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> 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 tr

> 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
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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.

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.