37 ms·

Why Jira Sucks

• denysvitali 6y ago
  Every bullet point says "Missing...", but I feel like the main issue about Jira is that it has waaay to many features, and that it's super slow! The only bullet point I do agree with, is that Jira is missing an easy (or IMHO a minimalist / simple) interface. The tool is a mess, and the people using it are probably also using it in the wrong way, making the whole situation way worse. Don't get me wrong, I like Jira to some extent, but its performance and messy UI are really making my life harder rather than simpler.
  • imbnwa 6y ago
    A former PM prioritized issues in the backlog by making a ticket and giving it a name like "Groom these next" or "Prioritized for January release", placing it in the backlog, then placing the tickets to be prioritized above it They also hid bugs from being counted in reports by marking them as stories but that's another conversation
    • throwaway4good 6y ago
      So much project management is about gaming internal politics and managing information flow between lower and higher parts of the hierarchy. These tools market themselves as creating transparency but they are in practice often used to hide or excuse things. I suppose that is why they all take the tragic path from being heralded as new and fresh in the beginning to absolutely being hated in the end. Goes for methodologies as well (I remember the agile manifesto ... look at where we are now).
  • loopz 6y ago
    The interface used to be simpler and less in the way of getting things done. Then they added personas, UX and tried to "help" the user. You now need more clicks to accomplish the same stuff while information is more hidden than before also. There's no way to cater every possible workflow without feature bloat. However, the space is ripe for simpler, more accessible solutions that supports work across multiple projects.
    • echelon 6y ago
      It's not for engineers. Or anyone in particular. They're building to check off boxes in order to sell top down to C-level execs that never touch the stuff. Atlassian products are all like this, and each one is a horrible trash fire. Confluence is the worst wiki product I've ever used. Gross syntax, slow, clunky plugin system, awkward permissions. Install MediaWiki and be done with it. Bitbucket is slow and feels like it's from the 90s. It doesn't seem to do multithreading well - sometimes force pushed branch rebases pick up a new, unrelated author. A bug that hasn't been fixed in years, and only one of many. How many times will merging not actually work? Jira is a special kind of hell. It's like every team needs their own embedded Atlassian solutions engineer to get it into a usable state. Not an EM or PM, but a specially dedicated role just to deal with Jira nonsense. Why even bother? Atlassian is like Salesforce for business process, but if it were written by all-remote temp contractors churning through Jira tickets themselves.
      • pm90 6y ago
        Agree with this. My hypothesis is that they’re just ridiculously slow at adopting newer UX principles. The product was successful initially (good for them) and it was just never made much better. The horrible response times and user hostile UI is shocking, especially if you look at their competitors. It gets in your way all the fucking time. But because they’re embedded in enterprises they don’t need to change much. It’s a big mess.
      • mgkimsal 6y ago
        > Confluence is the worst wiki product I've ever used. BUT... the direct integration with the ticket system - highlight a list, and make linked tickets (which keep the status info 'live' in the confluence doc) is pretty powerful, and allows a lot of people to keep their business docs, and get status updates without ever having to learn other parts of the system.
  • my_usernam3 6y ago
    I was feeling the same way. Maybe we can get a Steve Jobs of agile development and create the "Iphone of Software Development Management Software". What I (drunkenly) mean is that the customer might not always know best when it comes to UX, especially when your early adopters/feedback providers are human management nerds.
    • ghayes 6y ago
      Have you tried Linear[0]? It's a well-designed, streamlined tool similar to JIRA. [0]: https://linear.app/ https://linear.app/
  • throwaway4good 6y ago
    If you want something that is simple use kanban-board like trello, github, an excel spreadsheet or whatever. The complexity comes from the demand of Jira's paying professional customers. Eventually Jira will grow too complex and bane the way for simpler tools probably of a different paradigm. Much like how Jira replaced things like HP Quality Center or the tools of Rational Unified Process.
  • toolslive 6y ago
    why oh why does it have to be this sloooow ?
  • veidr 6y ago
    I think you are right: the SLOWNESS is a killer. In fact, I think it is THE show-stopper flaw. I recently succeeded in an 18-month-long effort to coordinate moving off of JIRA at work. We moved to clubhouse.io and it's been great. We were also looking closely at GitHub Issues + something like ZenHub for the missing project-management features — and that would have been great, too. As soon as we moved off of JIRA, the amount of communication that started happening in the most relevant place — the bug tracker thread — increased by like... I don't know, something like 20x or 50x. In our years on JIRA (the hosted plan) virtually nobody every discussed the details of the bugs on JIRA. We filed tickets there, and checked them off when done, and used it to review what had gotten done after each iteration — but nobody used it day-to-day. If discussion was to happen about a bug, it happened on Slack (which is horrible for ever finding it again, but it is fast). The reason, I believe, is simply that JIRA is waaaayyy tooooo slow. Nobody wanted to use it day-to-day. You made a list of stories at the beginning of the iteration, and you checked it again at at the end of the iteration, to mark the ones you did done. I did this too. Now, all the discussions directly about the bugs/features in the tracker happen directly on the tracker. Which, I recalled, was how it used to be several years ago before we moved to JIRA (from GitHub issues). There is a lot of other stuff that is clunky about JIRA but I think we could have probably dealt with it, if it wasn't so slow that every interaction — even simple things like "find and open the bug I was working on most recently" or "see what is assigned to me this iteration" — felt like rm -rf node_modules && npm install and you somehow find yourself checking twitter before it even opens... Speed matters!
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • tvanantwerp 6y ago
      I once had a user show me his CPU spike by 50% by merely scrolling up and down a JIRA page. It was stunning.
    • that_guy_iain 6y ago
      > I think you are right: the SLOWNESS is a killer. In fact, I think it is THE show-stopper flaw. I think there are multiple clones of JIRA that literally just focus on the performance part. I think at this point it's unrealistic to expect major performance improvements in a timely fashion with JIRA.
  • kevsim 6y ago
    If you want to try something in this space that's really snappy and responsive, checkout out Kitemaker (YC W21) [0]. I'm a founder and happy to chat with anyone that has any feedback/feature requests: hi@kitemaker.co 0: https://kitemaker.co https://kitemaker.co
    • dotancohen 6y ago
      I was looking at the homepage reading text that explained the Picture Gallery ("when users can reuse images... more likely to...") and then the whole page refreshed with a completely different design. I was on the page for probably about 30 to 60 seconds. Firefox 84 on Kubuntu Linux, no relevant addons.
      • kevsim 6y ago
        Hi! That’s just a video playing on a loop taking you through the various screens. The “image gallery” is just showing our work item screen and then it jumps to some other screens. Thanks for the feedback though! It may be that this isn’t clear enough
        • wyck 6y ago
          Some constructive advice, your homepage is messy, the ratios and spacing are really off and makes it hard to digest and focus on your features. This will directly impact your actual product. Please don't be insulted , I've spend 20 years in design/branding and want you to succeed but this homepage isn't doing it, you need a brand book with some strict guidelines.
          • kevsim 6y ago
            Not insulted at all! Very useful feedback.
        • dotancohen 6y ago
          I see, thanks. I scroll with the keyboard, not the mouse, so I did not notice that the next screenful was entirely a video.
  • m0llusk 6y ago
    Sniff around a bit and you will find that what is even worse is why it is slow. Even the most simple operations call out to multiple sites. Quitting Jira requires more than three dozen sites to respond in order to actually work. Jira is an example of just how much the modern APIs are fun yay methodology sucks in actual practice.
  • catdog 6y ago
    > Every bullet point says "Missing...", but I feel like the main issue about Jira is that it has waaay to many It says "missing" but it mostly talks about those existing features lacking any polish. > and that it's super slow! It is and it really sucks or to quote Firefox "A web page is slowing down your browser, what do you want to do, wait or stop it".
    • denysvitali 6y ago
      It's funny because I have never seen the mentioned Firefox error on any Jira instance. The problem is mostly server-side: it's slow as hell! I'm personally using go-jira [0], but even that is slow: the problem as I said is not (only) the frontend, but the backend. [0]: https://github.com/go-jira/jira https://github.com/go-jira/jira
    • Can_Not 6y ago
      Definitely. JIRA often feels like it's running an eletron app inside of my browser and inside of the server.
  • that_guy_iain 6y ago
    For most it seems "missing easy user interface" meaning there is an interface. And what they're wanting to do is part of a complex system therefore it's easy to understand why an easy interface isn't there, it's not a simple thing in the first place.
• quattrofan 6y ago
  Agreed it is now far too complex and the cloud version appallingly slow. I no longer recommend it to anyone.
  • pkt1975 6y ago
    What would you recommend now?
    • itronitron 6y ago
      https://www.redmine.org/ https://www.redmine.org/ or https://trac.edgewall.org/ https://trac.edgewall.org/
      • fnord123 6y ago
        Trac is unusably slow. It's even worse than JIRA.
    • real_joschi 6y ago
      - GitHub/GitLab/Gitea issues and projects - YouTrack: https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/ https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/
  • fnord123 6y ago
    What do you recommend?
• wintorez 6y ago
  All I want from Jira is to allow me to use Markdown.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • randallsquared 6y ago
    It's definitely not all I want, but that would be huge. Also in Confluence, please.
    • lbruder 6y ago
      I've made the switch back to Redmine for my personal projects. By now it has full Markdown support for issues and wiki. Faster than Jira, and easier to use.
  • Klaster_1 6y ago
    The new rich text editor still confuses me when it comes to newlines and quote blocks, in months since it's been gradually rolled out, I still can't remember if it's Shift+Enter or Enter to end the quote block and what kind of newlines work with quotes, if it's the selected text or a hidden paragraph that quotes are applied to and so on. Just let me edit the raw markdown as before or expose the underlying markup model when editing.
  • mulcahey 6y ago
    It has a markup language that accomplishes the same thing effectively but has a completely different syntax. This is super annoying when you are bouncing between pull requests in Atlassian Bitbucket and JIRA tickets. I have tried to create a heading with # only to end up with an <ol> at least a hundred times. I imagine this is because JIRA (2002) predates Markdown (2004), or at least its mainstream popularity when GitHub adopted it.
    • denysvitali 6y ago
      Is that an excuse? If we have to make a fair comparison, HTML 5 is newer than both: is that a reason why one shouldn't not update the procuct? As an additional side note, Jira updates are NOT free. You have to pay for a license fee every year to get the updates + support, but the product unfortunately remains kind of the same: super slow and with missing basic features (e.g: Markdown)
• curzondax 6y ago
  I just want to quickly see the dashboard of my project and the status of my tasks for the daily. Just getting there is a pain every day.
• jimbob45 6y ago
  What would you have us use instead? Trello?
  • echelon 6y ago
    Github issue tracker is a fantastic alternative if you aren't deep down the Jira hole.
  • st1x7 6y ago
    Trello is great for small projects and for personal lists and boards. I certainly wouldn't want to manage a complex project with a large software team from Trello.
    • emilsedgh 6y ago
      What's your threshold for considering a team as large?
  • MatekCopatek 6y ago
    My go-to options are the following: - Whatever GitHub/GitLab provides if I need the most basic level of tracking. - Trello for a more polished experience, a few additional ticket/board related features and easier involvement of non-developers. - Linear if there's a bigger team that needs more than a bunch of boards (backlogs, roadmaps, projects, teams etc.).
    • echelon 6y ago
      Not sure why you're being downvoted - someone from Atlassian, maybe? I wholeheartedly agree with your suggestions. Trello won't scale, but it's good for n < 3 users, especially if working with non-engineers / non-PMs.
    • Can_Not 6y ago
      > Trello for a more polished experience On android, returning from a screen unlock deleted all my unsaved text.
  • 6y ago
• Closi 6y ago
  Great article. As you are likely not native English, just as a tip you can actually simplify a lot of statements by removing the word ‘the’. As one example: > When the users need the features from Jira and request them to configure the plugins for many application scenarios, which contribute to the overall complexity of UIs. Becomes > When users need features from Jira they request plugins, which contributes to UI complexity. Not a criticism - just thought this might help!
  • mongol 6y ago
    Are both equally correct?
    • Closi 6y ago
      The first has incorrect use of the definite article (the users, the features), but to be honest it’s less about specific grammar syntax/rules and more about making writing easier to understand and more concise.
    • bambataa 6y ago
      Second is preferred. When you say “need the features”, that immediately makes me think “which features?” because it reads as if you are referring to some previously mentioned features.
    • psnatch 6y ago
      Yes, but only one is easy to read correctly.
    • chrisseaton 6y ago
      The 'features' in the sentence are indefinite - they're not fully specified - so clearly adding a definite article isn't right.
    • dkdbejwi383 6y ago
      No offence but I couldn’t understand the example without the correction.
• ngrilly 6y ago
  Try linear.app and it will clarify why Jira sucks :)
  • veidr 6y ago
    I hadn't heard of this one, so I checked their website. I found it interesting that the first bullet point (at least when I loaded the site) was: < 100ms Built for speed Synchronized in real-time ... ...No spinners or waiting. That indeed is why Jira sucks, in my opinion (and apparently many other people, judging by comments in this thread).
  • Aeolun 6y ago
    It would be nice if any of the alternatives would be in line with Jira cost for a large enterprise. I can’t recommend this to anyone if our cost for issue tracking would quadruple overnight. Not to mention the migration costs...
    • robinjones 6y ago
      Jira costs are going to skyrocket soon too since they are sunsetting Jira Server. Opportunity is ripe for competitors.
      • Aeolun 6y ago
        True, but we’re already on datacenter, so won’t be affected.
• baxtr 6y ago
  I don’t like Jira any longer, too. Slow and overloaded. It feels ancient. So, what are some good alternatives you use?
• mkl95 6y ago
  I hate Jira because every company I've worked for that uses it is a feature factory. But maybe that's just me.
• bzb6 6y ago
  They programmed it in Java, so its performance is sad
  • bitcharmer 6y ago
    The nineties called, they want their java jokes back.
    • bzb6 6y ago
      Consider yourself lucky that you have never had to use Jira.
      • echelon 6y ago
        IntelliJ, Clion, and the host of JetBrains IDEs are written in Java, and they're the best IDEs on the planet. Better than VisualStudio. Minecraft Java Edition is fantastic. Java is just a tool. Atlassian isn't a good workshop.
        • bzb6 6y ago
          I haven’t used any of those IDEs, but really, is Minecraft your example? A game with graphics so simple it should work on a Pentium 4 but requires a very beefy computer instead because it’s written in Java. They rewrote it (not sure if in C++ or C#) for the windows store and it works perfectly on computers that can barely run the Java version.
          • echelon 6y ago
            You might not be familiar with how modern computer graphics work. Objects and textures are loaded into the GPU and managed with an API like OpenGL and shader programs written in languages such as GLSL. Java, in this case, serves as the engine that ties everything together and runs the core game logic. Microsoft rewrote it because they're not a Java shop. Microsoft Games Studio not only uses C#, but their mission is to increase adoption throughout the industry as it feeds into Microsoft's ecosystem. Microsoft is about developer mindshare. C# and Java are incredibly similar languages. They're almost indistinguishable. Pointing to C# as if it's substantially different from Java makes me think you've never used either.
• lome_co 6y ago
  is it ethical to link this without linking 'why skype is bad' by rms?
• tmaier 6y ago
  What is missing in my opinion? It is consistency between the atlassian products and/or adherence of industry “standards” Confluence and JIRA use a different markup language for posts and none of them uses Markdown (in any flavour), which I would also use to write in-code documentation, like in a README file
  • oftenwrong 6y ago
    The larger problem is that you cannot (AFAICT) edit the markup directly in Confluence or JIRA. I believe this used to be possible, but has been removed in the cloud version, and will die with the server version. The markup you write gets turned into in-editor "objects" (for lack of a better term) as you type it out. This makes editing an incredibly painful experience. I am occasionally asked to document something on Confluence for a client and every time I feel like I am fighting a battle just to make a basic document. For example, I strongly dislike their implementation of ordered list editing. They have tried to make the ordered list editing mode "smart", but it mostly just gets in the way, and is harder than writing it out manually. Additionally, you cannot embed other "objects" in an ordered list. If you attempt to insert a file object, or something similar, it splits your ordered list into two, with the second list starting its ordering at the beginning. This would seem to defeat the purpose of having a rich editor with embeddable objects, since I cannot use them if I am making an ordered list, such as set of "how to" steps. I usually give up an hour in and switch to writing in my text editor instead, but even then Confluence will mangle my input in surprising ways when I paste it in. Rule #1 of making an editor in my book is that it has to be, at a minimum, as easy and useful as a basic text editor. Microsoft Word and LibreOffice, in spite of their faults, are quite good at this. I would guess most software shops could not implement a WYSIWYG editor at that level of polish, and they would be better off just providing editable markup.
• noja 6y ago
  Can someone - anyone - recommend a better product (non-cloud)?
  • mgbmtl 6y ago
    Gitlab (self-hosted). The community/FOSS version mainly lacks the kind of reporting that jira has (the paid/Enterprise version has some basic reports, such as burndown charts). It's not perfect, but it's fast, simple and has an easy API and webhooks. In the field I work in (CRM/webdev/consulting), JIRA used to be everywhere. Now all those shops have moved to Gitlab.
  • yakubin 6y ago
    Phabricator.
    • IshKebab 6y ago
      Phabricator is pretty good except it has pretty much zero CI integration. Kind of annoying. You also have to pay to even comment on issues. I think that's a pretty great way of getting companies to pay for support but it's also annoying if you want to work with other freeloaders on issues. Also it's written in PHP which means you aren't ever going to want to read or modify the code. No different to GitHub, or probably even GitLab but I can definitely imagine modifying Gogs/Gitea.
      • yakubin 6y ago
        > You also have to pay to even comment on issues. OP mentioned "non-cloud", so I assumed they wanted it self-hosted. You don't have to pay anyone for commenting in Phabricator when you're self-hosting it.
        • IshKebab 6y ago
          Err, I think you misunderstood. You have to pay to comment on issues about Phabricator. On their official bug tracker. Like, if you find a bug, or a solution for a known bug, you can't tell them without paying. Doesn't have anything to do with cloud hosting our self-hosting.
• bserfaty 6y ago
  It always seems to me that Jira was used to produce Jira itself and that's why it turned out this way.
  • rgoulter 6y ago
    Allegedly, they use post-it notes. https://twitter.com/isislovecruft/status/1292331568330022913 https://twitter.com/isislovecruft/status/1292331568330022913
• fullstackwife 6y ago
  We are trying to unsuck Jira for users with an alternative UI, allowing them to manage Jira issues on a virtual whiteboard. [1]. [1] https://spartez-software.com/products/whiteboards-for-jira https://spartez-software.com/products/whiteboards-for-jira
  • bitcharmer 6y ago
    Spartez rings a bell. Aren't you the very people who create software for Atlassian?
    • konic 6y ago
      Yes, but no. You can check some details here https://spartez-software.com/blog/2020/10/27/two-spartez-companies-focusing-on-different-businesses-one-of-them-has-been-just-acquired https://spartez-software.com/blog/2020/10/27/two-spartez-com...
      • vxNsr 6y ago
        This looks like it's mostly yes.
  • oftenwrong 6y ago
    I would like to try a more visual and spatial approach to project planning software. Most of the major solutions, like JIRA, are more like interacting with a RDBDMS through a UI. (Although I admit JQL is very useful, so I don't want to throw that away entirely.) Here's another product I found recently that allows users to draw out their project plan, and have it turned into management-friendly reports automatically: https://www.gameplan.global/ https://www.gameplan.global/ No comment on whether or not this is actually good, since I have never tried it, but it presents a refreshing concept.
• silvestrov 6y ago
  1. It is dog slow. 2. It is dog slow. 3. It is dog slow. ... When my team had an important as-quickly-as-possible sprint, we dropped Jira and switched to Google Docs as it was much easier and faster than Jira. My conclusion was that Jira doesn't do much for developers that can't be done in some Google Docs/Sheets.
  • veidr 6y ago
    Yeah, that's right. Before we escaped JIRA, my team would often do that, too, even for regular sprints. Make a checklist in a collaborative editor tool like Google Docs or Notion, and just do the day to day work there. Then somebody would have to copy it to JIRA so the work would get tracked. But very little of the planning, work breakdown, day to day updates, or discussion actually happened on JIRA because it was literally like a hundred times slower (with the convoluted UI compounded by incessant "wait... is it even loading?... oh, OK, it finally loaded" at each step of the way).
  • dplgk 6y ago
    I manage a team of devs but my clients love to use Jira. So I typically use something like Board Genius to sync between Github issues and Jira. This also let's me keep my devs out of Jira so they can just focus on actual work and not worry all the discussions that happen in Jira between my clients and project management.
  • papaf 6y ago
    It is dog slow. We had a product manager who used to write tickets in OneNote and then copy and paste into JIRA when things were quieter in the evening.
  • enra 6y ago
    Working on a much faster issue tracker: https://linear.app https://linear.app We build it so that almost everything you do in the app instant (<100ms)
    • buttscicles 6y ago
      Linear is the real deal. Love the keyboard shortcuts & speed.
• postexitus 6y ago
  does anybody use monday.com ? it looks very capable at high level (and addresses some of those observability issues stated in the site)
  • mtberatwork 6y ago
    My workplace uses Monday.com and some folks like it but I personally find it clunky and underwhelming. In my opinion, it tries to do too many things and doesn't do any one thing particularly well. If you are just wanting a kanban board, you are better off sticking with Trello. If you are wanting bug tracking, feature requests, etc, you are better off with things like GitHub Issues and other specialized tools. YMMV of course.
  • wkoszek 6y ago
    If you want a normal software engineering process, where you want to check in with your colleagues after 1-2 weeks on the progress etc. it's not going to happen. The normal concepts of sw. eng. aren't in Monday. It's more like a clunky to-do for non-techy people. Simple things are extremely hard in Monday. For example seeing all the tasks from all projects assigned to you -> hard. I'd rather stick with GitHub/JIRA
• gauthamshankar 6y ago
  Co-founder of Zepel.io [0] here. Thank you for giving Zepel a shoutout in the Jira alternatives section of the landing page. Would love to get feedback from the community regarding our App. [0]:https://zepel.io/ https://zepel.io/
  • iblaine 6y ago
    Did someone at Zepel.io create this Why Jira Sucks site?
    • gauthamshankar 6y ago
      No @iblaine, no one from Zepel created this website. Noticed that we were getting some traffic from this source and found this page.
• iainmerrick 6y ago
  As others have said here, the main problem is just that it’s really slow. Apart from that, I think the only item on this list that really puts its finger on a key problem is #1, inability to manage dependencies between projects. You try to work around Jira’s problems by splitting the work into separate projects, but then they’re almost completely siloed, and Jira doesn’t help you connect them up. The other problem I have with it is that it’s too fussy about the hierarchy of issue types. You have sub-tasks, stories, epics, and initiatives. Each one has special semantics and certain supported operations. If you started defining some work at the wrong level of granularity, too bad, because switching everything to a different tier is complicated and massively slow (literally a multi-page wizard, a progress bar and a confirmation screen when making a “mass edit”, i.e. a trivial edit to two or more issues). Hierarchical issues is a good idea, because that’s a very natural way to break down and refine work estimates, but it should just be an arbitrary tree, not a strict and limited set of tiers. Too much complexity, not enough generality. (And not enough speed.)
  • paulryanrogers 6y ago
    Looks like the complexity is a consequence of its generality. Much like Word it serves so many different cases that many people end up using only subsets of features. Yet the code must support all possible cases. Competitors too will likely drift into the same quagmire unless they're unashamedly opinionated.
• franze 6y ago
  In my job I use: * Google Analytics * Google Search Console * Jira So basically I wait and wait and wait to manage projects to make websites fast.
• stephen_g 6y ago
  What’s killing Jira and the other tools in Atlassian’s suite for us is them killing off the on-premises server products. Some of the companies I work with have defense security requirements and just can’t use it in the cloud (unless they followed a lot of stringent requirements that are not on their roadmap, and I assume they would charge a lot more for that). The cloud versions are also far more expensive and while I’ve always liked the software in general (apart from it being dog slow), a big draw was how cost effective the server products were. So I’m about to start evaluating GitLab, YouTrack, etc. to start moving these companies off Jira, Bitbucket and Confluence in the next year or so.
  • Aeolun 6y ago
    Jira datacenter is too expensive too?
    • stephen_g 6y ago
      Yeah, we’re on 25 and 50 user licenses for the various products (~$3000-$5000 p/a). Datacenter’s lowest tier is 500 users for $40,000 p/a.
• CraigJPerry 6y ago
  Unpopular opinion: it doesn’t suck. Let me walk that back a bit - I have no experience of the cloudy version which unanimously seems to be derided as slow. Atlassian - you might wanna fix that. Like yesterday. But server (& datacentre) editions - best in class for my money. In terms of features, the Rally / Agile Central (did that just re-brand again?) rollup roadmap view is the only missing feature i crave. Atlassian should just merge the portfolio product into jira. As for everything else - speed is absolutely fine if hosted well. I tend to council people to try to use less features not more - often jira features are used to attempt to work around challenges that are best addressed by talking to people instead. It integrates with everything, no matter what source control, build pipeline or IDE tooling is in use, there’s integration with jira. The REST API is absolutely usable (mostly for workflow automation and analysis purposes).
  • stephen_g 6y ago
    Server starts heading towards EOL in February 2021 unfortunately. They’ve said that they will support it for three years after that date but you’ll only be able to renew licences (not buy new ones), the pricing is going up and you can’t change tiers. Datacenter is still supported but I think they’re jacking up the price of that too.
  • smitty1e 6y ago
    Indeed. It is a tool. The chief issue I encounter is the staff not actually using the tool, whether Jira or otherwise. If Jira takes a performane hit by lowering the bar for the non-techs, fine. Just use the tool.
  • denysvitali 6y ago
    > But server (& datacentre) editions - best in class for my money. Well, performance wise they're as bad as the cloud version. Even when you give the instance a lot of CPU / Memory. The problem is not only the Spring application itself, the DB seems to be missing some indexes or the queries are super badly optimized. God only knows what's really happening under the hood, but my self hosted Jira instance isn't any better (I've tried them both, cloud and on-prem).
• JosefAssad 6y ago
  I also have a low opinion of jira, but I don't agree with this list at all. I refuse to use jira because it is over-engineered and is generally used as a crowbar to foist non-technical influence upon technical teams, at least in the sites I've seen. Jira is in my opinion a fatal source of friction to the production of reasonable software. That's not what I'm getting from this list. Worse, almost all of the points (all maybe? Haven't checked) declare that something is "missing". Please god no. Jira isn't missing more features. When you make a list like this, some product manager at Atlassian is going to turn it into a bunch of scrum epics and jira will be even worse in 12 months.
  • cogman10 6y ago
    Yup. Jira seems to be a tool around creating process. Management loves that shit because they believe if they put enough checkboxes and fields into a ticket eventually things will be good (or something). It drives me nuts to no end how stupidly complex people want to make the development process. What should, IMO, have almost no interaction with the ticketing system, ends up being a chore for development which adds 0 value to the final product.
• mongol 6y ago
  If anything, Jira tries to do too much. It is like Excel, tries to fit every need in its domain. That it still has limits does not mean it sucks. Quite tiring when people reach for that word for nitpicks and personal opinions.
• amazonfurr 6y ago
  I tried to submit one alternative but can't get hold o them. Anyone can help?
• anotherevan 6y ago
  RT @HackerNewsOnion: California has ruled it illegal to conceal a company’s JIRA subscription for the purpose of attracting engineers. https://twitter.com/HackerNewsOnion/status/981609242221318145 https://twitter.com/HackerNewsOnion/status/98160924222131814...
  • paulryanrogers 6y ago
    Do people really avoid companies based on their choice of administrative services?
    • BlargMcLarg 6y ago
      Choice of administrative services can definitely be a symptom of a larger problem. When most of the services used are unfriendly to the user and one is expected to use these every day, especially with alternatives available, that doesn't tell me they value their workers a lot.
    • SkyPuncher 6y ago
      In my experience, their PM tools tell a lot about the possible complexity/overhead of their process. Jira and the other behemoths tend to come with a lot of process/formality. Tends to be borderline waterfall. The lighter-weight tools tend to be used by teams that actually run an Agile process.
      • paulryanrogers 6y ago
        Perhaps. Could also be that management uses the tools they are familiar with, even if overkill. I use Git for one man projects even though Subversion or even just periodic rsync would suffice.
    • chrisseaton 6y ago
      Are you asking if people care about the tools they're going to have to work with to practice their profession? Yes, of course. I imagine you do as well! If you were looking for a job and they were programming in VB 6 and using CVS for version control I would imagine you (or almost everyone if not you) would say 'hmmm I'm not sure that's how I want to spend my day'. I know I don't want to spend my precious hours on Earth trying to remember which markup syntax this particular input box uses in Jira today.
• SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
  To me, what sucks about JIRA (and would suck about any well-designed tool that replaces it) is not "feature x" but the entire JIRA mentality. All of it. It encourages micro-management. It encourages more and more process. It is the enemy of getting better at the DORA metrics, which requires streamlining process. tickets in JIRA are not the work itself, never was and never will be, it is a LARP of the work, but it gets taken for the central thing. This is an illusion. Fixing a bug without filing a JIRA ticket is in itself progress. Moving a JIRA card without any other change is not. Yet the second is what's visible and therefor what's rewarded. Any problem gets solved with "more JIRA " which stops working when the remaining problems are caused by too much JIRA. And yet they keep trying, because it gives "control". JIRA is a like metastatic tumour that will grow until it kills the host. In case the cancer metaphor didn't make it very clear, I don't like JIRA much. Yet if JIRA were to die today, the middle management who live by JIRA would replace it with something else equally bad, if not worse. Filling in missing features won't and can't fix that.
  • mnd999 6y ago
    100% this. JIRA is bad because it encourages managers to use it to do stupid things, not because it’s inherently bad software.
    • deleted 6y ago
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    • deleted 6y ago
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    • j45 6y ago
      We can say laptops are bad because they let people create bad software too. Jira is far from perfect but there isn’t much that solves what it can in an integrated manner. Sometimes complex problems need complex tools to manage them. Maybe some problems are too simple and basic but imagined to have complexity and end up in an over engineered Jira setup?
      • 6y ago
• tristor 6y ago
  I am reading this comment thread and honestly I don't know that I agree. I think JIRA, like most tools, is as good or bad as you make it. I've been at numerous companies using JIRA that don't seem to have most of the issues referenced here. The only thing I've ever felt like JIRA really lacked in was in a good UX for embedding code snippets or other technical details into issue comments. Native support for Markdown in comments would be a good win. I actually like JIRA and Confluence and have generally had good experiences using them in multiple companies. One of the main things I like is the integration between the two, and Confluence's concept of spaces so you can have some things publicly facing and other things private, which allows you to use Confluence documentation as user-facing docs, which references JIRA issues directly for known issues, and can write requirements/specs/PRDs in Confluence and reference them easily within a JIRA issue. The only real problem JIRA/Confluence have is being very very slow. They've gotten marginally better over the years, but they're still terribly slow compared to competing offerings.
  • papaf 6y ago
    Native support for Markdown in comments would be a good win. In the Atlassian ecosystem, the markup languages are constrained by the following equation: JIRA Markup != Confluence Markup != Bitbucket Markup
    • smcl 6y ago
      Also even just within JIRA it can be inconsistent - I realised that to make monospaced text you need to use: - backticks when creating a Jira ticket, e.g. `hello` - double curly-braces when editing a Jira ticket, e.g. {{hello}} ... or vice versa. I cannot honestly remember which way round it is. Of the complaints I have about Jira this is probably the least annoying - but it really shows how irritating the product is.
      • julenx 6y ago
        I haven't used JIRA recently, but as far as I remember the difference existed because they were rolling out a "new" editor, which was active when editing tickets, but wasn't available when creating new ones. I remember this caused me some data corruption when editing a comment created with the old version of the editor using the new editor. It was a mess.
• k__ 6y ago
  I think, tools like Jira would be evaluated 10x more favourably if they just weren't so damn slow. Same goes for Asana and Slack.
  • Aeolun 6y ago
    Asana and Slack were both fast once upon a time.
• danny_taco 6y ago
  I used to agree, but then I tried all the alternatives. And as others have mentioned, it's as good as one configures it to fit the team needs.
• waylandsmithers 6y ago
  What about the burn down charts? Every project I’ve ever worked on, features are finished, apps and websites are shipped, clients are happy and pay the bills, yet the burn down just goes straight to the right and never down. Sometimes right and up if people added more tickets during the sprint. We look at it at the end of the sprint and say ah well and continue on our way. Then sometimes a PM type decides it’s a problem but nothing ever changes it.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • Jolter 6y ago
    That’s not really not a problem with the software though, is it? Draw your burndown chart on paper and you’ll have exactly the same problem.
    • Sodman 6y ago
      Well it's at least an indicator something has gone terribly wrong. Your project management software, one of the flagship features of which is reporting - now tells you essentially "no work is being done". Somebody in management panics, the team is told to get its act together and some variation of "improve the numbers". Yet features are getting shipped and clients are happy. The two most frequent (bad) options teams take to get out of this are: 1) Ignore the burndown chart / any other reports. Everything is fine on the business side, so let's just accept that the reports are broken and not spend time trying to fix them. 2) Have everyone invest more time into using the system (usually on an ongoing basis), so that it produces the correct looking down-and-to-the-right chart. The problem is that with #1, the software is arguably not producing much value, if any. The problem with #2 is that you're spending extra energy and effort to make the software happy, even though outside of the software it seems like your team is working well, shipping features and keeping customers happy - all of which are more important than a pretty graph.
  • inadequatespace 6y ago
    Hit the nail on the head with this. It's sort of like a gimmie "problem" that can be weaponized if anyone is in the mood, but mostly just ignored entirely.
• Hovertruck 6y ago
  For some quick catharsis, have a look at https://jiralover.tumblr.com/ https://jiralover.tumblr.com/
• waylandsmithers 6y ago
  Does anyone here get to use Basecamp? It looks awesome and I’ve read up on their Shape Up process but have yet to find any organizational support for it in my professional experiences.
  • ci5er 6y ago
    The ui is a little non-intuitive, but good for small teams. For repetitive process work or small distributed teams, I also like Azendoo or even Asana (which has the reports that managers crave)
• Aeolun 6y ago
  I don’t know who the author is, but they clearly have completely different issues with Jira than I have.
• yakubin 6y ago
  I have more specific problems with Jira: 1. When editing a comment, the textarea is tiny and placed in a pop-up, instead of in the page. Can't resize that to see the comment better. 2. After disabling shortcut overrides, the shortcuts are simply disabled, along with the default browser behaviour for them. 3. Refreshing a page resets scroll-status. Seriously, webdevs, stop hijacking normal browser scroll behaviour. You always make it worse, never better. 4. If your login session times out when you're writing a comment, you can't publish it, but the error message isn't clear about the reason why. There was some button in the error message that caused you to lose the entire contents of the comment you were writing. Happened to me several times after writing comments 8+ paragraphs long. It's infuriating.
• KaiserPro 6y ago
  JIRA is a bit like linux. It only really sings when you have a skilled admin to set it up and maintain it. I have used a whole bunch of ticket/project managing tools in a number of different orgs. By far the most useful is JIRA. taiga.io comes close, but lacks the admin interface and multi project overview that jira has. Trello is ok, but terrible for large teams, or large projects. Subtasking is a pain and there is no real concept of a sprint. its ok for replacing notes on a board, but terrible for recording state. Some of these criticisms are valid, but compared the competition[1], I'd choose JIRA 7 times out of 10. [1] dont get me started on the "clever" people that decided to make their own in house solution, kneecapping the entire planning ability of a 70k person org.
  • omosubi 6y ago
    a single JIRA instance is used for a 70k person org?
  • TheFunkyMonk 6y ago
    My smaller team settled on Asana and I really like it. It's much more approachable than JIRA, and while not as powerful, much more so than Trello. Subtasks/relating tasks to other projects is great and I can easily see a birds-eye view of my upcoming pipeline (referencing tickets on other projects) at any time.
• Lazare 6y ago
  There's a hundred small issues with Jira, but there's one huge one: It's slow. Really, really slow. Atlassian seems to make a lot of money, so I guess they're optimising for something that matters to someone, but from my point of view I have a simple process for evaluating tools: 1) Can I use it at all? 2) How many of the features I want does it have? I'm pretty sure Jira would score great on the second question, but since it hard fails the first, I'll never know. And it's been slow for so many years now, I assume they have no interest or ability to fix it. And their slow drift towards cloud installs over letting people self host isn't helping them either since, embarrassingly, their cloud instances seem to be even slower. (Incidentally, there's a lot of competition in that space, but I've been pretty happy with Clubhouse. I wouldn't mind a few more features, but it's good enough. More importantly, the UI is clean and snappy, and that hides a multitude of sins.)
  • eplanit 6y ago
    It's the mainframe app of our time.
    • bdavis__ 6y ago
      nah. mainframe apps are very snappy with that text only interface.
      • nikau 6y ago
        Damn right, I still miss Infoman for change management, you could just type ahead with command line interface to do everything if it was under load. Now everyone uses service now with 50 unnecessary subtickets and multi second delays moving around the web interface.
  • core-questions 6y ago
    Yes, it's slow as balls. I run my own Jira for ~100 users and, despite throwing as much hardware at it and its PostgreSQL database as possible, it's still extremely slow clicking around and trying to use it. Database operations that would have been fast against simple MySQL 15 years ago on a single core server take seconds. What is it doing that makes it so slow?? The PostgreSQL server has most of the working set of data cached into 64GB of memory, for pete's sake, and still it's not enough to make it fly. Cloud Jira is unusably slow in comparison, too, and when the Atlassian server licenses are not available any more (soon!) and we're forced with having to migrate, I'm not sure what to do. Bite the bullet and just accept the abysmal performance for an easy migration, pay through the nose for the Data Center license, or get people running on a new tool?
• gregmac 6y ago
  > Missing Easy Search Option for Finding Issues in the Project Really? I think search is one of the most compelling features. I find most of the time when I can't find something, it's because of different terms used, such as searching for "schedule task failing" vs the ticket saying "job run error". (Usually once I eventually find it I just edit the ticket to have the other keywords I tried) The UI for selecting advanced search is acceptable.. it's not the easiest thing - for example searching open vs closed on GitHub is an much simpler - but it also exposes a lot more of the fields. Personally I use the text-based JQL interface most of the time. It's very powerful, and as the name implies, anyone that knows SQL will find it familiar. A quick example, an easy way to find bugs closed in the version you're releasing but that weren't correctly tagged: `(type = bug) and (fixversion is null) and (status changed to closed after 2020-12-02)`. And search you do is updated in the url (easy to share with others), and even better, if you paste that url into Confluence, it turns into an embedded dynamic list. This is great for release notes, or making category pages of certain types of tickets (eg: all open bugs related to feature x, or all bugs older than 6 months with more than a few comments, etc). Yeah you can build reports with this, but I find these are more accessible and used when they're organized within a logical structure in the wiki vs buried in a flat list of dozens or hundreds of other reports.
• andrewl 6y ago
  We're getting off our old ticket/wiki project system this coming year as it's being sunsetted. Jira is one of the alternatives we're investigating, because several staff have used it in other jobs. I also used it for a brief time, and I was not in love with it. I often felt like it was arguing with me. There are so many systems out there. Right now we're also evaluating YouTrack from JetBrains and OpenProject.org (which is a fork of a fork of RedMine). We don't want to have to move again any time soon, so while we're evaluating features we're also trying to predict stability and viability. To that end, when available, I'm including in our evaluation notes 1) when the company making the system started; 2) when the system was launched; 3) how many staff the company has. JetBrains started in 2000, YouTrack launched in 2009, and they have over 900 employees. OpenProject launched in 2012. Both seem to be stable and under active development. ClickUp has a lot of features and looks nice (we haven't dug into it yet). But they launched in 2017, and raised Series A funding in June 2020. So they're young. That doesn't mean they're bad. It just means they're less known, and have not proved long-term viability. On the plus side, it also means they don't have the 18 years of cruft in the system that Jira (launched in 2002) seems to have. In my experience the right project management system can really help developers, so I always want to hear everybody's experiences, good and bad.
  • wkoszek 6y ago
    JIRA is just fine. Can't really go bad with it. If you have limited needs, you can try GitHub or GitLab Issues. But for a team which may end up growing, JIRA will work. It has good integration with GitHub/GitLab, and with Smart Commits enabled, most of workflows can be baked into it. It's slow, but judging by this thread, I suspect Atlassian customers are complaining about it too, so hopefully it'll be heard.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• SkyPuncher 6y ago
  Am I the only one who has never had an issue with Jira? Sure, there are some things that could be better. But, overall, I find I'm content with Jira. My belief from seeing many organizations struggle with Jira is they have process issues that need to be addressed outside of Jira. Jira is simply the place where their process becomes visualized and put into place - so it gets blamed for the breakdowns. Reading through this list, I can picture exactly why this user is having these complaints. Some of these a definitely UX frustrations, but many of these seem to be fundamental process issues or contradictions. For example, the website claims "missing easy setup" - while also listing a bunch of things that demonstrate the complexity of their Jira setup. ----- tldr: If you're having the issues the author lists, you should probably check your process. Jira is doing you the favor of highlighting where it's broken.
• cowmix 6y ago
  I'm old enuff to remember when Jira was brought in through the back door and was forced on management.
  • donkeyballs 6y ago
    Those were the days.
• dyeje 6y ago
  Jira sucks but it's not because of these reasons. In fact if you fixed each item here, it would be worse. Jira sucks because it is unopinionated and infinitely customizable. As a result, everybody who believes they've discovered the perfect project management setup (spoiler: they haven't) is empowered to cook up their vision via an inscrutable set of customizations. This leads to a bunch of inconsistencies between projects and endless bikeshedding. I imagine all this dynamic configuration is also the reason their cloud hosted version is so painfully slow.
  • elric 6y ago
    There is no magical one-size-fits-all project management setup. Having a tool that is customizable to match your team's workflow is a great win in my book. I've never encountered any organizations where there is endless bikeshedding regarding Jira. Would you care to give an example?
    • alexchamberlain 6y ago
      Format of labels; what is an epic, vs a version on an epic; what do swim lanes represent; do you tag cross team dependencies etc
  • wombat-man 6y ago
    Yeah, I've had really positive experiences with Jira, and I think it's only because the person who configured it knew what they were doing. It was also a smaller company so the limited complexity of the project could have also helped.
• maxdo 6y ago
  No decent dashboards
• softinio 6y ago
  I was hoping to find a list of alternatives that are serious contenders as part of this thread. What alternatives are people using?
• nicwolff 6y ago
  Jira has two different WYSIWYG fields for issue descriptions. The one in the edit-issue form understands Markdown, but the one in the create-issue form doesn't. It's been this way for at least a couple of years. Jira could become perfect in every other way, and would still suck if they don't fix this.
• meagher 6y ago
  As others have mentioned, check out: https://linear.app https://linear.app https://height.app https://height.app is also quite good
• Philip-J-Fry 6y ago
  The one thing that annoys me is that even after all these years of JIRA they still haven't fixed their shitty WYSIWYG editor. I can't count the number of times I've written something and then end up with random asterisks all over the place because it failed to figure out what is bold or what's in a list or whatever.
  • aldanor 6y ago
    Plus you have to learn their stupid formatting rules no one else uses, e.g. to insert code. If it's so targeted at developers, why not use a monospace editor in markdown with easy code highlighting instead of the abomination they have?
• noarchy 6y ago
  Is it Jira that sucks or the management methodologies that cause it to be such a dumpster fire? Scrum-style management is the norm now: it is increasingly difficult to escape it now. So this means project managers are chasing burndown metrics and the like, and organizing everything on boards that are tweaked to death. Atlassian is basically the centre of the so-called "Agile" industry these days. Jira is just a reflection of it.
• CivBase 6y ago
  Missing... missing... missing... I disagree. What makes JIRA a pain is that it has too much. It tries to be a solution for every possible workflow and ends up being a slow, clunky, and confusing solution for all of them. I personally think the best thing Atlassian could do is spin of JIRA into multiple apps which all use the same core, but have different interfaces designed for different workflows. Of course, that's much easier said than done with such a ubiquitous monolith as JIRA.
• sgt 6y ago
  Completely misses the point. The reasons why JIRA sucks are: 1. It is slow
  • nn3 6y ago
    2. It has too many buttons
• jeffreyrogers 6y ago
  I haven't encountered a bug/feature tracker that doesn't suck. They're really designed for managers so that they have some glimpse into what the people they are managing are working on. Something designed solely for engineering teams would be much simpler I think.
• fmakunbound 6y ago
  It's so fucking SLOW. I'm sure it has something to do with Angular or modern JavaScript development, somehow. I'd rather poke my eye out than navigate around in Jira.
• ozim 6y ago
  JIRA does not suck, it is people who are using it. The same with programming languages and frameworks. We all suck just accept it and try to improve yourself and others point by point in that new 2021!
• arnonejoe 6y ago
  Jira is not all that bad. With Jira It's easier to write stories outside of the tool and copy/paste in. If you have a side hustle or small team Jetbrains YouTrack is free to 10 users (I think) and it's awesome. https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIx5iu7O_47QIVYSCtBh02AwWKEAAYASAAEgKnu_D_BwE https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIx5iu7O...
• AltruisticGapHN 6y ago
  As a dev working in a team with "sprints" and creating/ solving tickets, I find the interface awful. I remember 10+ years ago jira had straightforward tables, it was much quicker to add, remove, close issues. I’d open a bookmark to a page with a simple table listing of all issues assigned to me. I don’t know what the heck is going on, now the ui is this awful "modern clean" style with popups everywhere, sidebars, everytime i look at an issue it’s cramped in a tiny column, or i have to open in a new page. The whole ui is so slow and clunky, you have to expand/collapse content all 5he time. All in the name of what? Is scrolling down a page so difficult for a user? How does Amazon make money?
• justinzollars 6y ago
  Have you measured how much javascript comes down the wire? Jira takes 30 seconds to load on my mac.
• TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
  > Missing Easy User Interface to Edit and Update Confluence There is no “easy” UI for this. The problem to solve is merge conflicts, and Atlassian (rightly in my view) clearly decided that real-time collaborative editing of the draft beats forcing users to do merge conflict resolution when saving changes. Wikipedia takes that latter strategy and it's a huge hassle.
• DrBazza 6y ago
  Jira is a generic issue tracker for any industry, not a bug tracker for software development. That’s why in 2020 it doesn’t work for software any more. And it’s slow. And the UI is awful.
• dig1 6y ago
  Why do I get the impression that either Zapel or clubhouse sponsors this domain? :) Anyway, from personal experience of working with large, distributed teams and (later) leading team that included developers, designers (who had no idea what software development workflow is), and electrical engineers, I have to say that still there is no replacement for Jira. And I'm saying that after trying dozens of alternatives. Now, maybe things got changed in the last five years, but something where Jira still shines IMHO: * Self-hosted, free for small teams, you get access to *every* release they made. All these cloud-hosted solutions sound nice until they close the shop. * Almost infinitely configurable. Going from Jira to enter-your-favorite-simple-tool feels like going from Emacs to the chalkboard. Your CEO likes workflow X, sure. Your designer wants workflow Y, no problem. Your plumber used to Z, done. Irreplaceable when you work with the teams from different fields. * Bazillion plugins, integrations, name it. You are still missing something, go and write a plugin in any JVM language you like. It probably will work for all Jira versions with small modifications. * Management, CEOs, even front-end desks like it. Easy to sell, no matter the price. I had a harder time selling Zimbra (which is free) to CEO than Jira, because every CEO knows about Jira :D Right, it got slow over time (I believe the main reason is clunky UI), but you have to pay the price for all those features. If I'm Atlassian, I'd probably add some optional light add-on UI, as Jenkins did with Blue Ocean.
  • sam_bristow 6y ago
    Atlassian is in the process if killing off the self-hosted Server versions of their products. It used to be really annoying that the plugins were split between Server and Cloud. You'd find the prefect plugin for your task and then find it was only available for Cloud or Server.
• DeBraid 6y ago
  Sucks indeed. Ended up using the CLI for most JIRA related activities in my previous job. https://www.npmjs.com/package/jira-cli https://www.npmjs.com/package/jira-cli Some utils to add to `bashrc`: alias jo="jira open" alias js="jira show" jos() { ticket="$1" if [ $# -eq 0 ] then jira open else jira open PROJECT_NAME_HERE-"$ticket" fi } jss() { ticket="$1" if [ $# -eq 0 ] then jira show else jira show PROJECT_NAME_HERE-"$ticket" fi } jqlf() { jql="$1" chrome https://__PROJECT_NAME_DOMAIN_HERE__.atlassian.net/issues/?jql="$jql" } alias jm="jira mark" alias jcs="jira create --project PROJECT_NAME_HERE --type 10001 --priority 3" # create story alias jcb="jira create --project PROJECT_NAME_HERE --type 10004 --priority 3" # create bug alias jce="jira create --project PROJECT_NAME_HERE --type 10000 --priority 3" # create epic alias jjq="jira jql" # custom query alias jql="jira jql" # custom query # example: # jjq 'project = PROJECT_NAME_HERE AND sprint = 158 AND "Epic Link" not in (PROJECT_NAME_HERE-4695, PROJECT_NAME_HERE-4373) AND status in ("Push to PROD") ORDER BY cf[10008] ASC'
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• ccwilson10 6y ago
  [Current Atlassian employee here] This might be biting off more than I can chew, but if anyone has tangible ways they think Jira can be improved for non-tech team members I'd love to hear them. Happy to chat via email or Zoom about them and try to add some of the fixes into the upcoming roadmap.
  • nlh 6y ago
    Based on everything I've sorta-kinda-summarized here, the #1 thing you guys could do is speed up Jira Cloud. My company uses it and tolerates it, but at this point it now takes 8-10s to load a single issue from the board view, and ~5s to toggle the edit state. There is basically not a single action I can perform that takes less than 5s to execute, and some take more (backlog, etc. view take upwards of 30s to load a few hundred issues). This is just not OK. And we're using hosted, Next-Gen. No fancy customizations. Every. Single. Click. takes 5s+ to register a reaction. I'm on a gigabit internet connection and have a 16" MacBook Pro with all the dials turned up (eg it is NOT me).
    • ccwilson10 6y ago
      Whew. At 8 seconds I'd probably call for the tool to be removed. I had a similar experience while at Atlassian at one point and then we found a way to speed up the (Jira Core) boards by ~5 seconds after changing some JQL for the board logic. That change should be in effect for your org but you'd need to use Classic Business projects. Fun fact, next-gen might actually be a reason why your instance is running slower. A side-effect of NG can be the slowdown from each project with its own custom fields and that effect multiplied hundreds of NG projects across an organization. Then (I think), when loading your project it calls all the fields to see which fields it should show. Not an ideal rec, but I'd check out Classic projects and see if that speeds things up for you and your org. Speeding up Jira Cloud is a top priority for Atlassian this year so you should see some improvements coming. I'm working on a new view right now in Jira and we've been able to load about 100 issues in ~1-2 seconds. It lazy loads, but we can flip through 500 easily once you've scrolled to the bottom. Should be able to get that in your hands this coming year.
• iplaman 6y ago
  their tweeter account suspended :(
• wtf_is_up 6y ago
  I really enjoy JIRA.
• cratermoon 6y ago
  Every time I upvote a submission by the title without reading it I regret it, and this time is no exception. Some of the items don't even make sense as written. The fourth item, for example, has two huge issues. 1. It's about Confluence, which is a different Atlassian product. There's some Jira/Confluence integration, but they are not the same thing. 2. "you have to save the other user changes also and while viewing the confluence, if you want to edit, the user will be redirected to other pages." That sentence is gore.
• LeonidBugaev 6y ago
  For us Jira became the only option for scaling engineering. Do not bother about if you have less then 3-4 teams. But if you scale, essentially it is the only solution we found which can fit everyone needs, and give deep enough insights about engineering metrics. And obviously Jira can be very light or very complex. It gives you a lot of building blocks and it is your choice how to use it.
  • Tomis02 6y ago
    What kind of engineering metrics? Do you have any examples?
• blargmaster42_8 6y ago
  Use Azure DevOps instead
• LeonidBugaev 6y ago
  It looks like one of may marketing websites, in this case build by clubhouse or zeppel. And I'll be frank, clubhouse does not work at all for complex software projects. Maybe it can fit some web consultancies flows or similar, but it is build for VERY specific niche.
• losthobbies 6y ago
  I remember when I was working in a start up we used a simple Excel spreadsheet to track bugs. We eventually transitioned to Jira and it was good. I now work in a much bigger company and we use an Excel spreadsheet to track the Jira bugs. It’s very annoying.
• camsjams 6y ago
  Um did anyone look at the OP's submissions? Clearly they are linked with Zepel.io: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=svikashk https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=svikashk I sense a lawsuit from Atlassian poised at Zepel incoming.
• tomphoolery 6y ago
  Is there a better product out there that can communicate what the development team is doing to non-technical people? I like Jira when I don't have to use it. For example, setting up GitHub automation so that changes from Git will cause tickets in Jira to transition to the next stage. Or, automating a transition from "Pending Estimate" when a Jira user assigns story points to a ticket. The automation features in Jira are far beyond anything I've ever used before (one might even consider it an "IFTTT for project management"), and on most teams I've been on, very much under-utilized. I can even automate starting the process of development when design is finished, as when the design ticket is marked "Done", the development ticket it's linked to will change to "Pending Estimate", as it's now possible for a developer to estimate how long it will take to implement the given design.
• kabes 6y ago
  Jira sucks because middle management wants to be able to look at stats about stuff like estimated vs achieved points to get a fake feeling of control and hide the fact they are useless powerpoint generators.
• etimberg 6y ago
  I'm surprised this doesn't mention things like the poor performance, or the fact that some screens expect text in textile format whereas others use markdown
  • rightbyte 6y ago
    It is probably written by some marketing team that hasn't actually used Jira. Who really cares about those bullet points they present. The main issue is lag and clonkyness and forcing ppl into the cloud according to me. Not missing more custom workflow ...
• kazinator 6y ago
  Sorry, no; a bug tracking system can be missing all those things and still not exhibit that intangible Jira suckage. Simply adding more things to Jira that are supposedly missing won't fix it.
• giancarlostoro 6y ago
  Jira is basically the Excel of task management. As my coworker says if Excel I also attribute to Jira: it is the most abused tool.
• ctrager 6y ago
  When I read the list of reasons "Why Jira Sucks" what came to mine was the Charlie Kaufman movie "Synecdoche, New York". In that movie, a playwright keeps expanding the scope of a play to more and more encompass the scope of reality itself. Likewise, some of the points (1, 2, 3, 5...) in the writer of "Why Jira Sucks" wants Jira to be bigger, to encompass the variety of ways work can flow.
• ratherbefuddled 6y ago
  1. Unbearably slow. 2 -> n. Whatever. None of the missing features matter in the slightest in the face of the completely unusable performance.
• offtop5 6y ago
  Jira is just fine. But if you find a company where they want to create their own ticket tracker in house, run. It means they're pennywise pound foolish
• lacoolj 6y ago
  this list has some good items on it but it's very poorly organized. don't mention 3 different things as one item (looking at you number 11)
• madrox 6y ago
  When I got my first job reporting to a non-technical executive and had authority to pick the PM tool, I thought this was my chance to find the Tool That Didn't Suck. Going down that rabbit hole led me to the sad truth that it'll be impossible to make a project management tool that the engineer likes until the engineer stops perceiving project management data entry as busy work. Finding a new tool ameliorates this until the novelty of working in a new UI has worn off. Engineers are an autonomous bunch, and the best coders among us despise doing anything that isn't actually writing code. Unfortunately, like doc writing, there is more to being a good engineer than writing code.
• alexchamberlain 6y ago
  I'm no fan of JIRA, but why are we all using it if we hate it so much?
• locusofself 6y ago
  I got pulled in as the acting sysadmin of an on-prem atlassian suite at my last job after the I.T. dept lost everyone who knew how to use linux. The worst part of doing upgrades by far were the 3rd party addons everyone had added to Confluence etc, they always screwed up the upgrade process. I didn't really mind using JIRA to track my daily dev work, it seemed fine to me. It was annoying that each team had different custom fields etc and seemed a bit unwieldy in that respect.
• hakfoo 6y ago
  What I don't like about Jira is that eventually everything ends up in a poorly structured pool of "Work complete" tasks. I regularly come across situations of the form "we finished Task XYZ a few months ago, but I want to come back to it." Maybe the ticket has an attachment we need for long-term documentation purposes or a test detail we need the next time we review the code. Jira search rarely finds anything useful-- the S/N ratio is terrible with non-development tasks mentioning XYZ, yet ignoring actual XYZ tasks due to poor naming and heirarchy. I usually instead look at the code itself, see in the git history "This was modified in ticket 345675" and then use that to index Jira back to the info I want. From there maybe I can walk between linked blockers and sub-tasks to get what I want. My pre-Jira experience was on Basecamp v1/v2. I appreciated the forum-style layout, because it tends to allow for a few key things: * "Search" and "browse" are both well supported use cases * Old content remains usable and structured, rather than dropping off a cliff after the last ticket closed. * Content can be grouped as it makes sense-- say you get a customer feedback item that touches on three eventual tasks. It would have to be (possibly sliced up and) attached to all three tickets in a Jira model. * It felt "discussion-first"-- the discussion of what to do and how we want to do it is central. This tends to archive some of the subtle choices and gotchas that won't appear automatically in a ticket. I always dreamed of a system that basically added lightweight ticket/kanban model on top of Basecamp. I can see the value of tickets as a trackable unit of work, but it feels like this would be little more than a few tiny tags decorating a readable discussion flow.
• Marazan 6y ago
  Missing the ability to assign more than one person to a card.
• jcahill84 6y ago
  I aspire to build a product that has a website dedicated to how much it sucks, in namesake.
• ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  I was a JIRA admin for a waterfall-based company (Japanese). They did process hard. Agile was a cussword, and the JIRA workflows were standalone engineering efforts; complete with custom JIRA plugins, written in Java, because even JIRA couldn't handle some of the process. I guarantee that it would have had most of the folks here, whimpering under their standing desks. It was the Tenth Circle of Hell. It gave me a sort of PTSD, so that, now I'm on my own, I try not to write anything down, and, if I do, it's usually a small list on a whiteboard. If I never see JIRA again, I will die a happy man. That said, it is like blaming the asphalt for the eminent domain seizures for a road. It's a symptom.
• G4BB3R 6y ago
  Everyone in our company hates redmine. We were doing great before when we used trello, but managers want to track and feel they have control of the projects.
• JackFr 6y ago
  Why is JIRA so Outrageously slow?
• JackFr 6y ago
  I have to say the seriousness of coronavirus only hit me when it got a Jira ticket: COVID-19
• kull 6y ago
  After months of frustrations dealing with JIRA, our team switched to Youtrack[1], it is more than 2 years now using it and we are extremely happy with this tool. Best yet, it is supper affordable for small teams. [1] https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/ https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• kalyantm 6y ago
  Does anyone else think that Airtable is headed down the same path? Hot mess in terms of trying to do a lot, and never being able to find out what i actually need?
• harha_ 6y ago
  I think JIRA is just too complex. Same goes for Confluence...
• konsole 6y ago
  Since many people are also complaining about Jira UI, I've been working on a CLI app during the holidays in a hope to speed up my Jira workflow to some extent: https://bit.ly/38P12bv https://bit.ly/38P12bv
• inadequatespace 6y ago
  Don't think it's mentioned, but actually what I hate most about it is that there are plugins that seem to do useful stuff, but they're paid-for plugins that also require the IT department to do something. It's hard to imagine a more hopeless prospect that even one of these two things occurring (people agreeing that we should pay for something, and IT doing it in a timely fashion), but both at the same time and just because some lowly IC (or even whole team) wants them to is far beyond the realm of possibility.
• globular-toast 6y ago
  Jira is by far the worst software I'm forced to use. The fact that I can't even reliably find old tickets, not even by search which should be a last resort, is enough for me. It's a steaming pile of crap.
• arminiusreturns 6y ago
  The problem with Jira is management shifting overton windows over time and making it into a blocker to work instead of a tracker of work. I just checked, on one of my main work boards, to create a new ticket, there are 33 fields to fill out, at least half of which are mandatory. In the middle of a highsev incident, I absolutely hate the time sink, and have been trying to figure out ways to automate away jira as much as possible. I think Jira can be used correctly, but over time PHB's ruin it's potential. The other problem with Jira is the Atlassian push into confluence that tends to go with it. Confluence is so infuriating. Oh what, you want to do a simple operation like copy-paste data from one section of a table to another? Fuck you. You want built in markdown? Fuck you. You want to embed github pages? Thats a plugin and an ordeal to get approved...etc People always talk about how it's just a wysiwg and so its for the non-techs, but the thing is it's so specific and non-standard they are still having to learn how to use it anyway. Why not just get them working on github wikis or something? Also: ffs, stop trying to do "smart searching" for me! It's literally the most useless feature ever, and has never returned anything close to what I was looking for. Yay for having to learn JQL just to do a semi-advanced search. How many query languages do we need to know these days?
• egamirorrim 6y ago
  As someone who's stuck on Gitlab for ticket/issue management I'd give my right nut for a JIRA instance.