5 ms·

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?

by zuern 8y ago

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
  [deleted]
- sidlls 8y ago
  I 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 ago
JIRA 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 ago
  all 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.
  - kasey_junk 8y ago
    But most other systems don't sell that they can solve this problem. If I gave you a web form with a title, a description, a comment section and some tags, would you argue that you could solve those org problems? Would you spend any time trying to solve the problem in the system?
    - chii 8y ago
      > But most other systems don't sell that they can solve this problem. Don't the simpler (more opinionated) systems also tout the same? All software is sold with the same promise in one way or another.
  - castlecrasher2 8y ago
    I agree. One of my previous companies used Jira and it was absolutely fantastic because one project manager had a clear vision for it and implemented it and the other PMs planned sprints inside it.
    - hvidgaard 8y ago
      The old saying: Too many chefs spoil the broth. If you have multiple people with conflicting priorities the tool will be crappy.
    - MisterOctober 8y ago
      Yep! I switched to Jira from an older in-house solution early this year, and have found it to be excellent so far. There's a little learning curve on the admin side, but the actual experience of using it for feature / issue tracking has been real positive. A lotta folks I talk to have had bad experiences with Jira in a big-company setting -- say in particular, Amazon --- but most of those problems I've heard boil down to poor practices on the management / admin end, rather than problems with the software itself. p.s. I've also used Asana and a few other less-costly solutions, but their limitations ended up getting frustrating.
paulddraper 8y ago
JIRA 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 ago
  My 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 ago
    Check 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 ago
      Not talking about the search or search results, talking about the Active Sprint board and Backlog.
- p2t2p 8y ago
  I'll tell you a secret, there are no "subissues", there are only issue links and UI represents different kind of links differently ;-).
  - Cogito 8y ago
    Subtask 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 ago
I like YouTrack
leetcrew 8y ago
yesterday 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 ago
That's not saying much. Rally is probably the most overpriced, awful tracking software out there. I prefer Pivotal Tracker personally.
- mgoblu3 8y ago
  As someone who works at a place that just moved from Pivotal Tracker to Rally.... you're opening up some wounds :(

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?

by 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
[deleted]
sidlls 8y ago
I 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 ago

JIRA 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 ago
all 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.
- kasey_junk 8y ago
  But most other systems don't sell that they can solve this problem. If I gave you a web form with a title, a description, a comment section and some tags, would you argue that you could solve those org problems? Would you spend any time trying to solve the problem in the system?
  - chii 8y ago
    > But most other systems don't sell that they can solve this problem. Don't the simpler (more opinionated) systems also tout the same? All software is sold with the same promise in one way or another.
- castlecrasher2 8y ago
  I agree. One of my previous companies used Jira and it was absolutely fantastic because one project manager had a clear vision for it and implemented it and the other PMs planned sprints inside it.
  - hvidgaard 8y ago
    The old saying: Too many chefs spoil the broth. If you have multiple people with conflicting priorities the tool will be crappy.
  - MisterOctober 8y ago
    Yep! I switched to Jira from an older in-house solution early this year, and have found it to be excellent so far. There's a little learning curve on the admin side, but the actual experience of using it for feature / issue tracking has been real positive. A lotta folks I talk to have had bad experiences with Jira in a big-company setting -- say in particular, Amazon --- but most of those problems I've heard boil down to poor practices on the management / admin end, rather than problems with the software itself. p.s. I've also used Asana and a few other less-costly solutions, but their limitations ended up getting frustrating.

paulddraper 8y ago

JIRA 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 ago
My 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 ago
  Check 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 ago
    Not talking about the search or search results, talking about the Active Sprint board and Backlog.
p2t2p 8y ago
I'll tell you a secret, there are no "subissues", there are only issue links and UI represents different kind of links differently ;-).
- Cogito 8y ago
  Subtask 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 ago

I like YouTrack

leetcrew 8y ago

yesterday 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 ago

That's not saying much. Rally is probably the most overpriced, awful tracking software out there. I prefer Pivotal Tracker personally.

mgoblu3 8y ago
As someone who works at a place that just moved from Pivotal Tracker to Rally.... you're opening up some wounds :(