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I work in a shop that had effectively no project management. When jira was introduced it was a godsend. Obviously email and slack requests aren't better, so wha

by ahi 8y ago

I work in a shop that had effectively no project management. When jira was introduced it was a godsend. Obviously email and slack requests aren't better, so what is the alternative system that has people hating on jira? Honest question.

bpchaps 8y ago
How long has your company been using JIRA for? JIRA has a tendency to.... decay. New ticket types are created with custom fields that aren't ever kept up to date. Everyone starts to choose random entries because they have no choice, and no way to add new ones. Once that starts, things fall into chaos because nobody knows the "right" way to file tickets. Tickets soon become immeasurably immeasurable. Projects become categorized incorrectly on a constant basis. The only people who know how to use JIRA effectively are the ones who know how to ignore all the noise. Once those people leave, you're left with pure, unadulterated chaos. And then you get people who try to fix it by adding a new ticket type or project group, etc. Rinse, repeat. If you haven't already, then you should check out JIRA's query language and its API. The query language is... special (and doesn't support wildcards, last I checked). Its API, instead of displaying field names as you see it in their interface, shows "fieldname_21234". No joke. You have to run another api request for all of the field names and associate them yourself. It's painful To your point - sure, JIRA can be used effectively. Though, any bad tool can be used well if enforced. But that's not what most of us have seen in the wild. JIRA eventually just becomes a behemoth of a tool.
- Latteland 8y ago
  That's a great point about Jira, about decaying and left over ticket types. But I used TFS (team foundation server) in a job, and it had some of the same problems. Someone always felt the need to edit the dang project and team paths and it was just a pain in a big company with constant churn. One level deep labels is much easier to deal with.
- meetbryce 8y ago
  That sounds a lot like a human problem, not a tool problem.
  - Twisol 8y ago
    There's a saying along the lines of, the purpose of a tool is determined by how its users use it. For instance, security dialogs are often useless because users blindly click through. Is this a human problem? Yes, absolutely. Does that mean we can blame users for not using the dialog properly? No, it doesn't. We're trying other approaches now that encourage better behaviors from users. All that is to say, a human problem is fundamentally a tool problem.
  - regularfry 8y ago
    It's an artefact of the tool having too many features.
- wizardofmysore 8y ago
  Dev here. I worked in the company that used Jira. Used it for 4 years. It was really useful. It is anyday better than getting tasks over email. We had very minimal customisations. A simple set of swimlanes that we update throughout the product development process. From what you are telling it looks like your team had other problems in delivery. You tried to solve it via Jira by adding new custom fields and forcing people to update them. Solving the deeper issue would have helped there. I have been able to track my deliverables. See how my team is performing. Plan for the next sprint. Perform retrospectives and capture action items. The tool hasn't broken while doing this. UI is decent. I really don't see a problem with the tool, it serves its goal.
- donkeyd 8y ago
  > JIRA has a tendency to.... decay. Is there any enterprise scale tool that doesn't, when it isn't managed correctly? It needs management just like any other tool that's being used on an enterprise scale. People just want to be able to set and forget, but then it doesn't adapt well to individual departments and teams. Then people either start messing with it, or if they can't, they start hating it. The benefit of a smaller tool is then, that teams can just get their own instance and mess that up without impacting the organization.
  - baud147258 8y ago
    > it doesn't adapt well to individual departments and teams With Jira, one can create project-specific issue types, fields and workflow.
Aeolun 8y ago
It’s not that JIRA cannot be decent, but in any enterpriseish environment it ALWAYS turns into a monster. The Jira environment I’m currently working in, takes 2+ seconds for any interaction to update the interface (that’s the sped up version. People tell me it used to take 20...). Creating a new ticket displays no less than 150 fields (not all of which are required, thank god).
MaulingMonkey 8y ago
The two... archtypical complaints typically I hear levied against JIRA are typically: 1) It's sometimes a tool for managerial micromanagement, such as the extraction of unreasonably certain estimates as "promises", which can then be adjusted further down by your project managers, which can then be used to pressure devs into crunch or worse, instead of as a means of adjusting expectations. 2) It's an extremely complicated piece of software which you can (read: will) overcustomize into oblivion, confusion, and general busywork. Having grown over the years, it's various complications are also not consistent with each other, so some features don't really work well with others. The antithesis of KISS or YAGNI. 3) Project managers will still ask you about stuff instead of referring to JIRA. What's the point of sending time estimates into the void if they're going to swing by and disrupt your flow to hear those same estimates from you in person anyways?! #1 gives people a (reasonable) emotional reason to hate JIRA, #2 gives people a (reasonable) rational reason to hate JIRA. #3 probably counts for both. I feel like I'm the weird one out not having come to hate JIRA in my social circles. Project management is important, but JIRA is just a tool, not project management. Ultimately, that's a communication problem with your stakeholders and the people who get to call the shots. Email, slack, trello boards, even water-cooler chit chat can be better than an over-configured JIRA install in the right hands with the right managers. Get everyone on the same page in terms of tasks and priorities, manage expectations, track progress, avoid last minute surprises... Something like a Trello board is sometimes popular with the "JIRA is overcomplicated" crowd. I use it for personal projects sometimes. It's OK. I'm OK with JIRA in the right hands too though. You don't have to tweak every single knob and settings. You can practice some self restraint and avoid it nerd sniping you, probably.
stevenjohns 8y ago
It depends on how Jira is used. In your case it appears that there was just oversight added when there wasn't before, but for many of us we get quizzed daily on whether or not we're logging hours for individual tasks, "burn down" is used as a measure of productivity and there are dozens upon dozens of emails sent out to the point where you can ignore everything and still do okay. This is excluding Jira's design, which frustratingly makes you click several times to uncover data that should be obvious, and various other minor issues that just create headaches, for example: estimations for individual tasks don't bubble up for stories or epics, so you can have two wildly different sets of data to maintain. The alternative systems would change depending on what people's issues with Jira are -- i.e are they design-based or ideology-based.
bisby 8y ago
I was running an on-prem jira. But I felt like I was doing something completely wrong because it was so unbearably slow. I was slightly embarrassed that it was on me that this was running so slow. Our team grew to the point where we needed a bigger license, so we just migrated over to Jira Cloud. And it was even slower than the on-prem install. No "no project management" isn't a better solution. No, I can't name any alternatives off the top of my head that are better than jira. But holy cow, jira is not a good piece of software. It has a lot of great concepts, but it runs like garbage and really isn't THAT fancy for what most people require. Especially for the cost. It's not good, but it's not exactly a risky move either. "No one ever got fired for choosing IBM."
- hvidgaard 8y ago
  We use YouTrack with great success. We have a fully fledged issue tracker we can customize to our needs, and the agile boards make planning and executing sprints straight forward.
- stock_toaster 8y ago
  You really do have to basically over-provision the crap out of it, to get anything even in the neighborhood of “acceptable” performance.
derefr 8y ago
The worst shoes in the world are a godsend to a person who's been walking across the desert in bare feet. Doesn't mean they're good shoes. Good project management systems are simple and frequently not completely technically automated. Trello, or its older cousin "index cards on a whiteboard" are popular. Regular GitHub issues handle much of what needs to be handled, as long as you impose an organizational policy for how you'll go about triaging and updating status in them. Scrum stand-ups are just... regular meetings. None of this is very fancy; none of it needs to be.
lmm 8y ago
Trello. No "workflows" that force you to drag the ticket through 5 different columns to get it to the state you wanted (or, even better, just make it completely impossible to undo a mistake), no approvals, no waiting 5 seconds for the UI every time you change something, just a bunch of task cards in columns that you drag between them.

by ahi 8y ago

bpchaps 8y ago

How long has your company been using JIRA for? JIRA has a tendency to.... decay. New ticket types are created with custom fields that aren't ever kept up to date. Everyone starts to choose random entries because they have no choice, and no way to add new ones. Once that starts, things fall into chaos because nobody knows the "right" way to file tickets. Tickets soon become immeasurably immeasurable. Projects become categorized incorrectly on a constant basis. The only people who know how to use JIRA effectively are the ones who know how to ignore all the noise. Once those people leave, you're left with pure, unadulterated chaos. And then you get people who try to fix it by adding a new ticket type or project group, etc. Rinse, repeat. If you haven't already, then you should check out JIRA's query language and its API. The query language is... special (and doesn't support wildcards, last I checked). Its API, instead of displaying field names as you see it in their interface, shows "fieldname_21234". No joke. You have to run another api request for all of the field names and associate them yourself. It's painful To your point - sure, JIRA can be used effectively. Though, any bad tool can be used well if enforced. But that's not what most of us have seen in the wild. JIRA eventually just becomes a behemoth of a tool.

Latteland 8y ago
That's a great point about Jira, about decaying and left over ticket types. But I used TFS (team foundation server) in a job, and it had some of the same problems. Someone always felt the need to edit the dang project and team paths and it was just a pain in a big company with constant churn. One level deep labels is much easier to deal with.
meetbryce 8y ago
That sounds a lot like a human problem, not a tool problem.
- Twisol 8y ago
  There's a saying along the lines of, the purpose of a tool is determined by how its users use it. For instance, security dialogs are often useless because users blindly click through. Is this a human problem? Yes, absolutely. Does that mean we can blame users for not using the dialog properly? No, it doesn't. We're trying other approaches now that encourage better behaviors from users. All that is to say, a human problem is fundamentally a tool problem.
- regularfry 8y ago
  It's an artefact of the tool having too many features.
wizardofmysore 8y ago
Dev here. I worked in the company that used Jira. Used it for 4 years. It was really useful. It is anyday better than getting tasks over email. We had very minimal customisations. A simple set of swimlanes that we update throughout the product development process. From what you are telling it looks like your team had other problems in delivery. You tried to solve it via Jira by adding new custom fields and forcing people to update them. Solving the deeper issue would have helped there. I have been able to track my deliverables. See how my team is performing. Plan for the next sprint. Perform retrospectives and capture action items. The tool hasn't broken while doing this. UI is decent. I really don't see a problem with the tool, it serves its goal.
donkeyd 8y ago
> JIRA has a tendency to.... decay. Is there any enterprise scale tool that doesn't, when it isn't managed correctly? It needs management just like any other tool that's being used on an enterprise scale. People just want to be able to set and forget, but then it doesn't adapt well to individual departments and teams. Then people either start messing with it, or if they can't, they start hating it. The benefit of a smaller tool is then, that teams can just get their own instance and mess that up without impacting the organization.
- baud147258 8y ago
  > it doesn't adapt well to individual departments and teams With Jira, one can create project-specific issue types, fields and workflow.

Aeolun 8y ago

It’s not that JIRA cannot be decent, but in any enterpriseish environment it ALWAYS turns into a monster. The Jira environment I’m currently working in, takes 2+ seconds for any interaction to update the interface (that’s the sped up version. People tell me it used to take 20...). Creating a new ticket displays no less than 150 fields (not all of which are required, thank god).

MaulingMonkey 8y ago

The two... archtypical complaints typically I hear levied against JIRA are typically: 1) It's sometimes a tool for managerial micromanagement, such as the extraction of unreasonably certain estimates as "promises", which can then be adjusted further down by your project managers, which can then be used to pressure devs into crunch or worse, instead of as a means of adjusting expectations. 2) It's an extremely complicated piece of software which you can (read: will) overcustomize into oblivion, confusion, and general busywork. Having grown over the years, it's various complications are also not consistent with each other, so some features don't really work well with others. The antithesis of KISS or YAGNI. 3) Project managers will still ask you about stuff instead of referring to JIRA. What's the point of sending time estimates into the void if they're going to swing by and disrupt your flow to hear those same estimates from you in person anyways?! #1 gives people a (reasonable) emotional reason to hate JIRA, #2 gives people a (reasonable) rational reason to hate JIRA. #3 probably counts for both. I feel like I'm the weird one out not having come to hate JIRA in my social circles. Project management is important, but JIRA is just a tool, not project management. Ultimately, that's a communication problem with your stakeholders and the people who get to call the shots. Email, slack, trello boards, even water-cooler chit chat can be better than an over-configured JIRA install in the right hands with the right managers. Get everyone on the same page in terms of tasks and priorities, manage expectations, track progress, avoid last minute surprises... Something like a Trello board is sometimes popular with the "JIRA is overcomplicated" crowd. I use it for personal projects sometimes. It's OK. I'm OK with JIRA in the right hands too though. You don't have to tweak every single knob and settings. You can practice some self restraint and avoid it nerd sniping you, probably.

stevenjohns 8y ago

It depends on how Jira is used. In your case it appears that there was just oversight added when there wasn't before, but for many of us we get quizzed daily on whether or not we're logging hours for individual tasks, "burn down" is used as a measure of productivity and there are dozens upon dozens of emails sent out to the point where you can ignore everything and still do okay. This is excluding Jira's design, which frustratingly makes you click several times to uncover data that should be obvious, and various other minor issues that just create headaches, for example: estimations for individual tasks don't bubble up for stories or epics, so you can have two wildly different sets of data to maintain. The alternative systems would change depending on what people's issues with Jira are -- i.e are they design-based or ideology-based.

bisby 8y ago

I was running an on-prem jira. But I felt like I was doing something completely wrong because it was so unbearably slow. I was slightly embarrassed that it was on me that this was running so slow. Our team grew to the point where we needed a bigger license, so we just migrated over to Jira Cloud. And it was even slower than the on-prem install. No "no project management" isn't a better solution. No, I can't name any alternatives off the top of my head that are better than jira. But holy cow, jira is not a good piece of software. It has a lot of great concepts, but it runs like garbage and really isn't THAT fancy for what most people require. Especially for the cost. It's not good, but it's not exactly a risky move either. "No one ever got fired for choosing IBM."

hvidgaard 8y ago
We use YouTrack with great success. We have a fully fledged issue tracker we can customize to our needs, and the agile boards make planning and executing sprints straight forward.
stock_toaster 8y ago
You really do have to basically over-provision the crap out of it, to get anything even in the neighborhood of “acceptable” performance.

derefr 8y ago

The worst shoes in the world are a godsend to a person who's been walking across the desert in bare feet. Doesn't mean they're good shoes. Good project management systems are simple and frequently not completely technically automated. Trello, or its older cousin "index cards on a whiteboard" are popular. Regular GitHub issues handle much of what needs to be handled, as long as you impose an organizational policy for how you'll go about triaging and updating status in them. Scrum stand-ups are just... regular meetings. None of this is very fancy; none of it needs to be.

lmm 8y ago

Trello. No "workflows" that force you to drag the ticket through 5 different columns to get it to the state you wanted (or, even better, just make it completely impossible to undo a mistake), no approvals, no waiting 5 seconds for the UI every time you change something, just a bunch of task cards in columns that you drag between them.