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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.
by 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 agoJust 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 agoPeople 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 agoWith 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[deleted]
- sidlls 8y agoI manage developers and coordinate work across teams. Can't stand JIRA. I'm not expecting much. For one this is a space that many engineers sneer at ("product/sales/marketing/not-engineering" is beneath them) and don't really want to work in. Another thing is that many of the individuals responsible for deciding on project management tools are not qualified to do so but think they are and won't apply effort to doing a proper job of evaluating options.
- kasey_junk 8y agoJIRA in its out of the box configuration is an adequate issue tracker. Thats never the problem. The problem falls into a few broad categories: - conflating how you interact with issues (bugs, security events, new client on-boarding, etc) and how you do product development (prospecting, requirements analysis, systems design, etc). These activities only have a passing relationship with each other. Designing new products is fundamentally different than dealing with customer service items. Just as a specific, issues in JIRA are a terrible way to capture the vision and mission of a new feature. They are further a terrible way to capture requirements which in any other system would be versioned along with the software they define. - the customization of workflows encourages teams to think of every component as a fungible unit. If you don't define 'workflows' and instead prioritize around results, you can motivate teams to operate in their best ways. If you build complicated or bespoke workflows in JIRA you operate in a way that presumes that all teams and all situations can be put in the same box. - JIRA, especially in its most customized versions, implies that you can replace normal human communications, conversations, emails, chats, with a Platonic ideal of tickets. Yet tickets are a bad mechanism for spreading big picture ideals and an even worse mechanism for spreading specific details of a functional specification (no testability, no atomicity with software change, etc). - JIRA's customizability leads people to think that the right thing to do with their project management teams is to define standardized workflows, automated integrations, normalized schemas for issues, and the like. Instead of doing the hard work of aligning priorities Project Managers get caught up in the minutia of making sure tickets are in the proper form or that developers have moved tickets through the correct statuses. All told, this is one of those cases where worse is better. A title, a comment box and a set of tags largely allow you to systematically capture everything you need to capture and allow a qualified project manager to do their job. Github issues does this, JIRA out of the box does this, Bugzilla and FogBugz all do this. I only ever run into problems with JIRA, so I can only extrapolate from experience that it is something about JIRA that leads Project Managers to spend less time with legal pads and more times futzing with JIRA.
- chii 8y agoall of those problems you have aren't inherently a problem with the Jira product. They are organizational problems, management problems, and communication problems. If you have any of those problems, replacing Jira with another issue tracker will not solve it. Jira gets the flac, because but the problems isn't Jira.
- paulddraper 8y agoJIRA Core is a good issue tracker. However JIRA Agile is a dumpster fire, partly because JIRA Agile reinvents JIRA. Summary field? Yes, but also "Epic Name" field. Status field? Yes, but also "Epic Status" field. Priority field? Yes, but also "Rank" field. Subissues? Yes, but also "Epic Link" field. And then boards and sprints are weird. Boards are supposed to be just views, but then access permissions for closing sprints depends on the view you were looking at when you created it. Plus the UI bad; the whole board gets really squished and becomes essentially unusable if I half-screen it.
- TheGRS 8y agoMy main gripe about JIRA, other than how abysmal it gets when you add a slew of custom fields and workflows all over the place, is that I can't sort on the boards based on all of these fields I've setup. I set priority and severity on every issue, yet I can't sort by those fields in the planner or board, that's infuriating to me.
- seanjregan 8y agoCheck out Jira cloud, you can filter with a single click in the Next-gen UI by issue ower, epic, or label, no JQL required.
- TheGRS 8y agoNot talking about the search or search results, talking about the Active Sprint board and Backlog.
- p2t2p 8y agoI'll tell you a secret, there are no "subissues", there are only issue links and UI represents different kind of links differently ;-).
- Cogito 8y agoSubtask issuetypes are a real thing, and are different to issue links. Different parts of the UI and some functionality works differently for subtasks than for linked issues. For example, you can set it up so that you can't close a 'user story' until all subtasks under it have been closed. Not possible out of the box with linked issues.
- keithnz 8y agoI like YouTrack
- leetcrew 8y agoyesterday i tried to drag/drop a single profile trace file to upload to a bug report. somehow JIRA uploaded it as ~100 different files, which i had to delete one by one, since JIRA doesn't have batch deletion for attachments. every single deletion sent out an email to everyone who was following the bug, which means i dumped 100 emails on five different people.
- dyeje 8y agoThat's not saying much. Rally is probably the most overpriced, awful tracking software out there. I prefer Pivotal Tracker personally.
- mgoblu3 8y agoAs someone who works at a place that just moved from Pivotal Tracker to Rally.... you're opening up some wounds :(
- bicubic 8y agoI think it's less a sign of how bad JIRA is, and more how bad project management and project managers are in software development. JIRA can be a decent tool. The issue is the way that 90% of all businesses big and small use it, is just so that managers can shrug off any responsibility for understanding the projects they're managing, and wall themselves off in JIRA bureaucracy. Engineers have not taken too kindly to it.
- fnord123 8y agoHow can it be a decent tool if any operation takes . . . . forever
- subpixel 8y agoExactly. Jira is horrible developer experience and it occupies a space in the developer workflow where it can create a feeling that the whole project or organization is off the rails.
- dominotw 8y agoI've never seen a JIRA installation that isn't slow as hell. Project Manager types dont mind JIRA slowness for some reason. Prbly have too much time in their meetings to sit and wait around.
- nojvek 8y agoJIRA is slooooooooooow. I don’t think any fancy integration can fix that slowness if their APIs are just snail slow. On the other hand JIRA UX and moreso Atlassian UX needs a lot of work. A number of common things take wayyyy too many clicks. It’s hard to discover etc. A good integration can definitely fix that mess. GitHub knows how to do good simple UX.
- ascagnel_ 8y agoIf you think JIRA is slow, you should check out tools like HP Quality Center. That thing was such a piece of garbage the last time I had it foisted on me (2015), it: - made JIRA look fast - only ran in IE6 - required a special MSIE shell to run in Win7 - despite running only in IE6/Windows, it had several places where it broke from the standard Windows UX
- braythwayt 8y agoI gently suggest that you examine this thinking, hard. You obviously don’t believe that you have a choice in the matter today. But you also seem to have a helpless belief that you won’t have a choice in the matter tomorrow, nor do you seem to believe there are things you can do to have a choice tomorrow. So instead, you are wishing that something else would force the universe to give you what you want, but without you actually changing your circumstances such that you can freely choose not to use JIRA tomorrow. I urge you to shift your thinking and make it your business to recognize that you actually do have a choice today. You can work somewhere else. That has some costs you may not care for, but it’s healthy to say, “Overall, I like the choice I’m making” and then to be happy with the outcome. Next, I urge you to believe that you can make choices today that give you even greater freedom to choose not to use Jira tomorrow without making difficult tradeoffs. When you have greater confidence in your own freedom of choice in these matters, you will be happier today and tomorrow, and you will let go of wishing that other forces will act to give you what you want in life. Summary: Working on your own agency is far, far better for you personally than hoping that the universe will conspire to make other people stop choosing to ask you to use Jira.
- Spivak 8y agoThis is all well and good but I don't think the thinking is wrong, Jira is built and sold to managers who have the authority to impose it on their engineers, (typically dumping a lot of management responsibility onto the engineers in the process but that's a different issue). There's really not much you can do in a lot of orgs except hope that Jira starts to stagnate and rot. So I understand the frustration when someone from the engineering side builds something for it -- "why, oh god why are you trying to extend its life?!?"
- braythwayt 8y agoNope, nope, nope. If Jira didn’t exist, someone would build it, because said managers have the budget and authority to spend. If we want a different management culture, we have to work on the culture directly. Which is the entire point of agile, lean, and other movements. As for managers buying it and imposing it on their engineers, we need to recognize that said managers are users too, and their needs matter. It’s not like there’s a good tool and a shitty tool, and the engineers and managers put in a requisition for the good tool, but the CFO plays golf with the shitty tool’s VP of Sales and they buy the shitty tool. Managers want Jira for a reason. We may not like the reason, but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong, and it especially doesn’t mean that if we burned Jira down to the ground its replacement wouldn’t address the reasons managers want Jira. If we believe that software can do what managers and engineers need doing without being as craptastic as Jira, we need to build it. But we can’t ignore what managers need. We either give them something else that solves their problem, or we stop worrying about Jira and get them to approach software development in a new way.
- celticninja 8y agoYeah I'm avoiding telling any of my managers a out this new development, I like gitub and I don't need Jira fucking it up.