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Been forced to use Jira instead of pivotal tracker. Wow. Traded all useablity for endless features. Our setup barely works. And creating a story is such a ma

Been forced to use Jira instead of pivotal tracker. Wow. Traded all useablity for endless features. Our setup barely works. And creating a story is such a massive pain. Sometimes things just won’t work. So I refuse to use it for stories beyond one mega story.

nkrisc 6y ago
One place I worked wanted multiple people to "own" a story, but JIRA doesn't work like that, so they implemented a totally new custom "owner" field that did allow it and then told everyone not to use the native owner field. Now you had to track everything two ways.
- gen220 6y ago
  This isn't that bad. What makes this worse is when 1/3 of the teams in your org decide that they want a similar feature, but each comes up with their own custom-named tag ("owner", "lead", "point person", "point of contact", "jefe"). And then you want to run some jql queries against those tickets, and you have to use disgusting query generators to de-dupe the tag monstrosity. They've done an excellent job of giving you just enough features to shoot yourself in the foot with.
snarf21 6y ago
Exactly, Jira is garbage and only PjMs seem to like it. A spreadsheet is a better tool for actually tracking work.
- jimmynopension 6y ago
  there is no work tracking tool better than .txt and asking people for updates. Maybe I should sell notepad as a fully extensible work prioritisation tracking platform that integrates with all email providers and now supports slack...
  - yvdriess 6y ago
    You want to sell a notepad org-mode mod?
  - squeaky-clean 6y ago
    I remember someone here created a service, it may have been paid, that simply emailed you "What did you work on today, what did you complete, encounter any problems?" at a pre-defined time every weekday and then would forward your response back to your manager. Fantastic idea IMO.
    - ativzzz 6y ago
      We have a slack bot that replaces daily standups with those exact questions. It's called standuply
growlist 6y ago
I got so annoyed when someone that I shared JIRA admin credentials with changed the front page to a Kanban board. All I wanted was bloody issue tracking! KISS.
marcusjt 6y ago
How interesting, my experience is completely different - I'm a UX Designer working in a squad and I/we find JIRA super easy to use, allows you to customise ticket types pretty much to our heart's content (including removing stuff you don't need), ditto customising the board and other features, allows us to track changes, comment on tickets, and works reliably. Almost nothing else allows us to do the same. Admittedly Jira has been overhauled recently and is much better than it was, plus some new features have been added. Oh, and there's an app which allows me to do most of what I need to do on my phone super quickly, partially thanks to the notifications.
- oehpr 6y ago
  I'm... actually shocked to hear this. You're a UX designer. a User Experience designer. User Experience is your profession. And you're telling me: JIRA, the application with massively nested hierarchical layouts and a 2 second response time for every user interaction is easy to use? Jira has to be the most complicated monolithic issue tracker available. I should think even Jira's sales team would struggle to call it easy to use, particularly when compared to more simple competitors like Trello. I certainly have not made UX my specialty so I'd like to know what markers I'm missing out on here. What kind of things is Jira putting forward that mitigates its crazy abstractions, its hierarchical layouts, combined with its slow response times? I thought those were the kinds of things that signified really bad UX. Personally. I'm forced to use Jira as part of my job and have suffered terribly at its hands. If someone is finding it a breeze then it would be a great benefit to me to understand.
  - codethief 6y ago
    I second this. I've been using Jira on and off for years and I'm still having the feeling I haven't fully figured it out yet. In particular, there are some things that I still find unintuitive and which require more brain capacity than they should.

nkrisc 6y ago

One place I worked wanted multiple people to "own" a story, but JIRA doesn't work like that, so they implemented a totally new custom "owner" field that did allow it and then told everyone not to use the native owner field. Now you had to track everything two ways.

gen220 6y ago
This isn't that bad. What makes this worse is when 1/3 of the teams in your org decide that they want a similar feature, but each comes up with their own custom-named tag ("owner", "lead", "point person", "point of contact", "jefe"). And then you want to run some jql queries against those tickets, and you have to use disgusting query generators to de-dupe the tag monstrosity. They've done an excellent job of giving you just enough features to shoot yourself in the foot with.

snarf21 6y ago

Exactly, Jira is garbage and only PjMs seem to like it. A spreadsheet is a better tool for actually tracking work.

jimmynopension 6y ago
there is no work tracking tool better than .txt and asking people for updates. Maybe I should sell notepad as a fully extensible work prioritisation tracking platform that integrates with all email providers and now supports slack...
- yvdriess 6y ago
  You want to sell a notepad org-mode mod?
- squeaky-clean 6y ago
  I remember someone here created a service, it may have been paid, that simply emailed you "What did you work on today, what did you complete, encounter any problems?" at a pre-defined time every weekday and then would forward your response back to your manager. Fantastic idea IMO.
  - ativzzz 6y ago
    We have a slack bot that replaces daily standups with those exact questions. It's called standuply

growlist 6y ago

I got so annoyed when someone that I shared JIRA admin credentials with changed the front page to a Kanban board. All I wanted was bloody issue tracking! KISS.

marcusjt 6y ago

How interesting, my experience is completely different - I'm a UX Designer working in a squad and I/we find JIRA super easy to use, allows you to customise ticket types pretty much to our heart's content (including removing stuff you don't need), ditto customising the board and other features, allows us to track changes, comment on tickets, and works reliably. Almost nothing else allows us to do the same. Admittedly Jira has been overhauled recently and is much better than it was, plus some new features have been added. Oh, and there's an app which allows me to do most of what I need to do on my phone super quickly, partially thanks to the notifications.

oehpr 6y ago
I'm... actually shocked to hear this. You're a UX designer. a User Experience designer. User Experience is your profession. And you're telling me: JIRA, the application with massively nested hierarchical layouts and a 2 second response time for every user interaction is easy to use? Jira has to be the most complicated monolithic issue tracker available. I should think even Jira's sales team would struggle to call it easy to use, particularly when compared to more simple competitors like Trello. I certainly have not made UX my specialty so I'd like to know what markers I'm missing out on here. What kind of things is Jira putting forward that mitigates its crazy abstractions, its hierarchical layouts, combined with its slow response times? I thought those were the kinds of things that signified really bad UX. Personally. I'm forced to use Jira as part of my job and have suffered terribly at its hands. If someone is finding it a breeze then it would be a great benefit to me to understand.
- codethief 6y ago
  I second this. I've been using Jira on and off for years and I'm still having the feeling I haven't fully figured it out yet. In particular, there are some things that I still find unintuitive and which require more brain capacity than they should.