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Serious question, why does anyone still use Jira. It's a huge pita and everywhere people are essentially forced to use it, they hate it. It's become clear case

Serious question, why does anyone still use Jira. It's a huge pita and everywhere people are essentially forced to use it, they hate it. It's become clear case of too many knobs.

ryanbrunner 6y ago
Serious answer: there's a relative dearth of project management tools that have anything approaching useful reporting and analytics, and the requirements of the organization outside of engineering often require that that reporting exists (if not in the pointy-haired boss "measure the productivity of your individual engineers" sense, at least the "tell me when big project will be done and how many resources you need" sense). GitHub issues and Trello have more or less just abandoned the idea of being able to do any useful analytics or reporting, tools like Pivotal Tracker have some but require that you work in exactly the process they dictate, and the other big ones that have reporting generally are even worse than JIRA.
- scott_w 6y ago
  This is a huge thing. Also, if Jira doesn’t directly support your specific workflow, the API and Export functions provide a lot of information to do this for you. This reporting gets useful once you have a stable team and you want to identify issues in your process and back your theories up with data. Let’s say you struggle to meet expected delivery dates (based off estimates), have a look at a chart of your cycle times. Do they take longer than a week, with a wide variance in when they get delivered? Maybe you’re not breaking down work enough, or you’re getting blocked (committed too early). Check a chart of the number of tickets in each status every day, that might tell you that things get backed up waiting for review or deployment, so discuss that. Simpler tools don’t really provide this information. Is it always necessary? On greenfield work with a smaller company, almost certainly not, but as your product and company gets more complex, having access to this, and presenting it to your team, gets more valuable.
leokennis 6y ago
Because the alternative is something worse... I hated JIRA until our company switched to a competitor. Now I wish I was on JIRA.
- mekster 6y ago
  Which alternative?
  - leokennis 6y ago
    ServiceNow. Never seen so many popovers and tabs-in-a-page.
- MivLives 6y ago
  My company just switched from a home rolled system to JIRA. It's been an interesting but welcomed transition.
- replyguy912 6y ago
  I disliked JIRA and we switched to Microsoft DevOps about a year ago. Now I really miss JIRA. DevOps is so painful in comparison, especially doing really specialized things like, you know, tracking work items and answering questions like "what's done; what's outstanding". sigh.
- techntoke 6y ago
  Phabricator is amazing and fast compared to JIRA, and better yet is open source and can be quickly tested in Docker or deployed using their official Helm chart.
colinjoy 6y ago
The strength and problem of Jira is that you can model the most absurd organisational processes with it. There are a bunch of oddities in the UI that don’t help it much (like having 4 different interaction patterns for sorting list items), but the biggest issue by far is needless complexity and foot guns added by the org/admins. For this, I wouldn’t blame Jira/Atlassian. I’ve managed Jira workflows for 3/4-digit users on even larger instances and I run my own self-hosted Jira as a private task manager (If you’re already concerned about waste of resources and bloat in Electron apps, better not try this at home). When configured properly, I prefer Jira over all the other tools* in it’s domain that I administered at some point in time. * Bugzilla, Gitlab, Github, OTRS
- sgt 6y ago
  The most annoying thing on a daily basis for me with JIRA is how slow it is. It seems like a cloud hosted one and a self hosted one are are equally slow. By slow I don't mean abysmally slow, but every action typically takes 500-750 ms. And if you use it regularly, that makes doing stuff a chore.
  - Maxion 6y ago
    Surely 750ms is already in the absurdly slow category?
    - sgt 6y ago
      If you're used to fast paced web apps like Trello, yes.
      - sjwright 6y ago
        It begs the question what could it possibly be doing to take half a second of wall time. That’s an eternity for a modern computer.
    - dheera 6y ago
      In general UIs should always respond in 100ms or less. For lord's sake GMail takes a full 3s which is slower than any desktop client took in 2000. Somehow people think it is okay to make your page slower because "ooh aah AJAX" and "oh I can just add a spinner" or something ... Back when I used pine it just loaded instantly! No spinner, no splash screen, no progress bar needed. And don't give me that "oh but it's in the cloud" crap -- the cloud isn't an excuse to be slow when I have a 300mbps downlink with sub-10ms ping times to headquarters and datacenters of these companies.
prepend 6y ago
I’m always looking for better tools. For informal projects Trello or GitHub issues works, but if I ever have to track anything, it isn’t easy. I went from MSProject and ClearCase to Jira in the mid 00s and thought it was so much better. I’ve gradually changed to hate it, but can’t find a better tool. The alternatives I’ve tried have been way worse in terms of complication, cost, and specialized training required. I work with people who use MSTeams and it makes me yearn for Jira. I’ve used GitLab, but it’s cost is too high for non software projects. It’s weird how this seems so simple that there would be a clear default tool that just captures user stories, routes them among people, and gives reports.
- wx196 6y ago
  I similarly tried Trello and Github issues (created about 1,500 issues so far just on GH) and it is not easy to work in any of them. Trello is great until you have lots of tasks, Github is developer-centric and not product-centric, thus too unstructured. Finally decided to do one more task management tool. Saying the truth, there is so huge competition in this space right now, that I would think 10 times before making something like this nowadays, knowing how difficult to implement it despite seeming simplicity. It becomes more and more complex if you want to offer revision history, "undo" functionality instead of constant "are you sure you want to delete" etc. But I like what we did so far (see project name in my profile if you want to try it). Actually, I still don't know the other tool which is focused on creation of actual "stories" and not just small text description and lots of tags.
- sidpatil 6y ago
  > I work with people who use MSTeams and it makes me yearn for Jira. What do you mean by this? As far as I can tell, stock MS Teams and stock Jira are designed for very different goals—they don't fall in the same category.
  - prepend 6y ago
    Sorry, I meant TeamFoundationServer.
- ahuang1018 6y ago
alkonaut 6y ago
The question is "why do organiations use processes that are complex enough to require it". I couldn't imagine doing the process I use at work in something less complex (github issues, trello, ...). We tried that in a simpler system and it is a web of hacks, manual steps, emails... If the complex you need is complex, then a complex and configurable system might be the easiest way of managing it. Everyone should of course first consider whether a complex process is actually needed - but for the sake of discussion, let's say it is (No one who has a simple process would be considering Jira, and contrary to popular belief I don't think complex systems breed complex processes. I think complex organizations do). Do you have multiple teams, with people switching between teams. Do teams have different processes in different teams? Do you have hierarchical planning where a management team plans on a higher level what features go in what major version and different product teams break it down into managable chunks? Do you have managers that need to report statistics to various stakeholders? All of that can be emulated in any system. But if you start emulating it in a simple system, then all that's missing instead you need to add to the system with emails, a wiki describing which email to send to what person after generating the monthly report or whatever. I think the mistake that is often made is that these systems are seen as tools for a development team of 4-8 people who would otherwise use a whiteboard. They aren't. In fact, I'd recommend that any team use a simpler tool to manage their progress if they want to. Why not post-its on a whiteboard if you are colocated? All that's left after you complete an iteration (sprint, release, whatever) is to fill in the issues from the whiteboard back into a system and be done. These systems aren't supposed to get in the way of developers. If they do, don't use them. But you need a central source of truth for questions like "what was the cause of that bug 9 years ago?". I use info like that daily. It's not going to be found in the trashcan under the post-it whiteboard.
noarchy 6y ago
Jira supports the kind of software management that has become ubiquitous in our industry. So one "needs" tools to create burndown charts and the like. This is now a multi-million dollar industry, and Atlassian is all-in for it.
enra 6y ago
We are building something new with http://linear.app/ http://linear.app/
magicalhippo 6y ago
We use Jira at work. We register issues in it, we got Fisheye integrated, the SQL-ish search makes it reasonably easy to find issues. The custom dashboards makes it reasonably easy to have a good overview over my issues. My previous serious exposure has been MantisBT and Bugzilla. Out of those I vastly prefer Jira. So what's with the Jira hate? Seems clear we're not doing something a lot of other people are with our Jira.
- jfim 6y ago
  Jira is customizable, so one user might have a vanilla experience while another one might have one with enough issue fields to make an airliner cockpit blush with envy and complicated multistep workflows. The latter tends to be horrifically slow from what I understand.
bound008 6y ago
In defense of Jira. It is a tool. Some people may say desktop linux is clunky and slow and difficult. But on linux, everything is up to the user. You can choose from at least 10 window managers, make your own from scratch, or fork and modify your most preferred. Jira, is like linux. If you don't like Jira, it's either slow (will address this next), or its really that you don't like the organization processes of the team or organization you are a part of. Because properly configured, Jira reflects the working decisions you have made as a team. As to being slow. I only had this issue once with a small dev shop self hosting in a closet. At a large enterprise with over 10,000 engineers using Jira, not including the non-engineers using it, it was always lightning fast for the self hosted version. People didn't like Jira and started using Trello. So Jira made a Trello style view. People moved to Asana. Jira made an Asana view. Jira is everything, and if you don't like it, it either doesn't fit your use case ( yes its expensive and can take a lot of thought or time to set up properly ), but its likely more that you don't like your Jira that you are being _forced_ to use. (On the other hand, I have many bones to pick with confluence).
- dijit 6y ago
  > As to being slow. I only had this issue once with a small dev shop self hosting in a closet. At a large enterprise with over 10,000 engineers using Jira, not including the non-engineers using it, it was always lightning fast for the self hosted version. Contra-point: I use Jira for <1,000 users, it's hosted on a single instance (128G mem 64vCPUs), with a seperate database server and it takes 30s to load my backlog. (And I'm not exaggerating, truly, each page load takes 1-30 seconds, direct ticket views to to kanban board). I looked at running multiple servers, but it seems like our license doesn't allow that. Which is another issue with Jira, it's licensed on the server level.
  - eropple 6y ago
    FWIW, in my experience a big factor of this is poor configuration, especially around permissions/ACLs getting out of control. That and deranged addons.
  - o-__-o 6y ago
shp0ngle 6y ago
sometimes people here on Hacker News keep on saying “I don’t understand why people keep using SAP or other ERP systems” and then under the guise of “agile” they develop the same exact thing JIRA is just a SAP for software development, with exactly the same forces making it a slow, complicated mess, that people keep using
kemiller2002 6y ago
For us it's purely cost. My company looked at the alternatives they wanted, and they cost significantly more. Everyone complains about it, but the cost savings is worth the pain to them.
- techntoke 6y ago
  Phabricator is free, better interface and way faster. Plus they have a Docker image and official Helm chart for deployment on Kubernetes.
dreamcompiler 6y ago
Jira is like Democracy; It's the worst system of government except for all the rest.
dogma1138 6y ago
Most likely they are just hate being forced into something or Jira isn’t actually used correctly as in just a vanilla instance without integrating it into the organization no custom scripts, no plugins nothing. Jira is an extremely powerful tool when used correctly by an organization and the entire Atlassian suite as a whole is pretty awesome. If you essentially write all your organizational processes into Jira workflows it’s a whole other universe all of a sudden everything is behind a single paint of glass and all technical and non-technical processes are in a single place in a single a coherent workflow. We have everything from the first steps of the project through its entire lifecycle in Jira it’s not just a place for bug reports.

Serious question, why does anyone still use Jira. It's a huge pita and everywhere people are essentially forced to use it, they hate it. It's become clear case of too many knobs.

ryanbrunner 6y ago

Serious answer: there's a relative dearth of project management tools that have anything approaching useful reporting and analytics, and the requirements of the organization outside of engineering often require that that reporting exists (if not in the pointy-haired boss "measure the productivity of your individual engineers" sense, at least the "tell me when big project will be done and how many resources you need" sense). GitHub issues and Trello have more or less just abandoned the idea of being able to do any useful analytics or reporting, tools like Pivotal Tracker have some but require that you work in exactly the process they dictate, and the other big ones that have reporting generally are even worse than JIRA.

scott_w 6y ago
This is a huge thing. Also, if Jira doesn’t directly support your specific workflow, the API and Export functions provide a lot of information to do this for you. This reporting gets useful once you have a stable team and you want to identify issues in your process and back your theories up with data. Let’s say you struggle to meet expected delivery dates (based off estimates), have a look at a chart of your cycle times. Do they take longer than a week, with a wide variance in when they get delivered? Maybe you’re not breaking down work enough, or you’re getting blocked (committed too early). Check a chart of the number of tickets in each status every day, that might tell you that things get backed up waiting for review or deployment, so discuss that. Simpler tools don’t really provide this information. Is it always necessary? On greenfield work with a smaller company, almost certainly not, but as your product and company gets more complex, having access to this, and presenting it to your team, gets more valuable.

leokennis 6y ago

Because the alternative is something worse... I hated JIRA until our company switched to a competitor. Now I wish I was on JIRA.

mekster 6y ago
Which alternative?
- leokennis 6y ago
  ServiceNow. Never seen so many popovers and tabs-in-a-page.
MivLives 6y ago
My company just switched from a home rolled system to JIRA. It's been an interesting but welcomed transition.
replyguy912 6y ago
I disliked JIRA and we switched to Microsoft DevOps about a year ago. Now I really miss JIRA. DevOps is so painful in comparison, especially doing really specialized things like, you know, tracking work items and answering questions like "what's done; what's outstanding". sigh.
techntoke 6y ago
Phabricator is amazing and fast compared to JIRA, and better yet is open source and can be quickly tested in Docker or deployed using their official Helm chart.

colinjoy 6y ago

The strength and problem of Jira is that you can model the most absurd organisational processes with it. There are a bunch of oddities in the UI that don’t help it much (like having 4 different interaction patterns for sorting list items), but the biggest issue by far is needless complexity and foot guns added by the org/admins. For this, I wouldn’t blame Jira/Atlassian. I’ve managed Jira workflows for 3/4-digit users on even larger instances and I run my own self-hosted Jira as a private task manager (If you’re already concerned about waste of resources and bloat in Electron apps, better not try this at home). When configured properly, I prefer Jira over all the other tools* in it’s domain that I administered at some point in time. * Bugzilla, Gitlab, Github, OTRS

sgt 6y ago
The most annoying thing on a daily basis for me with JIRA is how slow it is. It seems like a cloud hosted one and a self hosted one are are equally slow. By slow I don't mean abysmally slow, but every action typically takes 500-750 ms. And if you use it regularly, that makes doing stuff a chore.
- Maxion 6y ago
  Surely 750ms is already in the absurdly slow category?
  - sgt 6y ago
    If you're used to fast paced web apps like Trello, yes.
    - sjwright 6y ago
      It begs the question what could it possibly be doing to take half a second of wall time. That’s an eternity for a modern computer.
  - dheera 6y ago
    In general UIs should always respond in 100ms or less. For lord's sake GMail takes a full 3s which is slower than any desktop client took in 2000. Somehow people think it is okay to make your page slower because "ooh aah AJAX" and "oh I can just add a spinner" or something ... Back when I used pine it just loaded instantly! No spinner, no splash screen, no progress bar needed. And don't give me that "oh but it's in the cloud" crap -- the cloud isn't an excuse to be slow when I have a 300mbps downlink with sub-10ms ping times to headquarters and datacenters of these companies.

prepend 6y ago

I’m always looking for better tools. For informal projects Trello or GitHub issues works, but if I ever have to track anything, it isn’t easy. I went from MSProject and ClearCase to Jira in the mid 00s and thought it was so much better. I’ve gradually changed to hate it, but can’t find a better tool. The alternatives I’ve tried have been way worse in terms of complication, cost, and specialized training required. I work with people who use MSTeams and it makes me yearn for Jira. I’ve used GitLab, but it’s cost is too high for non software projects. It’s weird how this seems so simple that there would be a clear default tool that just captures user stories, routes them among people, and gives reports.

wx196 6y ago
I similarly tried Trello and Github issues (created about 1,500 issues so far just on GH) and it is not easy to work in any of them. Trello is great until you have lots of tasks, Github is developer-centric and not product-centric, thus too unstructured. Finally decided to do one more task management tool. Saying the truth, there is so huge competition in this space right now, that I would think 10 times before making something like this nowadays, knowing how difficult to implement it despite seeming simplicity. It becomes more and more complex if you want to offer revision history, "undo" functionality instead of constant "are you sure you want to delete" etc. But I like what we did so far (see project name in my profile if you want to try it). Actually, I still don't know the other tool which is focused on creation of actual "stories" and not just small text description and lots of tags.
sidpatil 6y ago
> I work with people who use MSTeams and it makes me yearn for Jira. What do you mean by this? As far as I can tell, stock MS Teams and stock Jira are designed for very different goals—they don't fall in the same category.
- prepend 6y ago
  Sorry, I meant TeamFoundationServer.
ahuang1018 6y ago

alkonaut 6y ago

The question is "why do organiations use processes that are complex enough to require it". I couldn't imagine doing the process I use at work in something less complex (github issues, trello, ...). We tried that in a simpler system and it is a web of hacks, manual steps, emails... If the complex you need is complex, then a complex and configurable system might be the easiest way of managing it. Everyone should of course first consider whether a complex process is actually needed - but for the sake of discussion, let's say it is (No one who has a simple process would be considering Jira, and contrary to popular belief I don't think complex systems breed complex processes. I think complex organizations do). Do you have multiple teams, with people switching between teams. Do teams have different processes in different teams? Do you have hierarchical planning where a management team plans on a higher level what features go in what major version and different product teams break it down into managable chunks? Do you have managers that need to report statistics to various stakeholders? All of that can be emulated in any system. But if you start emulating it in a simple system, then all that's missing instead you need to add to the system with emails, a wiki describing which email to send to what person after generating the monthly report or whatever. I think the mistake that is often made is that these systems are seen as tools for a development team of 4-8 people who would otherwise use a whiteboard. They aren't. In fact, I'd recommend that any team use a simpler tool to manage their progress if they want to. Why not post-its on a whiteboard if you are colocated? All that's left after you complete an iteration (sprint, release, whatever) is to fill in the issues from the whiteboard back into a system and be done. These systems aren't supposed to get in the way of developers. If they do, don't use them. But you need a central source of truth for questions like "what was the cause of that bug 9 years ago?". I use info like that daily. It's not going to be found in the trashcan under the post-it whiteboard.

noarchy 6y ago

Jira supports the kind of software management that has become ubiquitous in our industry. So one "needs" tools to create burndown charts and the like. This is now a multi-million dollar industry, and Atlassian is all-in for it.

enra 6y ago

We are building something new with http://linear.app/ http://linear.app/

magicalhippo 6y ago

We use Jira at work. We register issues in it, we got Fisheye integrated, the SQL-ish search makes it reasonably easy to find issues. The custom dashboards makes it reasonably easy to have a good overview over my issues. My previous serious exposure has been MantisBT and Bugzilla. Out of those I vastly prefer Jira. So what's with the Jira hate? Seems clear we're not doing something a lot of other people are with our Jira.

jfim 6y ago
Jira is customizable, so one user might have a vanilla experience while another one might have one with enough issue fields to make an airliner cockpit blush with envy and complicated multistep workflows. The latter tends to be horrifically slow from what I understand.

bound008 6y ago

In defense of Jira. It is a tool. Some people may say desktop linux is clunky and slow and difficult. But on linux, everything is up to the user. You can choose from at least 10 window managers, make your own from scratch, or fork and modify your most preferred. Jira, is like linux. If you don't like Jira, it's either slow (will address this next), or its really that you don't like the organization processes of the team or organization you are a part of. Because properly configured, Jira reflects the working decisions you have made as a team. As to being slow. I only had this issue once with a small dev shop self hosting in a closet. At a large enterprise with over 10,000 engineers using Jira, not including the non-engineers using it, it was always lightning fast for the self hosted version. People didn't like Jira and started using Trello. So Jira made a Trello style view. People moved to Asana. Jira made an Asana view. Jira is everything, and if you don't like it, it either doesn't fit your use case ( yes its expensive and can take a lot of thought or time to set up properly ), but its likely more that you don't like your Jira that you are being _forced_ to use. (On the other hand, I have many bones to pick with confluence).

dijit 6y ago
> As to being slow. I only had this issue once with a small dev shop self hosting in a closet. At a large enterprise with over 10,000 engineers using Jira, not including the non-engineers using it, it was always lightning fast for the self hosted version. Contra-point: I use Jira for <1,000 users, it's hosted on a single instance (128G mem 64vCPUs), with a seperate database server and it takes 30s to load my backlog. (And I'm not exaggerating, truly, each page load takes 1-30 seconds, direct ticket views to to kanban board). I looked at running multiple servers, but it seems like our license doesn't allow that. Which is another issue with Jira, it's licensed on the server level.
- eropple 6y ago
  FWIW, in my experience a big factor of this is poor configuration, especially around permissions/ACLs getting out of control. That and deranged addons.
- o-__-o 6y ago

shp0ngle 6y ago

sometimes people here on Hacker News keep on saying “I don’t understand why people keep using SAP or other ERP systems” and then under the guise of “agile” they develop the same exact thing JIRA is just a SAP for software development, with exactly the same forces making it a slow, complicated mess, that people keep using

kemiller2002 6y ago

For us it's purely cost. My company looked at the alternatives they wanted, and they cost significantly more. Everyone complains about it, but the cost savings is worth the pain to them.

techntoke 6y ago
Phabricator is free, better interface and way faster. Plus they have a Docker image and official Helm chart for deployment on Kubernetes.

dreamcompiler 6y ago

Jira is like Democracy; It's the worst system of government except for all the rest.

dogma1138 6y ago

Most likely they are just hate being forced into something or Jira isn’t actually used correctly as in just a vanilla instance without integrating it into the organization no custom scripts, no plugins nothing. Jira is an extremely powerful tool when used correctly by an organization and the entire Atlassian suite as a whole is pretty awesome. If you essentially write all your organizational processes into Jira workflows it’s a whole other universe all of a sudden everything is behind a single paint of glass and all technical and non-technical processes are in a single place in a single a coherent workflow. We have everything from the first steps of the project through its entire lifecycle in Jira it’s not just a place for bug reports.