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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

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.
- swozey 8y ago
  > More stable than some enterprise monstrosities It must have gotten a lot of stability improvements since I stopped managing jira clusters a few years ago because, from the ops side of things, JIRA was one of our main "make a cron job that restarts tomcat every night" running jokes at multiple companies over the last decade. I've also had wonderful (/s) experience with the unicorns in Gitlab but that's another tale.
  - Aeolun 8y ago
    That's what you get for putting unicorns in a product.

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.

swozey 8y ago
> More stable than some enterprise monstrosities It must have gotten a lot of stability improvements since I stopped managing jira clusters a few years ago because, from the ops side of things, JIRA was one of our main "make a cron job that restarts tomcat every night" running jokes at multiple companies over the last decade. I've also had wonderful (/s) experience with the unicorns in Gitlab but that's another tale.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  That's what you get for putting unicorns in a product.