5 ms·

I recently moved to a company that uses Jira. What kinds of problems should I be looking out for?

giancarlostoro 7y ago
Issues with JIRA are mostly seen as you use it for different companies and projects. Everyone sets it up differently. It is like Excel for ticketing. I didnt care much for Trac in comparison but I can appreciate that the UI always remained consistent.
liveoneggs 7y ago
There is some kind of issue with ASF's JIRA not being indexed by search engines, which makes discovery of problems more difficult than it should be. ASF gets their JIRA hosting gratis so I don't think they have much recourse.
mdaniel 7y ago
If it's the cloud hosted version (I can't speak to their on-prem software since I haven't used it in a few years), watch out for the nonsense that is having two separate markup languages, used it two different contexts. The original "Atlassian markup" (made famous by Confluence) is used, as best I can tell, in issue creation and descriptions, whereas some kind of Markdown hybrid is used in issue comments Be careful if you use subtasks for issues, which may sound like a perfectly reasonable work breakdown idea but subtasks are snowflakes in Jira and become very hard to have visibility into, assign points to, etc The rest of the rant I'll omit, since it's more rooted in my personal hatred for their products and has less substantiation
hobofan 7y ago
- It's kind of slow (page load/interaction wise) - There are ~5 different places where every setting could be and it's always the last one you look Apart from that, for internal company use it's been one of my favourite PM tools I've worked with. For open source with open communities, it's just too much overhead to manage.
lucb1e 7y ago
We use Jira in a very small company and I avoid it when possible. Wrote a command line hours tracker, that saves 1/3rd of my usage. Maybe I'll write an issues CRUD application some time as well, but I think going further down that rabbit hole costs more time than it saves. My previous employer was a little larger (some 40 employees) and I can say that Jira solves nothing that we couldn't solve much better with text files parsed by Perl/Python/sed/awk, sometimes having a little bit of editing help (such as syntax checking on :w) from Vim/Sublime plugins (both had users that maintained their plugins). Maybe Jira is meant for larger companies? There is a ton of special characters that trigger all sorts of crap: square brackets, double curly braces, ampersands, semicolons, colons, underscores, asterisks, at symbols, backslashes, octothorpes, pluses, carets, tildes, double question marks, pipes, and even hyphens. It takes about num_characters*20 seconds to escape a regex so it doesn't format or hide parts of it (it doesn't help that you can only check by saving, a lot of formatting does not show up in the "visual editor"), but there are probably a lot of features there that one could be using.
- CraftThatBlock 7y ago
  I'm at a company which we have hundreds of Jira users, and for us, it works quite well. It's really about how the team/department uses Jira, how it's setup, and the overall process. My last company we were ~30, and it was a total mess (although we were only ~3 developers). It's really about how it's setup.
  - lucb1e 7y ago
    What is the difference that makes it work for you now where it didn't before?
jkukul 7y ago
Be careful when writing longer comments or creating issues with long descriptions. Your work is not persisted, so in case of an unfortunate event you lose all your input. This happened to my colleagues several times and caused a lot of frustrations. There's a famous issue dating all the way to 2006 for this: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-9292 https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-9292

Issues with JIRA are mostly seen as you use it for different companies and projects. Everyone sets it up differently. It is like Excel for ticketing. I didnt care much for Trac in comparison but I can appreciate that the UI always remained consistent.

liveoneggs 7y ago

There is some kind of issue with ASF's JIRA not being indexed by search engines, which makes discovery of problems more difficult than it should be. ASF gets their JIRA hosting gratis so I don't think they have much recourse.

mdaniel 7y ago

If it's the cloud hosted version (I can't speak to their on-prem software since I haven't used it in a few years), watch out for the nonsense that is having two separate markup languages, used it two different contexts. The original "Atlassian markup" (made famous by Confluence) is used, as best I can tell, in issue creation and descriptions, whereas some kind of Markdown hybrid is used in issue comments Be careful if you use subtasks for issues, which may sound like a perfectly reasonable work breakdown idea but subtasks are snowflakes in Jira and become very hard to have visibility into, assign points to, etc The rest of the rant I'll omit, since it's more rooted in my personal hatred for their products and has less substantiation

hobofan 7y ago

- It's kind of slow (page load/interaction wise) - There are ~5 different places where every setting could be and it's always the last one you look Apart from that, for internal company use it's been one of my favourite PM tools I've worked with. For open source with open communities, it's just too much overhead to manage.

lucb1e 7y ago

We use Jira in a very small company and I avoid it when possible. Wrote a command line hours tracker, that saves 1/3rd of my usage. Maybe I'll write an issues CRUD application some time as well, but I think going further down that rabbit hole costs more time than it saves. My previous employer was a little larger (some 40 employees) and I can say that Jira solves nothing that we couldn't solve much better with text files parsed by Perl/Python/sed/awk, sometimes having a little bit of editing help (such as syntax checking on :w) from Vim/Sublime plugins (both had users that maintained their plugins). Maybe Jira is meant for larger companies? There is a ton of special characters that trigger all sorts of crap: square brackets, double curly braces, ampersands, semicolons, colons, underscores, asterisks, at symbols, backslashes, octothorpes, pluses, carets, tildes, double question marks, pipes, and even hyphens. It takes about num_characters*20 seconds to escape a regex so it doesn't format or hide parts of it (it doesn't help that you can only check by saving, a lot of formatting does not show up in the "visual editor"), but there are probably a lot of features there that one could be using.

CraftThatBlock 7y ago
I'm at a company which we have hundreds of Jira users, and for us, it works quite well. It's really about how the team/department uses Jira, how it's setup, and the overall process. My last company we were ~30, and it was a total mess (although we were only ~3 developers). It's really about how it's setup.
- lucb1e 7y ago
  What is the difference that makes it work for you now where it didn't before?

jkukul 7y ago

Be careful when writing longer comments or creating issues with long descriptions. Your work is not persisted, so in case of an unfortunate event you lose all your input. This happened to my colleagues several times and caused a lot of frustrations. There's a famous issue dating all the way to 2006 for this: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-9292 https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-9292