17 ms·

GitHub and Jira Software Integration

243 points by joeyespo 8y ago

diminoten 8y ago
> Check back for updates on an upcoming enterprise version of the Jira Cloud and GitHub integration. This is a bit murky re: enterprise Jira + enterprise GitHub.
kasey_junk 8y ago
I know that my experience is by definition limited but across multiple companies & industries the use of JIRA has been uniformly an anti/pattern. GitHub issues on the other hand have never been a negative. The only reason I bring this up is that I think this is an unmitigated bad feature. The only pushback I have at times in an org is the moat between JIRA & Github
- smcleod 8y ago
  Yeah I've had nothing but a bad time with Jira, it's slow / high latency and high impact to use - combining that with GitHubs poor UX and I guess they're made for each other :/
  - paranoidrobot 8y ago
    Admittedly I havn't used Jira for about 6 years, but I don't recall it being particularly slow, at least if you give it decent hardware to run on (this is on-prem, so not sure how the Cloud editions go). If you're talking about process aspects, well.. that's also a business process thing, as to how much information PMs/etc want.
    - jjoonathan 8y ago
      Cloud JIRA is so bad that Atlassian is pulling an Oracle and adding contractual clauses to forbid people from talking about it.
    - pfranz 8y ago
      I used it 6-8 years ago on-prem. I remember hearing it needed a rather beefy server and I don't remember it behaving particularly fast but it wasn't particularly slow, either. My jobs in-between didn't use Jira, but my most recent one uses the hosted version--it's very, very slow. What's annoying is it doesn't seem to cache either, so a second reload or navigating around is also slow. I only read this in passing, but I heard it's the growing pains of changing a codebase intended to run on a single-server and trying to rebuild it into "services" that scale.
  - antoineMoPa 8y ago
    While I agree that Jira is slow and generally a total pain to use (I can almost hear the JVM roaring 8000km away), I think Github is the contrary: fast with very good UX.
    - polityagent 8y ago
      it is odd that JIRA is so slow, and I doubt it's due to the JVM. Clubhouse is built using clojure and is delightfully fast to use. (not affliated, just a Dev who has used mingle, Jira and clubhouse)
- wisswazz 8y ago
  Try searching for the contents in a body of an issue in GitLab…
philliphaydon 8y ago
Nooooooooo. Ah I'm so sad. I literally found out 2 days ago we're gonna move to Jira. I hope management doesn't find out about the integration between the two.
kuyan 8y ago
My office usees Jira. I like it. I feel that a lot of the sentiment against Jira is a result of bad management - Jira is a tool. It can be used by good managers, and it can be used by bad managers.
- blt 8y ago
  Good point. Jira's depth and customizability must be like candy for terrible micromanagers. Kind of like how C++ gets an exaggerated bad rap because it is really attractive to people who like building complicated, baroque systems.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- eddieroger 8y ago
  It's an _extremely customizable_ tool. Just deploying it and using it will nearly always result in a bad experience. You have to spend time making it work for your workflow. I don't think that's so much a manager problem as a knowledge of the product. More like a work chair - it can be really uncomfortable if you unbox it and sit down, but if you adjust the back, arms, seat some it could be the most comfortable thing ever.
- lmm 8y ago
  Tools drive the way they're used. You have to go out of your way to use Jira well, the path of least resistance is to use it badly (e.g. task state transitions default to disallowed and you have to explicitly allow the ones you want to permit, so your workflow will be too restrictive unless you've gone out of your way to fix it).
Game_Ender 8y ago
I feel sad for all the Github users who will have to suffer the awful JIRA UX. It’s a tool that tries to be everything to everyone with a decade of legacy cruft attached. The result is something that is slow, confusing, and incoherent. If you have an expert and sink a lot of time into, you can a few decent workflows, but it’s just not worth it. In the end though, don’t worry the managers will get their reports and everyone will at least have there feature box checked (assume you don’t care about Markdown).
- cjdu 8y ago
  That's exactly what this is. Jira is entrenched in enterprises...whoever at those seem to like Jira, for whatever reason. Developers want GitHub. So bosses want Jira, developers want Github. This is one of those have your cake and eat it too scenarios for both Atlassian and GitHub.
  - Aeolun 8y ago
    The cake is way too salty, but hey, at least it’s cake :)
- regnerba 8y ago
  Any chance you can suggest a good alternative? For me its important that it is separate from GitHub for a few reasons: - having a Jira project means we can easily move issues between projects. This is especially useful for when our support team notices an issue, submits a ticket to our "support ingest" project, and then it can get routed to the correct actual project on the backend. Or when an issue gets misdiagnosed we can move it between projects while keeping a single issue and all the history of it. - having more complex workflows that allow you to force issues to go through specific steps, trigger webhooks, good fun stuff like that I really would love a good alternative. Jira has just gotten slower and slower, their UX has gotten worse, and I really would like a good alternative. However Jira has solid integrations into a lot of places and does a lot of complicated things. Suggestions?
  - thebigkick 8y ago
knocte 8y ago
Jira is the worst bug tracking tool I've ever used.
- hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
  I feel like Jira is like democracy: it's the worst bug tracking tool there is, except for all the other ones.
  - yborg 8y ago
    That was true for some time, but they're making me miss Bugzilla now. I spend increasing amounts of time just watching Jira load it's ever more bloated UI.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - ashelmire 8y ago
    I’ve been upgrading a todo app into an issue tracking tool, and I already find it to be more useful than Jira. I also have the misfortune of being our Jira admin, so I have more reasons than most to hate it.
- benatkin 8y ago
  I think it depends on how it's configured and on the team's workflow. It really sucked at my second to last job, but at my most recent job it was reasonably usable, in that about half the time it was better than a comparable tool like Pivotal Tracker or Asana, and about half the time it was worse. A good and bad thing about it is that it isn't a typical single page app - good because it has fewer glitches and bad because it is more tedious in some places than Asana or Pivotal.
  - knocte 8y ago
    You may be right, pivotal might be even worse. Haven't used Asana.
deepaksurti 8y ago
Ok, so finally time to move on to Gitlab, my weekend is gone! While from what I read GH issues are not going away, I won't be surprised if GH finally becomes a pure enterprisey product. My only concern is what happens when Gitlab is acquired? If someone from GL can confirm that they have serious checks and balances in place to not let the users who make Gitlab succeed be left to fend for themselves, can be a killing blow to Github in retaining even the left overs!
- hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
  Deciding to move to Gitlab because there is now a separate Jira integration makes no sense to me. Github has built a completely separate integration with Jira - it's not like anything in Github forces you to use Jira, but if you do use it (like a ton of companies do), you would want a better integration story.
- fingerprinter 8y ago
  This....this makes no sense. An integration doesn't mean something else is going away. That's not how platforms work. FWIW, gitlab is going to get acquired...it has to. Probably by google, or oracle, or salesforce, or ibm, or hp (or whatever name they have these days), or redhat. And depending on which one it is, will be how ruined gitlab becomes, because all of those seem like terrible options, but I digress now.
  - sytse 8y ago
    We can't predict the future. But our plan is to become a public company in 2020 https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/#sequence- https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/#sequence- And while it doesn't prevent an acquisition our recent fundraise makes it less likely https://about.gitlab.com/2018/09/19/announcing-100m-series-d-funding/ https://about.gitlab.com/2018/09/19/announcing-100m-series-d...
- jarfil 8y ago
  There has been a GitLab+JIRA integration for some time already.
loeber 8y ago
I see a lot of people complaining about JIRA in this thread, so here's my take: - I've used Trello, GitHub Projects/Issues, and other Project Management software; - While JIRA has a steep learning curve and is generally unpleasant to use, it is far and away the most customizable and powerful PM software I have used; - Despite JIRA's poor design choices and UX clunkiness, it is so powerful that I wouldn't use anything else. I'm hoping their design, etc. will ultimately catch up, but even it doesn't, it's still probably the net best option available.
- strictnein 8y ago
  > "it is far and away the most customizable and powerful PM software I have used" Opinionated software is good. Unlimited customizability is bad and the source of almost all of Jira's problems.
  - jschwartzi 8y ago
    Not really. Opinionated software is good when the opinion is something you agree with. When you need the opinionated software to something it wasn't designed for it's frequently really bad. CMake is opinionated. It's built assuming that the build yields an executable file for Windows, Linux or Mac. Try getting CMake to cross-compile for more than one platform at the same time, or build not than one executable and then build a root filesystem into a system image. This is impossible without circumventing CMake entirely. It's actually pretty easy in Make, which is what CMake generates. There are tons of organizations which need to manage their projects in a way Trello or Pivotal aren't designed for. These tools require you to adopt a methodology and they work great as long as you do. But if you need to do something strange like integrate with a separate system test team, good luck. That's really why organizations adopt JIRA. They want to do things that the tool designers thought you should never do. And those things are necessary in the eyes of those organizations. Being opinionated is great if you're a human, but the best software is built by people who are trying to help me do my job, not by people who want to dictate how it should be done from the perspective of not being my employer.
    - 8y ago
nine_k 8y ago
You may like Jira or dislike Jira, but having to click fewer controls, and likely wait fewer times for a Jira page to load, will be a plus. Especially if your company is heavily invested in Jira, and switching to your more favored issue tracker is infeasible.
tootie 8y ago
JIRA is the top project management platform for good reason. I know a lot of people complain that it's complicated, but every time I've something simpler we end up hitting a wall. JIRA just needs a sensible workflow configured for your project and it's great. All that being said, I don't get this move. Atlassian has a very capable git product. GitHub should have attempted to anoint a new tool.
- CodeSheikh 8y ago
  People complain not only it's complicated but it is slow and overloaded with unnecessary features. Can you open up create a new ticket window and how many features and fields do you count?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - shimms 8y ago
    3 - because we spent time configuring it to our needs.
    - regularfry 8y ago
      You are unusual in having that be in your control, I suspect. Ours is centrally managed.
  - sumedh 8y ago
    > Can you open up create a new ticket window and how many features and fields do you count? Not sure what is the point of asking that question, it depends on what you have configured.
- onion2k 8y ago
  That just means it's ideal for your projects, and maybe even most projects. That doesn't mean it's ideal for all projects though. To use an obvious analogy, PHP is the most popular web backend language and it's ideal for my project, so you should be using it on your project regardless of what your project is... Very few people would agree with that.
ausjke 8y ago
Isn't Jira from one of its major competitor? This is interesting.
- dreamcompiler 8y ago
  I expect many if not most users of Jira don't also use Bitbucket.
- lysp 8y ago
  I'm guessing they want to try and take some of the bitbucket market share back.
  - timberfields 8y ago
    This reads like a wise move on GitHub's part. Head to head, GitHub wins against bitbucket 10 out of 10 times x infinity. But being very close to enterprise sales cycles, some pointy haired boss somewhere says "gee, we have a jira contract already and they'll give me this other piece of software (bitbucket) for next to nothing...it's got to be good enough for my devs, right?" Of course this is silly way of thinking, but I'm certain it happens all the time, more than we think in forums like this.
    - itomato 8y ago
      Bitbucket Enterprise is not only cheaper than GitHub Enterprise, but it can run on-prem in a cluster. Hard to imagine where GitHub trounces Bitbucket, but I am willing to listen
  - alkonaut 8y ago
    But by integrating github more tightly with a competitor (Jira) to their owners' main enterprise issue management service (TFS/VSTS/Azure DevOps)?
memset 8y ago
I don't understand the negativity in this thread. Or why people are using this post as an impetus to (ostensibly) move to gitlab. Or lament the decline and fall of github. Nobody is forcing anyone to use Jira. Nobody is forcing anyone to use Github. You can continue to use both without adopting any of the UX or design or workflows or whatever of the other. This blog post is just saying "now we have an officially-supported integration that we believe works better than the previous and here are some new features." Am I missing something here? Otherwise, congrats to the github team for shipping this! I've used github+jira integrations in the past, and if this is an improvement, then cheers to making things easier for folks who use both tools as part of their day-to-day!
- kasey_junk 8y ago
  It’s a sign of how bad JIRA is. The tool is so bad that people (including me) want the integrations to be hard simply to have a reason not to use it.
  - zuern 8y ago
    Just curious, what do you think is so bad about Jira? I think it's miles ahead of other tools like Rally for example. What's your preference?
    - smokeyj 8y ago
      People who hate JIRA never had to manage other developers or coordinate work across teams. It's not a product that anyone loves but what the heck are you expecting?
      - jfoutz 8y ago
        With a pure jira approach, I would expect engineers to do what they think is best in the moment, and log something that vaguely matches the requirements laid out in the ticket. Essentially ineffective management of developer time.
      - deleted 8y ago
dikei 8y ago
If you think JIRA is bad, wait until you have to use IBM RTC :)
dhnsmakala 8y ago
Can someone explain all the Jira hate to me? Yeah it's an ugly UI. But once you are used to how it works, doesn't it do the job fine? I don't spend that much time in task management software, just need to look up my tasks...
- strictnein 8y ago
  The hate for it is from the large amount of customization that is done to workflows at large organizations, many times in the name of "compliance" or "security". Instead of just moving stories between lanes (To Do, In progress, Testing, Done or whatever), you're filling out multiple forms, clicking a bunch of checkboxes, adding links to test results, build results, PRs, etc, all for someone you'll never know to run a weekly report and send it off to a bunch of people who will never read it. But they will generate a wonderful paper trail in case something happens.
  - mrmondo 8y ago
    Yeah that and it's interface feeling so incredibly slow / high latency (on prem and cloud / hosted), it /feels/ like Java.
- caoilte 8y ago
  it's sloooooooow. i can create two tickets in trello in the time it takes jira to load a page.
  - DocTomoe 8y ago
    Those honestly can't be good, well-thought-out tickets, though.
pkamb 8y ago
I'm all for this if it prompts Jira to support Markdown.
CodeSheikh 8y ago
Can we use this post and maybe discuss possible alternatives to JIRA?
- CodeSheikh 8y ago
  Trello
  - ochrist 8y ago
    Trello was just bought by Atlassian (the company behind JIRA).
    - chii 8y ago
      Implying that it's not good simply because it's now owned by Atlassian? Trello is good for what it's designed for - simple lists of lists of notes.
      - chrisper 8y ago
        It's probably implied that Trello one day will become Jira...
        ochrist 8y ago
        Nah, not really. It was just for information. But Atlassian must have some kind of plan for Trello, and I for one can't guess what that might be.
        jschumacher 8y ago
        The plan is to let Trello do what it does best, help people manage anything from organising a wedding to planning software projects.
- omegabravo 8y ago
  I use Azure VSTS and am very happy with it. The only issue I have is that you can't export issues to a XLS file without plugins. However, I've used Jira previously and it worked just fine for me and the team. YMMV
qaq 8y ago
Jira is bad enough that at one point was seriously considering doing a startup in this space. There is a ton of alternatives for "simpler" use cases but 0 better alternatives that can actually be used by large Enterprises.
- lucidone 8y ago
  There are a million project management apps out there because it's basically all CRUD.
  - qaq 8y ago
    There are a million project management apps that a small team can use and there is 0 aside from Jira that large enterprises can use.
    - chii 8y ago
      > 0 aside from Jira that large enterprises can use. that's because the complaints against Jira (being infinitely customizable and has lots of enterprise features) are the very things that a startup can't do - and perhaps, feel they shouldn't do.
      - qaq 8y ago
        Thats not the main complaints against Jira.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > There are a million project management apps that a small team can use and there is 0 aside from Jira that large enterprises can use. I'm pretty sure that's wrong; there are large enterprises that use project management software but don't use Jira at all.
      - qaq 8y ago
        Yes there are and read what people are writing about those systems they are even more abysmal thats why Atlassian dominates this market.
bongo662 8y ago
While ive only been a dev for a bit over a year at my current company we use JIRA and its been pretty easy to understand and work with. Issue comes in a tester and dev is assigned work is tracked through the issues ID and you just move the status through its lifecycle (progres, review, testing, done). Maybe theirs more cumbersome workflows at other companies but mine seems to keep it straightforward.
anonytrary 8y ago
I noticed absolutely no change in Github's product after the Microsoft news, and I'm 99% sure there will be no appreciable change after this news settles. I'm 100% sure that people are going to freak out and waste their time migrating to BitBucket or GitLab for the wrong reasons. As a Github user, there are a few things Github does that makes me unhappy, like not hyperlinking static text when they should, but who they get in bed with is not one of them.
- johns 8y ago
  The Microsoft deal hasn’t even closed yet.
  - hinkley 8y ago
    In general, your new corporate overlords usually spend the first fiscal year trying to figure out what to do with you. So wait for the first full fiscal year after the deal closes, or the second if its late enough in the year. Then you will hear logic like, “We’re not going to tell you what to make, but we won’t pay for that,” as if that’s different or even better than just setting the agenda.
xab9 8y ago
After using bugzilla, mantis, tfs, jira, gitlab and github, I honestly think that jira is not half bad. In fact I prefer it over gitlab, but I'm alone with this view on the team. The hatred towards jira is on par with desktop java.
Cogito 8y ago
To wade in on the JIRA wars going on, I was once a JIRA consultant (among other things). I ended up telling people I worked on business process design because once you see 100 different ways people are using a tool you learn most of the wrong ways to do it. The primary issue with any task tracking or workflow tool is that the people implementing it have never learnt what is effective and what isn't. Worse, what is effective changes depending on what exact kind of task you are trying to track, in addition to the organisation and everything else. I would typically start, regardless of what the particular thing I was brought in to help with was, with getting management/project leads/etc to agree to what outcomes they want from a tool like JIRA. Companies have processes that get followed, and management need to provide direction and measure what's being done. Overwhelmingly there seems to be no good way of transferring information between these layers, of people doing work and other people trying to understand what that work is. A good tool will make it easy for that information to flow. The problem is that for the information to be useful it needs to be accurate and complete, you need people to actually use the tool. Every time you add a gate to a task (this person must accept this before it progresses, or this field has to be filled out) you add friction to the process and people disengage (often using a different tool altogether like excel or sticky notes). At the same time, a well designed tool supports people doing their work. Prompts remind people what things need to be checked or completed at each step, and notifications can let you know when something needs doing. As long as you can get people to agree to these concepts, you can start to design workflows and information to capture that will be useful for the people using it, and useful for the people trying to work out what is happening. JIRA also takes a while to learn how to architect sustainably. If you create 20 copies of different screens it becomes a real chore to go in and change them down the track. If you do have a bit of foresight and experience, however, it's not hard to manage hundred of projects with different workflows and fields. It has lots of warts and cruft that's built over time, and there isn't enough knowledge about how to use the good bits, so it gets a bad rap. I know how to use it pretty well, and am normally in a position to change it when I need to, so don't run into the gripes that most people see. The biggest positive however is not that it can do almost anything 'task-tracky' with a bit of effort - it's that it can do that and someone else maintains it. So many tools (internal and external) grow and grow and grow to try and cover things like assigning tasks and tracking workflow and sending emails, or run into a wall because VBA scripts in excel can only do so much. The ability to take almost any of those and add task tracking by simply integrating with JIRA is a huge selling point and has provided so much value to me over the years. That I can do the same for all parts of the business is the main reason it has spread so far in the enterprise world. I remember the days that JIRA used to be snuck into small teams when no one was looking, and spread organically throughout the organisation after that because it was so useful.
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timwaagh 8y ago
Kinda surprised it's jira and not Microsoft's own TFS. Oh well. Nice for those who use jira.
tilolebo 8y ago
So I installed it, configured it, the sync status is "COMPLETE" but I can't see anything related to github in my JIRA issues that are mentioned in PRs and commits. Is there an extra step to perform? The 3rd screenshot in https://github.com/marketplace/jira-software-github https://github.com/marketplace/jira-software-github shows an "ACTIVE" status.
tbarbugli 8y ago
This icould be great news, it is not clear from the article but I hope they solved the annoying problem of first repo sync hitting Github rate limits. We had this issue several times when we migrated from Trello to Jira.
swagatkonchada 8y ago
A lot of people are going to switch from Asana to Jira
ed_blackburn 8y ago
Any other ex-salesforce people here. If you think JIRA-GH is scary. Remember GUS :O
seanjregan 8y ago
This is pretty much every thread. Tool X sucks. No, you set it up incorrectly Tell me why it sucks? Management sucks Maybe your team/team and management is the problem. Oh Hai, GitLab CEO here. We will build whatever it is you are complaining about.
- KyeRussell 8y ago
  I can't take GitLab seriously until it stops touting itself as a project management tool with its flimsy label-based 'workflow' model.

243 points by joeyespo 8y ago

> Check back for updates on an upcoming enterprise version of the Jira Cloud and GitHub integration. This is a bit murky re: enterprise Jira + enterprise GitHub.

kasey_junk 8y ago

I know that my experience is by definition limited but across multiple companies & industries the use of JIRA has been uniformly an anti/pattern. GitHub issues on the other hand have never been a negative. The only reason I bring this up is that I think this is an unmitigated bad feature. The only pushback I have at times in an org is the moat between JIRA & Github

smcleod 8y ago
Yeah I've had nothing but a bad time with Jira, it's slow / high latency and high impact to use - combining that with GitHubs poor UX and I guess they're made for each other :/
- paranoidrobot 8y ago
  Admittedly I havn't used Jira for about 6 years, but I don't recall it being particularly slow, at least if you give it decent hardware to run on (this is on-prem, so not sure how the Cloud editions go). If you're talking about process aspects, well.. that's also a business process thing, as to how much information PMs/etc want.
  - jjoonathan 8y ago
    Cloud JIRA is so bad that Atlassian is pulling an Oracle and adding contractual clauses to forbid people from talking about it.
  - pfranz 8y ago
    I used it 6-8 years ago on-prem. I remember hearing it needed a rather beefy server and I don't remember it behaving particularly fast but it wasn't particularly slow, either. My jobs in-between didn't use Jira, but my most recent one uses the hosted version--it's very, very slow. What's annoying is it doesn't seem to cache either, so a second reload or navigating around is also slow. I only read this in passing, but I heard it's the growing pains of changing a codebase intended to run on a single-server and trying to rebuild it into "services" that scale.
- antoineMoPa 8y ago
  While I agree that Jira is slow and generally a total pain to use (I can almost hear the JVM roaring 8000km away), I think Github is the contrary: fast with very good UX.
  - polityagent 8y ago
    it is odd that JIRA is so slow, and I doubt it's due to the JVM. Clubhouse is built using clojure and is delightfully fast to use. (not affliated, just a Dev who has used mingle, Jira and clubhouse)
wisswazz 8y ago
Try searching for the contents in a body of an issue in GitLab…

philliphaydon 8y ago

Nooooooooo. Ah I'm so sad. I literally found out 2 days ago we're gonna move to Jira. I hope management doesn't find out about the integration between the two.

kuyan 8y ago

My office usees Jira. I like it. I feel that a lot of the sentiment against Jira is a result of bad management - Jira is a tool. It can be used by good managers, and it can be used by bad managers.

blt 8y ago
Good point. Jira's depth and customizability must be like candy for terrible micromanagers. Kind of like how C++ gets an exaggerated bad rap because it is really attractive to people who like building complicated, baroque systems.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
eddieroger 8y ago
It's an _extremely customizable_ tool. Just deploying it and using it will nearly always result in a bad experience. You have to spend time making it work for your workflow. I don't think that's so much a manager problem as a knowledge of the product. More like a work chair - it can be really uncomfortable if you unbox it and sit down, but if you adjust the back, arms, seat some it could be the most comfortable thing ever.
lmm 8y ago
Tools drive the way they're used. You have to go out of your way to use Jira well, the path of least resistance is to use it badly (e.g. task state transitions default to disallowed and you have to explicitly allow the ones you want to permit, so your workflow will be too restrictive unless you've gone out of your way to fix it).

Game_Ender 8y ago

I feel sad for all the Github users who will have to suffer the awful JIRA UX. It’s a tool that tries to be everything to everyone with a decade of legacy cruft attached. The result is something that is slow, confusing, and incoherent. If you have an expert and sink a lot of time into, you can a few decent workflows, but it’s just not worth it. In the end though, don’t worry the managers will get their reports and everyone will at least have there feature box checked (assume you don’t care about Markdown).

cjdu 8y ago
That's exactly what this is. Jira is entrenched in enterprises...whoever at those seem to like Jira, for whatever reason. Developers want GitHub. So bosses want Jira, developers want Github. This is one of those have your cake and eat it too scenarios for both Atlassian and GitHub.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  The cake is way too salty, but hey, at least it’s cake :)
regnerba 8y ago
Any chance you can suggest a good alternative? For me its important that it is separate from GitHub for a few reasons: - having a Jira project means we can easily move issues between projects. This is especially useful for when our support team notices an issue, submits a ticket to our "support ingest" project, and then it can get routed to the correct actual project on the backend. Or when an issue gets misdiagnosed we can move it between projects while keeping a single issue and all the history of it. - having more complex workflows that allow you to force issues to go through specific steps, trigger webhooks, good fun stuff like that I really would love a good alternative. Jira has just gotten slower and slower, their UX has gotten worse, and I really would like a good alternative. However Jira has solid integrations into a lot of places and does a lot of complicated things. Suggestions?
- thebigkick 8y ago

knocte 8y ago

Jira is the worst bug tracking tool I've ever used.

hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
I feel like Jira is like democracy: it's the worst bug tracking tool there is, except for all the other ones.
- yborg 8y ago
  That was true for some time, but they're making me miss Bugzilla now. I spend increasing amounts of time just watching Jira load it's ever more bloated UI.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ashelmire 8y ago
  I’ve been upgrading a todo app into an issue tracking tool, and I already find it to be more useful than Jira. I also have the misfortune of being our Jira admin, so I have more reasons than most to hate it.
benatkin 8y ago
I think it depends on how it's configured and on the team's workflow. It really sucked at my second to last job, but at my most recent job it was reasonably usable, in that about half the time it was better than a comparable tool like Pivotal Tracker or Asana, and about half the time it was worse. A good and bad thing about it is that it isn't a typical single page app - good because it has fewer glitches and bad because it is more tedious in some places than Asana or Pivotal.
- knocte 8y ago
  You may be right, pivotal might be even worse. Haven't used Asana.

deepaksurti 8y ago

Ok, so finally time to move on to Gitlab, my weekend is gone! While from what I read GH issues are not going away, I won't be surprised if GH finally becomes a pure enterprisey product. My only concern is what happens when Gitlab is acquired? If someone from GL can confirm that they have serious checks and balances in place to not let the users who make Gitlab succeed be left to fend for themselves, can be a killing blow to Github in retaining even the left overs!

hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
Deciding to move to Gitlab because there is now a separate Jira integration makes no sense to me. Github has built a completely separate integration with Jira - it's not like anything in Github forces you to use Jira, but if you do use it (like a ton of companies do), you would want a better integration story.
fingerprinter 8y ago
This....this makes no sense. An integration doesn't mean something else is going away. That's not how platforms work. FWIW, gitlab is going to get acquired...it has to. Probably by google, or oracle, or salesforce, or ibm, or hp (or whatever name they have these days), or redhat. And depending on which one it is, will be how ruined gitlab becomes, because all of those seem like terrible options, but I digress now.
- sytse 8y ago
  We can't predict the future. But our plan is to become a public company in 2020 https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/#sequence- https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/#sequence- And while it doesn't prevent an acquisition our recent fundraise makes it less likely https://about.gitlab.com/2018/09/19/announcing-100m-series-d-funding/ https://about.gitlab.com/2018/09/19/announcing-100m-series-d...
jarfil 8y ago
There has been a GitLab+JIRA integration for some time already.

loeber 8y ago

I see a lot of people complaining about JIRA in this thread, so here's my take: - I've used Trello, GitHub Projects/Issues, and other Project Management software; - While JIRA has a steep learning curve and is generally unpleasant to use, it is far and away the most customizable and powerful PM software I have used; - Despite JIRA's poor design choices and UX clunkiness, it is so powerful that I wouldn't use anything else. I'm hoping their design, etc. will ultimately catch up, but even it doesn't, it's still probably the net best option available.

strictnein 8y ago
> "it is far and away the most customizable and powerful PM software I have used" Opinionated software is good. Unlimited customizability is bad and the source of almost all of Jira's problems.
- jschwartzi 8y ago
  Not really. Opinionated software is good when the opinion is something you agree with. When you need the opinionated software to something it wasn't designed for it's frequently really bad. CMake is opinionated. It's built assuming that the build yields an executable file for Windows, Linux or Mac. Try getting CMake to cross-compile for more than one platform at the same time, or build not than one executable and then build a root filesystem into a system image. This is impossible without circumventing CMake entirely. It's actually pretty easy in Make, which is what CMake generates. There are tons of organizations which need to manage their projects in a way Trello or Pivotal aren't designed for. These tools require you to adopt a methodology and they work great as long as you do. But if you need to do something strange like integrate with a separate system test team, good luck. That's really why organizations adopt JIRA. They want to do things that the tool designers thought you should never do. And those things are necessary in the eyes of those organizations. Being opinionated is great if you're a human, but the best software is built by people who are trying to help me do my job, not by people who want to dictate how it should be done from the perspective of not being my employer.
  - 8y ago

nine_k 8y ago

You may like Jira or dislike Jira, but having to click fewer controls, and likely wait fewer times for a Jira page to load, will be a plus. Especially if your company is heavily invested in Jira, and switching to your more favored issue tracker is infeasible.

tootie 8y ago

JIRA is the top project management platform for good reason. I know a lot of people complain that it's complicated, but every time I've something simpler we end up hitting a wall. JIRA just needs a sensible workflow configured for your project and it's great. All that being said, I don't get this move. Atlassian has a very capable git product. GitHub should have attempted to anoint a new tool.

CodeSheikh 8y ago
People complain not only it's complicated but it is slow and overloaded with unnecessary features. Can you open up create a new ticket window and how many features and fields do you count?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- shimms 8y ago
  3 - because we spent time configuring it to our needs.
  - regularfry 8y ago
    You are unusual in having that be in your control, I suspect. Ours is centrally managed.
- sumedh 8y ago
  > Can you open up create a new ticket window and how many features and fields do you count? Not sure what is the point of asking that question, it depends on what you have configured.
onion2k 8y ago
That just means it's ideal for your projects, and maybe even most projects. That doesn't mean it's ideal for all projects though. To use an obvious analogy, PHP is the most popular web backend language and it's ideal for my project, so you should be using it on your project regardless of what your project is... Very few people would agree with that.

ausjke 8y ago

Isn't Jira from one of its major competitor? This is interesting.

dreamcompiler 8y ago
I expect many if not most users of Jira don't also use Bitbucket.
lysp 8y ago
I'm guessing they want to try and take some of the bitbucket market share back.
- timberfields 8y ago
  This reads like a wise move on GitHub's part. Head to head, GitHub wins against bitbucket 10 out of 10 times x infinity. But being very close to enterprise sales cycles, some pointy haired boss somewhere says "gee, we have a jira contract already and they'll give me this other piece of software (bitbucket) for next to nothing...it's got to be good enough for my devs, right?" Of course this is silly way of thinking, but I'm certain it happens all the time, more than we think in forums like this.
  - itomato 8y ago
    Bitbucket Enterprise is not only cheaper than GitHub Enterprise, but it can run on-prem in a cluster. Hard to imagine where GitHub trounces Bitbucket, but I am willing to listen
- alkonaut 8y ago
  But by integrating github more tightly with a competitor (Jira) to their owners' main enterprise issue management service (TFS/VSTS/Azure DevOps)?

memset 8y ago

I don't understand the negativity in this thread. Or why people are using this post as an impetus to (ostensibly) move to gitlab. Or lament the decline and fall of github. Nobody is forcing anyone to use Jira. Nobody is forcing anyone to use Github. You can continue to use both without adopting any of the UX or design or workflows or whatever of the other. This blog post is just saying "now we have an officially-supported integration that we believe works better than the previous and here are some new features." Am I missing something here? Otherwise, congrats to the github team for shipping this! I've used github+jira integrations in the past, and if this is an improvement, then cheers to making things easier for folks who use both tools as part of their day-to-day!

kasey_junk 8y ago
It’s a sign of how bad JIRA is. The tool is so bad that people (including me) want the integrations to be hard simply to have a reason not to use it.
- zuern 8y ago
  Just curious, what do you think is so bad about Jira? I think it's miles ahead of other tools like Rally for example. What's your preference?
  - smokeyj 8y ago
    People who hate JIRA never had to manage other developers or coordinate work across teams. It's not a product that anyone loves but what the heck are you expecting?
    - jfoutz 8y ago
      With a pure jira approach, I would expect engineers to do what they think is best in the moment, and log something that vaguely matches the requirements laid out in the ticket. Essentially ineffective management of developer time.
    - deleted 8y ago

dikei 8y ago

If you think JIRA is bad, wait until you have to use IBM RTC :)

dhnsmakala 8y ago

Can someone explain all the Jira hate to me? Yeah it's an ugly UI. But once you are used to how it works, doesn't it do the job fine? I don't spend that much time in task management software, just need to look up my tasks...

strictnein 8y ago
The hate for it is from the large amount of customization that is done to workflows at large organizations, many times in the name of "compliance" or "security". Instead of just moving stories between lanes (To Do, In progress, Testing, Done or whatever), you're filling out multiple forms, clicking a bunch of checkboxes, adding links to test results, build results, PRs, etc, all for someone you'll never know to run a weekly report and send it off to a bunch of people who will never read it. But they will generate a wonderful paper trail in case something happens.
- mrmondo 8y ago
  Yeah that and it's interface feeling so incredibly slow / high latency (on prem and cloud / hosted), it /feels/ like Java.
caoilte 8y ago
it's sloooooooow. i can create two tickets in trello in the time it takes jira to load a page.
- DocTomoe 8y ago
  Those honestly can't be good, well-thought-out tickets, though.

pkamb 8y ago

I'm all for this if it prompts Jira to support Markdown.

CodeSheikh 8y ago

Can we use this post and maybe discuss possible alternatives to JIRA?

CodeSheikh 8y ago
Trello
- ochrist 8y ago
  Trello was just bought by Atlassian (the company behind JIRA).
  - chii 8y ago
    Implying that it's not good simply because it's now owned by Atlassian? Trello is good for what it's designed for - simple lists of lists of notes.
    - chrisper 8y ago
      It's probably implied that Trello one day will become Jira...
      - ochrist 8y ago
        Nah, not really. It was just for information. But Atlassian must have some kind of plan for Trello, and I for one can't guess what that might be.
        jschumacher 8y ago
        The plan is to let Trello do what it does best, help people manage anything from organising a wedding to planning software projects.
omegabravo 8y ago
I use Azure VSTS and am very happy with it. The only issue I have is that you can't export issues to a XLS file without plugins. However, I've used Jira previously and it worked just fine for me and the team. YMMV

qaq 8y ago

Jira is bad enough that at one point was seriously considering doing a startup in this space. There is a ton of alternatives for "simpler" use cases but 0 better alternatives that can actually be used by large Enterprises.

lucidone 8y ago
There are a million project management apps out there because it's basically all CRUD.
- qaq 8y ago
  There are a million project management apps that a small team can use and there is 0 aside from Jira that large enterprises can use.
  - chii 8y ago
    > 0 aside from Jira that large enterprises can use. that's because the complaints against Jira (being infinitely customizable and has lots of enterprise features) are the very things that a startup can't do - and perhaps, feel they shouldn't do.
    - qaq 8y ago
      Thats not the main complaints against Jira.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > There are a million project management apps that a small team can use and there is 0 aside from Jira that large enterprises can use. I'm pretty sure that's wrong; there are large enterprises that use project management software but don't use Jira at all.
    - qaq 8y ago
      Yes there are and read what people are writing about those systems they are even more abysmal thats why Atlassian dominates this market.

bongo662 8y ago

While ive only been a dev for a bit over a year at my current company we use JIRA and its been pretty easy to understand and work with. Issue comes in a tester and dev is assigned work is tracked through the issues ID and you just move the status through its lifecycle (progres, review, testing, done). Maybe theirs more cumbersome workflows at other companies but mine seems to keep it straightforward.

anonytrary 8y ago

I noticed absolutely no change in Github's product after the Microsoft news, and I'm 99% sure there will be no appreciable change after this news settles. I'm 100% sure that people are going to freak out and waste their time migrating to BitBucket or GitLab for the wrong reasons. As a Github user, there are a few things Github does that makes me unhappy, like not hyperlinking static text when they should, but who they get in bed with is not one of them.

johns 8y ago
The Microsoft deal hasn’t even closed yet.
- hinkley 8y ago
  In general, your new corporate overlords usually spend the first fiscal year trying to figure out what to do with you. So wait for the first full fiscal year after the deal closes, or the second if its late enough in the year. Then you will hear logic like, “We’re not going to tell you what to make, but we won’t pay for that,” as if that’s different or even better than just setting the agenda.

xab9 8y ago

After using bugzilla, mantis, tfs, jira, gitlab and github, I honestly think that jira is not half bad. In fact I prefer it over gitlab, but I'm alone with this view on the team. The hatred towards jira is on par with desktop java.

Cogito 8y ago

To wade in on the JIRA wars going on, I was once a JIRA consultant (among other things). I ended up telling people I worked on business process design because once you see 100 different ways people are using a tool you learn most of the wrong ways to do it. The primary issue with any task tracking or workflow tool is that the people implementing it have never learnt what is effective and what isn't. Worse, what is effective changes depending on what exact kind of task you are trying to track, in addition to the organisation and everything else. I would typically start, regardless of what the particular thing I was brought in to help with was, with getting management/project leads/etc to agree to what outcomes they want from a tool like JIRA. Companies have processes that get followed, and management need to provide direction and measure what's being done. Overwhelmingly there seems to be no good way of transferring information between these layers, of people doing work and other people trying to understand what that work is. A good tool will make it easy for that information to flow. The problem is that for the information to be useful it needs to be accurate and complete, you need people to actually use the tool. Every time you add a gate to a task (this person must accept this before it progresses, or this field has to be filled out) you add friction to the process and people disengage (often using a different tool altogether like excel or sticky notes). At the same time, a well designed tool supports people doing their work. Prompts remind people what things need to be checked or completed at each step, and notifications can let you know when something needs doing. As long as you can get people to agree to these concepts, you can start to design workflows and information to capture that will be useful for the people using it, and useful for the people trying to work out what is happening. JIRA also takes a while to learn how to architect sustainably. If you create 20 copies of different screens it becomes a real chore to go in and change them down the track. If you do have a bit of foresight and experience, however, it's not hard to manage hundred of projects with different workflows and fields. It has lots of warts and cruft that's built over time, and there isn't enough knowledge about how to use the good bits, so it gets a bad rap. I know how to use it pretty well, and am normally in a position to change it when I need to, so don't run into the gripes that most people see. The biggest positive however is not that it can do almost anything 'task-tracky' with a bit of effort - it's that it can do that and someone else maintains it. So many tools (internal and external) grow and grow and grow to try and cover things like assigning tasks and tracking workflow and sending emails, or run into a wall because VBA scripts in excel can only do so much. The ability to take almost any of those and add task tracking by simply integrating with JIRA is a huge selling point and has provided so much value to me over the years. That I can do the same for all parts of the business is the main reason it has spread so far in the enterprise world. I remember the days that JIRA used to be snuck into small teams when no one was looking, and spread organically throughout the organisation after that because it was so useful.

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timwaagh 8y ago

Kinda surprised it's jira and not Microsoft's own TFS. Oh well. Nice for those who use jira.

tilolebo 8y ago

So I installed it, configured it, the sync status is "COMPLETE" but I can't see anything related to github in my JIRA issues that are mentioned in PRs and commits. Is there an extra step to perform? The 3rd screenshot in https://github.com/marketplace/jira-software-github https://github.com/marketplace/jira-software-github shows an "ACTIVE" status.

tbarbugli 8y ago

This icould be great news, it is not clear from the article but I hope they solved the annoying problem of first repo sync hitting Github rate limits. We had this issue several times when we migrated from Trello to Jira.

swagatkonchada 8y ago

A lot of people are going to switch from Asana to Jira

ed_blackburn 8y ago

Any other ex-salesforce people here. If you think JIRA-GH is scary. Remember GUS :O

seanjregan 8y ago

This is pretty much every thread. Tool X sucks. No, you set it up incorrectly Tell me why it sucks? Management sucks Maybe your team/team and management is the problem. Oh Hai, GitLab CEO here. We will build whatever it is you are complaining about.

KyeRussell 8y ago
I can't take GitLab seriously until it stops touting itself as a project management tool with its flimsy label-based 'workflow' model.