kind of actual agile process. Many try to fake it by endlessly throwing all of their work into the JIRA agile boards, which constantly have sprints rolling over, and are impossible to track any kind of actual velocity with. On our team we just said screw this and went back to getting things done, and tracking things how we wanted to track them. Don't even get me started on the nightmare that is JIRA TCM, which my company is currently still stuck with for test case management.
  - bestCauliflower 8y ago
    In my company they outright refused to pay for a test case management solution, so we are using this free plugin for Jira: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1214038/qaspace-test-management?hosting=server&tab=overview https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1214038/qaspace-test-... It works alright.
- modeless 8y ago
  > a panopticon of social control Thanks for putting this into words for me. This is exactly how I feel about Jira. Incompetent middle management automates their micromanaging and enforces bad ideas about how their subordinates should do their jobs.
- _jal 8y ago
  Jira doesn't have to be evil. It is intrinsically awful due to that tendency enterprise database products have of growing the flexibility to reimplement various wheels inside of them, poorly. But using it for evil depends on managerial intent. At my gig, everyone grumbles about Jira, because it sucks; see above. But, we have workflows built primarily around it with various integrations, and it works for coordinating ~200 folks in a starting-to-get-there "Agile" model. It is actually the worst for the managers - they spend a surprising amount of time noodling around in Jira to feed the workflows. For individual contributors, it works and isn't too much overhead. From an administration standpoint, it is OK (we run the on-prem version). More stable than some enterprise monstrosities, but the with occasional problem. The plugin-store-thing is annoying - somehow it manages to entice nearly every new business-side user into asking for some random thing, they usually get what they want, and then they sit unused aside from occasionally breaking things.
erichurkman 8y ago
My biggest complaint is the nonsensical UI. I never know when I click a ticket if I'm going to get a) a split screen view, b) a modal pop up, c) a full screen view, or d) sirens in the distance. When I click the 'back' button, I never know if I'm a) closing the ticket I have in a split screen, b) going back to the search results, or c) going back to Confluence and losing my search results and wondering how I was in Confluence to begin with.
- Domenic_S 8y ago
  Things could be worse. Nothing made me miss jira like using Rally.
  - ChristianGeek 8y ago
    I spell it Raly, just to make it a four-letter word.
- wool_gather 8y ago
  +1 You'd think this would mean there was a healthy market for native client apps using the JIRA API with a more pleasant UI (as there certainly is for Git, e.g.), but strangely not.
yyx 8y ago
> the only way you can link a git commit to a ticket is by putting the ticket ID into the commit message Is there any other way?
- kemayo 8y ago
  Presumably after the fact by linking them entirely within Jira. You could mention the commit in the ticket, but that wouldn't make a back-link from the commit if someone's browsing from that direction. That said, I don't really mind mentioning the ticket in the commit. It's relevant to what one is doing when one makes the commit. But then I use gerrit at my job, so I don't have room to complain about others' systems.
  - corndoge 8y ago
    It sucks when you work on public open source code with internal forks.
- dvlsg 8y ago
  I think naming the branch and/or the pr title after the jira ticket works too. I think it just needs to contain it, too. My feature branches usually look something like feature/proj-123-short-description. But to be honest, my extended commit descriptions usually contain the ticket number too, so I may be remembering wrong. Not sure if that's better or worse, though.
zerb 8y ago
It's also daaaamn slow. And when you paste formatted content into it (at least from vim on a mac), lol, have fun cleaning up your newly-unformatted content.
apersona 8y ago
What happened to their UX designers?

Rexxar 8y ago

I think the reality is that the software is not bad. But it is very often customized to fit ridiculous management desire and it then become difficult to use. And it's always simpler to blame the tool than your boss.

ohnoesmyscv 8y ago
Just like Zendesk and other outdated enterprise level software out there

nameless912 8y ago

Jira is Turing-complete. Let me repeat that. Your ticketing system is Turing-complete. I don't remember where I heard this first, but someone at my company (at least supposedly) proved it once. Jira has managed to grow into such a bloated, complex, incredibly pointless piece of software that I've never met someone who likes it. It's like software design by committee, where every manager involved had some pet project that NEEDED to be included for some asinine reason. Personal anecdote time: I had my interns start on Jira this summer. Three days in, I realized they weren't "getting" it because of how many damn buttons and knobs there are in the Jira UI. So, I switched all their issues to GitHub issues, and they went from having ~20 tickets in the project to over 100, and began adding, grooming, and closing their own without any input or direction from me. Sure, it's lackluster from an automation perspective, but they developed their own tagging system in the span of a few days and maintained their own board all summer. I loved Atlassian for BitBucket in college, but when I entered the workforce and was forced to use Jira and Hipchat, I lost all love for them.

cam3ham 8y ago
it's really not that complex at all...
- mcny 8y ago
  From my limited experience, Jira workflow at a company reflects the culture. Maybe jira can be a tool to surface organizational defects and deficiencies...
sundvor 8y ago
Can't read this thread without remembering the following nugget: https://twitter.com/HackerNewsOnion/status/981609242221318145?s=19 https://twitter.com/HackerNewsOnion/status/98160924222131814... It's funny because it's true. GitHub Issues is just so much more straightforward to use; throw Waffle on it for added functionality and your team is good!

noelsusman 8y ago

Honestly, it's just enterprise software. The problems I have with Jira are largely the same problems I have with any software developed exclusively for enterprise customers. Enterprise customers always get what they want, so every piece of enterprise software is a bloated piece of shit that does 900 more things than any sane person should ever want it to do, and nobody gives a shit because the people using the software are rarely the people deciding to buy it.