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I am directly responsible for Jira and Confluence admin/infrastructure on an enterprise level and once you know how at least Jira works, its a fairly powerful t

I am directly responsible for Jira and Confluence admin/infrastructure on an enterprise level and once you know how at least Jira works, its a fairly powerful tool for PM's. I haven't run into many issues except during a migration where we knew we were going to run into issues. Atlassian's documentation isn't that good however.

JoshTriplett 6y ago
> its a fairly powerful tool for PM's That's the fundamental problem. Jira is sold to PMs and managers, not to developers, and it shows. Jira isn't an issue tracking tool, it's a work-tracking and developer-tracking tool masquerading as an issue tracker. The people who spend the most time with it aren't the customer.
- marmaduke 6y ago
  I use Jira to track issues. It’s not as pretty and dumbed down as Github or as dandy as YouTrack but does the job fine over the last 8 years we used it.
- entropea 6y ago
  You can set it up to be an issue tracker or you can set it up to be work & developer tracking. It's really dependent on how your PM sets your projects up.
- lemmsjid 6y ago
  Interesting how perspectives differ. Having used Jira for many years, I think it's straightforward for engineering work, but particularly hard for PMs and managers. Why? On the engineering side, it's pretty straightforward to integrate into a lifecycle. But for PMs and management it's a nightmare because they still haven't gotten their birds-eye-view roadmapping / bulk editing act together. The usual issue I have with Jira is that the engineering team gets it integrated into their workflows, things work ok, but it's a continual challenge getting global rollup views to the business at large. We keep ending up with Excel, Airtable, or what-have-you high level views that then point to particular Jira issues for details (yes, we've used Portfolio). I think this actually might be a fundamental issue that is masquerading as design issues on Jira's side, because when you're doing roadmapping views you want to continually refactor them to reflect better metaphors and realities, whereas when you're doing issue tracking you want issues to stick around and be solid entities linked intimately into the history of the software application. So tools like Portfolio have to juggle both ends.
  - Izkata 6y ago
    This is pretty much my experience as well - Jira is used almost entirely by developers (and we set up the statuses/transitions/etc in the ways we find useful), while product organizes their thoughts in Excel/Google Sheets and will create/watch/comment on Jira cases but mostly not otherwise use it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- fennecfoxen 6y ago
  > Jira is sold to PMs and managers, not to developers, and it shows When you're working with Python, Jira will render __init__.py as an italicized version of _init_.py even when you put it in monospace with the {{braces}}. If you're talking more abstractly about algorithms, O(n) turns into the letter O followed by the thumbs down emoji. It's a good thing no one uses Jira for software projects because that'd be really awkward!!!
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  Can someone explain what is hard about Jira to me? I push bugs and pull bugs and spend maybe 20 minutes a day in it. What is hard about it? Am I just at a place that uses it sanely? Once a week we spend maybe 1 or 2 hours in it review/updating the Agile sprint buckets with the group.
  - user5994461 6y ago
    You must at a place that is sane enough. A non sane place would have 20 obscure mandatory fields per ticket, require the ticket to go through 10 different states that makes no sense, and last but not least, every click would take a full minute to load the page.
  - JoshTriplett 6y ago
    One of the other problems with Jira is that it's incredibly easy to create complex Byzantine workflows, dozens of required fields to file or update an issue, and reports based on those files. That makes it easy for a bad PM or manager to take their own hard questions to answer and turn them into endless bureaucracy for developers.
Hamuko 6y ago
>once you know how at least Jira works, its a fairly powerful tool for PM's. I'm not a PM and I don't really want to get to know the ins and outs of an issue tracker.
- entropea 6y ago
  I'm not entirely sure why you'd comment this in the first place? If you're a developer you simply need to login and look at your project, not really know much else except how to click issue buttons. I'm talking from an administrator standpoint. Developers also aren't the center of the universe no matter how much we think we are.
  - Hamuko 6y ago
    Most of the tickets in our JIRA are made for the developers, not for the PMs or the customer support. Also, looking at my project is a pain since my tickets are outside the sprint and I either need to go into the backlog and scroll a bunch, or use a custom search.
    - stjohnswarts 6y ago
      Unless you're a micromanager that's the way it should be. She see issues opening and closing and estimates on it. If those estimates blow up/linger on and on then the PM is needed to pull together resources and get it finished off. I don't see how it's a big deal. I've used it both as group lead and as a programmer and didn't have many issues with it either way. Sure it's a bit laggy but it's not that bad. It would be a lot nicer if they'd made a native client that has better queuing/caching of tasks to let you do many things at once.
triceratops 6y ago
Jira is achingly slow. Confluence has the worst search in the world.
pm90 6y ago
Both JIRA and confluence are slow and the UI's are horrible and incredibly unresponsive by modern standards. It shouldn't take several seconds to load my JIRA board. Fuzzy searching for issues should just work. Collaborating over JIRA on a video conference is PAINFUL AF. A lot of time is spent just waiting for the UI to respond. It is completely unacceptable.
skrap 6y ago
Curious if you use self-hosted or cloud jira? My main problem with (cloud) jira is that it takes about 30 seconds from navigating to the site until I can start typing my issue comment or description or whatever. And that's without using search... It's just _so_ slow.

JoshTriplett 6y ago

> its a fairly powerful tool for PM's That's the fundamental problem. Jira is sold to PMs and managers, not to developers, and it shows. Jira isn't an issue tracking tool, it's a work-tracking and developer-tracking tool masquerading as an issue tracker. The people who spend the most time with it aren't the customer.

marmaduke 6y ago
I use Jira to track issues. It’s not as pretty and dumbed down as Github or as dandy as YouTrack but does the job fine over the last 8 years we used it.
entropea 6y ago
You can set it up to be an issue tracker or you can set it up to be work & developer tracking. It's really dependent on how your PM sets your projects up.
lemmsjid 6y ago
Interesting how perspectives differ. Having used Jira for many years, I think it's straightforward for engineering work, but particularly hard for PMs and managers. Why? On the engineering side, it's pretty straightforward to integrate into a lifecycle. But for PMs and management it's a nightmare because they still haven't gotten their birds-eye-view roadmapping / bulk editing act together. The usual issue I have with Jira is that the engineering team gets it integrated into their workflows, things work ok, but it's a continual challenge getting global rollup views to the business at large. We keep ending up with Excel, Airtable, or what-have-you high level views that then point to particular Jira issues for details (yes, we've used Portfolio). I think this actually might be a fundamental issue that is masquerading as design issues on Jira's side, because when you're doing roadmapping views you want to continually refactor them to reflect better metaphors and realities, whereas when you're doing issue tracking you want issues to stick around and be solid entities linked intimately into the history of the software application. So tools like Portfolio have to juggle both ends.
- Izkata 6y ago
  This is pretty much my experience as well - Jira is used almost entirely by developers (and we set up the statuses/transitions/etc in the ways we find useful), while product organizes their thoughts in Excel/Google Sheets and will create/watch/comment on Jira cases but mostly not otherwise use it.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
fennecfoxen 6y ago
> Jira is sold to PMs and managers, not to developers, and it shows When you're working with Python, Jira will render __init__.py as an italicized version of _init_.py even when you put it in monospace with the {{braces}}. If you're talking more abstractly about algorithms, O(n) turns into the letter O followed by the thumbs down emoji. It's a good thing no one uses Jira for software projects because that'd be really awkward!!!
stjohnswarts 6y ago
Can someone explain what is hard about Jira to me? I push bugs and pull bugs and spend maybe 20 minutes a day in it. What is hard about it? Am I just at a place that uses it sanely? Once a week we spend maybe 1 or 2 hours in it review/updating the Agile sprint buckets with the group.
- user5994461 6y ago
  You must at a place that is sane enough. A non sane place would have 20 obscure mandatory fields per ticket, require the ticket to go through 10 different states that makes no sense, and last but not least, every click would take a full minute to load the page.
- JoshTriplett 6y ago
  One of the other problems with Jira is that it's incredibly easy to create complex Byzantine workflows, dozens of required fields to file or update an issue, and reports based on those files. That makes it easy for a bad PM or manager to take their own hard questions to answer and turn them into endless bureaucracy for developers.

Hamuko 6y ago

>once you know how at least Jira works, its a fairly powerful tool for PM's. I'm not a PM and I don't really want to get to know the ins and outs of an issue tracker.

entropea 6y ago
I'm not entirely sure why you'd comment this in the first place? If you're a developer you simply need to login and look at your project, not really know much else except how to click issue buttons. I'm talking from an administrator standpoint. Developers also aren't the center of the universe no matter how much we think we are.
- Hamuko 6y ago
  Most of the tickets in our JIRA are made for the developers, not for the PMs or the customer support. Also, looking at my project is a pain since my tickets are outside the sprint and I either need to go into the backlog and scroll a bunch, or use a custom search.
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    Unless you're a micromanager that's the way it should be. She see issues opening and closing and estimates on it. If those estimates blow up/linger on and on then the PM is needed to pull together resources and get it finished off. I don't see how it's a big deal. I've used it both as group lead and as a programmer and didn't have many issues with it either way. Sure it's a bit laggy but it's not that bad. It would be a lot nicer if they'd made a native client that has better queuing/caching of tasks to let you do many things at once.

triceratops 6y ago

Jira is achingly slow. Confluence has the worst search in the world.

pm90 6y ago

Both JIRA and confluence are slow and the UI's are horrible and incredibly unresponsive by modern standards. It shouldn't take several seconds to load my JIRA board. Fuzzy searching for issues should just work. Collaborating over JIRA on a video conference is PAINFUL AF. A lot of time is spent just waiting for the UI to respond. It is completely unacceptable.

skrap 6y ago

Curious if you use self-hosted or cloud jira? My main problem with (cloud) jira is that it takes about 30 seconds from navigating to the site until I can start typing my issue comment or description or whatever. And that's without using search... It's just _so_ slow.