7 ms·

I tend to agree but I have a anecdotal counterexample. We recently switched from JIRA to Clubhouse by importing our history and backlog wholesale. Due to the su

by tbrock 6y ago

I tend to agree but I have a anecdotal counterexample. We recently switched from JIRA to Clubhouse by importing our history and backlog wholesale. Due to the substantial performance bump we have definitively leveled up as a team. Status updates that used to happen in slack channels are now captured in Clubhouse, people log in to check on progress, stories get love and details. JIRA cloud was unusably slow and as a result we didn’t want to use the tool. We hated it even though it technically “worked”.

ryanisnan 6y ago
> JIRA cloud was unusably slow and as a result we didn’t want to use the tool. We hated it even though it technically “worked”. - every JIRA customer ever
- magicalhippo 6y ago
  We're a JIRA customer and we're quite happy. It's not slow, at least to any degree that matters. We're not a huge team, nor do use much more than tickets with FishEye integration though. We also have a self-hosted instance. But for us it has worked quite well, and I have better memories of JIRA than say MantisBT which I used before.
  - ithkuil 6y ago
    Cloud or self-hosted?
    - magicalhippo 6y ago
      Self-hosted, as mentioned.
      - p_l 6y ago
        A lot of issues can be mitigated when you self host vs using JIRA Cloud, not just because you might have beefier hw and better network link. While I suspect it got better, periodic reindexing and similar cron jobs were a hell on a team separated by 9 hour timezone difference, because time chosen for convenience in San Francisco meant many Mondays of "Atlassian Cloud is down" for team in Warsaw.
        magicalhippo 6y ago
        Wow, that sounds horrible. While we're all in the same timezone in our company, we're also programmers... so that doesn't always matter. I've been using our JIRA in the middle of the night on several times, and it's just... there. edit: so yeah just highlights the self-hosting vs cloud...
  - munchkinship 6y ago
    you are self-hosted, which is different from cloud.
    - magicalhippo 6y ago
      But we're still JIRA customers, which was the point I was trying to make.
  - m_eiman 6y ago
    Same here - went from MantisDB to Jira and it's a big improvement in so many ways.
ahnick 6y ago
I haven't noticed JIRA cloud being that slow, but maybe that's because the team is small. Did you start to experience performance issues as team size increased? Did you have a lot of issues or data held in the issues? Or was there another issue that you think led to the slowness? I'm interested in your insights as we went with JIRA initially, since it was pretty much the gold standard and we thought it would scale nicely as we added team members, but if it is not going to do so, then it may not be worth the JIRA premium.
- icegreentea2 6y ago
  I don't want to put words in OP's mouth, but I suspect that OP was referring to just like... "you click and something and then wait" type of slow. Something like, taking several seconds to load an issue. In my case, we were a small team (<10 users, <1k total issues split in maybe 8 projects), and were running into random load time slowness irritations. It never stopped us from doing what we needed to do, but it sure did make it more frustrating to do it. We are using a cloud instance.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    It’s a documented phenomenon in UX that if an activity involves a quantity of small pauses in a short enough time span, that the user perceives them as a single, long pause. If your app is fast but your workflows are terrible, people will call you slow because everything takes four interactions. If you have a bad workflow and a slow-ish app, people will talk about you on the Internet.
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
I was a JIRA admin for a number of years for an organization that had a heavy QA workflow. It was all about making sure that every issue had an "owner," at any given time, a strict approval and verification process was followed, and that as much up-front data as possible was collected during the initial report. In my experience, unless the people entering the issues are paid, professional engineers, we'll never get the information we need up front. I have found that the basic GitHub model works well for me. When someone reports a bug, they are doing me a favor. It's in my interest to ensure there are as few roadblocks as possible to them sending a report. If they give contact info, then I can contact them with specific questions. In my experience, a simple email form is the best way to solicit reports. It may have a workflow hidden behind it, but I have found that the simpler the workflow is, the more likely it is that the issue tracking will work. JIRA basically starts off complicated, and it's possible to make it much, much worse. It's also slow, but that wasn't really the problem we had. The workflows and forms were where it fell down for us.
- jnwatson 6y ago
  In my experience, it isn't Jira that people hate, it is the horrible rules and bureaucracy-ridden workflows that Jira allows an admin to implement. My team switched back to Jira after trying several other tools and we're pretty happy.
  - Twirrim 6y ago
    All the extra plugins etc. that people bolt in to get those extra features really slow it down too.
  - _Qeomash_ 6y ago
    As a current Jira admin, I constantly have to fight this. A non dev team came into Jira and implemented a huge octopus of a workflow (despite my strong advice against it) and were shocked to find out it didn't really help them work better. The handful of teams inside that department that I've gotten to switch over to a simpler To Do / In Progress / Done style workflow have been much happier. Jira has many, many faults, but most of them are what the users do to themselves.
ghshephard 6y ago
Not sure what happened to you - but speaking anecdotally, but from someone who logs into Jira Cloud every day, and spends 20-30 minutes interacting with the interfaces over 8-10 hours a day, and has done so for the last 3 years - it's had a handful of outages, nothing that really rose to the level of being memorable though (and less than any internal issue tracker I've worked with) - and the performance is, fine? I mean, it's not <50ms twitch fast, so, I guess I'm losing a minute or do wall-clock time + whatever larger blocks of time that occur when I get distracted waiting for a ticket to come up - but it isn't at all what I would call "unusably slow". In our case though, we only have about 50 engineers and a few hundred thousand issues. Jira has performance issues in the 500 engineer / 100mm+ issue space - or it used to, perhaps they've resolved those issues by now.
- tbrock 6y ago
  Ours JIRA instance took multiple seconds to load modals. Think 5+ seconds. It was miserable. I would have gladly paid more for faster speed but it turned out the APIs were blazing fast and it was the JS that was slow. Not sure how we have had such different experiences. Seems impossible that your JS was executed that much faster than mine. I was using chrome FWIW.
  - CraigJPerry 6y ago
    5+ seconds sounds wild. Our active users number is a multiple of the 5k max users for jira cloud and the only actions i can think of that are >2s are bulk edits and complex jql
    - tbrock 6y ago
      We must have been using it incorrectly then, oh well. Good riddance Atlassian.
      - hinkley 6y ago
        Almost everyone is “using it incorrectly”, but it’s like the aphorism about assholes. (If you meet assholes all day long, you’re the asshole.) If your software encounters idiots all day long, you’re the idiot.

by tbrock 6y ago

ryanisnan 6y ago

> JIRA cloud was unusably slow and as a result we didn’t want to use the tool. We hated it even though it technically “worked”. - every JIRA customer ever

magicalhippo 6y ago
We're a JIRA customer and we're quite happy. It's not slow, at least to any degree that matters. We're not a huge team, nor do use much more than tickets with FishEye integration though. We also have a self-hosted instance. But for us it has worked quite well, and I have better memories of JIRA than say MantisBT which I used before.
- ithkuil 6y ago
  Cloud or self-hosted?
  - magicalhippo 6y ago
    Self-hosted, as mentioned.
    - p_l 6y ago
      A lot of issues can be mitigated when you self host vs using JIRA Cloud, not just because you might have beefier hw and better network link. While I suspect it got better, periodic reindexing and similar cron jobs were a hell on a team separated by 9 hour timezone difference, because time chosen for convenience in San Francisco meant many Mondays of "Atlassian Cloud is down" for team in Warsaw.
      - magicalhippo 6y ago
        Wow, that sounds horrible. While we're all in the same timezone in our company, we're also programmers... so that doesn't always matter. I've been using our JIRA in the middle of the night on several times, and it's just... there. edit: so yeah just highlights the self-hosting vs cloud...
- munchkinship 6y ago
  you are self-hosted, which is different from cloud.
  - magicalhippo 6y ago
    But we're still JIRA customers, which was the point I was trying to make.
- m_eiman 6y ago
  Same here - went from MantisDB to Jira and it's a big improvement in so many ways.

ahnick 6y ago

I haven't noticed JIRA cloud being that slow, but maybe that's because the team is small. Did you start to experience performance issues as team size increased? Did you have a lot of issues or data held in the issues? Or was there another issue that you think led to the slowness? I'm interested in your insights as we went with JIRA initially, since it was pretty much the gold standard and we thought it would scale nicely as we added team members, but if it is not going to do so, then it may not be worth the JIRA premium.

icegreentea2 6y ago
I don't want to put words in OP's mouth, but I suspect that OP was referring to just like... "you click and something and then wait" type of slow. Something like, taking several seconds to load an issue. In my case, we were a small team (<10 users, <1k total issues split in maybe 8 projects), and were running into random load time slowness irritations. It never stopped us from doing what we needed to do, but it sure did make it more frustrating to do it. We are using a cloud instance.
- hinkley 6y ago
  It’s a documented phenomenon in UX that if an activity involves a quantity of small pauses in a short enough time span, that the user perceives them as a single, long pause. If your app is fast but your workflows are terrible, people will call you slow because everything takes four interactions. If you have a bad workflow and a slow-ish app, people will talk about you on the Internet.

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

I was a JIRA admin for a number of years for an organization that had a heavy QA workflow. It was all about making sure that every issue had an "owner," at any given time, a strict approval and verification process was followed, and that as much up-front data as possible was collected during the initial report. In my experience, unless the people entering the issues are paid, professional engineers, we'll never get the information we need up front. I have found that the basic GitHub model works well for me. When someone reports a bug, they are doing me a favor. It's in my interest to ensure there are as few roadblocks as possible to them sending a report. If they give contact info, then I can contact them with specific questions. In my experience, a simple email form is the best way to solicit reports. It may have a workflow hidden behind it, but I have found that the simpler the workflow is, the more likely it is that the issue tracking will work. JIRA basically starts off complicated, and it's possible to make it much, much worse. It's also slow, but that wasn't really the problem we had. The workflows and forms were where it fell down for us.

jnwatson 6y ago
In my experience, it isn't Jira that people hate, it is the horrible rules and bureaucracy-ridden workflows that Jira allows an admin to implement. My team switched back to Jira after trying several other tools and we're pretty happy.
- Twirrim 6y ago
  All the extra plugins etc. that people bolt in to get those extra features really slow it down too.
- _Qeomash_ 6y ago
  As a current Jira admin, I constantly have to fight this. A non dev team came into Jira and implemented a huge octopus of a workflow (despite my strong advice against it) and were shocked to find out it didn't really help them work better. The handful of teams inside that department that I've gotten to switch over to a simpler To Do / In Progress / Done style workflow have been much happier. Jira has many, many faults, but most of them are what the users do to themselves.

ghshephard 6y ago

Not sure what happened to you - but speaking anecdotally, but from someone who logs into Jira Cloud every day, and spends 20-30 minutes interacting with the interfaces over 8-10 hours a day, and has done so for the last 3 years - it's had a handful of outages, nothing that really rose to the level of being memorable though (and less than any internal issue tracker I've worked with) - and the performance is, fine? I mean, it's not <50ms twitch fast, so, I guess I'm losing a minute or do wall-clock time + whatever larger blocks of time that occur when I get distracted waiting for a ticket to come up - but it isn't at all what I would call "unusably slow". In our case though, we only have about 50 engineers and a few hundred thousand issues. Jira has performance issues in the 500 engineer / 100mm+ issue space - or it used to, perhaps they've resolved those issues by now.

tbrock 6y ago
Ours JIRA instance took multiple seconds to load modals. Think 5+ seconds. It was miserable. I would have gladly paid more for faster speed but it turned out the APIs were blazing fast and it was the JS that was slow. Not sure how we have had such different experiences. Seems impossible that your JS was executed that much faster than mine. I was using chrome FWIW.
- CraigJPerry 6y ago
  5+ seconds sounds wild. Our active users number is a multiple of the 5k max users for jira cloud and the only actions i can think of that are >2s are bulk edits and complex jql
  - tbrock 6y ago
    We must have been using it incorrectly then, oh well. Good riddance Atlassian.
    - hinkley 6y ago
      Almost everyone is “using it incorrectly”, but it’s like the aphorism about assholes. (If you meet assholes all day long, you’re the asshole.) If your software encounters idiots all day long, you’re the idiot.