5 ms·

Consider yourself fortunate, you were spared pain of using JIRA and Confluence

by acd10j 5y ago

charles_f 5y ago
What are the pains of using Jira and confluence?
- lifthrasiir 5y ago
  Slow, complex (in terms of feature), painful (in terms of UX)---pick any three.
  - WantonQuantum 5y ago
    Inconsistent user experience between the products. “Oh this is Jira so I can’t use those formatting options that I use in confluence.”
    - chrisweekly 5y ago
      It's worse than that; even within Jira the editing contexts are completely inconsistent. And the cache behavior is apparently nondeterministic. It boggles my mind that such awful UX is tolerated in software used in so many companies. It's like Atlassian put all its eggs in the "crack the enterprise sales code" basket, met wild success, and that was all they were capable of. If my job required me to work in Confluence and Jira all day I'd change my job or my career.
- dzhiurgis 5y ago
  Rage inducing formatting
- zemo 5y ago
  Jira requires a person to tailor it to your org. It can be pretty good if you have people who configure it correctly and have a workflow that suits your team/org, but that's kinda the problem: making Jira be good is a full time job. Confluence is just a terrible experience overall. Terrible editing, terrible browsing, terrible search. I've used both at multiple orgs, I've seen Jira be good, I've never seen Confluence be good.
  - d3nj4l 5y ago
    Yeah, same experience here. Confluence is just dogshit: the only positive thing I can say about it is that it's better as a wiki than using Google Drive with Docs, which can memory hole even faster if it's not set up correctly.
- pragmatic 5y ago
  Confluence content is write only. Good luck finding it ever again unless you know exactly what you are looking for.
  - boyter 5y ago
    So much so I wrote a app that I used for finding things in my own confluence and then released as a marketplace application. You can mitigate the issues in the search if you are organise your content well but the search is still deficient in other ways.
- RachelF 5y ago
  Trello is also terrible software. It's basically a web interface for agile post-it notes. Compared to decent project management software it has almost no project management features.
  - N4der 5y ago
    can you give me a good project management software to use? alternative to Trello.
    - higeorge13 5y ago
      Shortcut
  - viraptor 5y ago
    That's exactly what Trello is though - boards of cards. Do not expect the usual project management features from it.
  - charles_f 5y ago
    This is a funny one. People usually give all the rage to Jira because it's so complex, and Trello because it's post-its. I feel like there's no good middle-ground, people are gonna hate one or the other
- lostdog 5y ago
  Put a sleep(60000) in every request of your own webapp and it will still be more responsive than JIRA.
- kstrauser 5y ago
  Confluence supported Markdown (or was it HTML? It’s been a long time.). We wrote a lot of automation that would pull comments out of code, format them that way, and load them into Confluence. Voila! Documentation that’s always synced with production code. And then a point upgrade removed that support in favor of their own rich text format, so in an instant all our tooling died. We were not happy campers. I have other thoughts about Jira: https://honeypot.net/post/jira-is-a-code-smell/ https://honeypot.net/post/jira-is-a-code-smell/
  - hobos_delight 5y ago
    It wasn't a point upgrade - Confluence 4.0 got rid of markdown in favour of an "XHTML" storage format, then a layer on the editor to autocomplete markdown into the rich-text as you typed. Personally I preferred the ability to edit pages as markdown, and we toyed with ways to allow users to edit the rich pages in markdown (i.e. a new transformer from the storage format to wiki-markup, instead of the editor format) - but it wasn't possible to not come up with a diverging solution for the transformations here (at the time, given the time we had spent on it). Whilst we copped a lot of flack from the die-hard Confluence users when this was done, the vast majority of users liked the change. Also from a different angle, this was a really fun time at Atlassian - we had run out of space in the CornX (office at the time) so we had leased the floors above the pub next door (The Dundee Arms), and there were five of us in there, all with out machines crammed around a single table in this tiny room. Good times.
    - kstrauser 5y ago
      It was a death knell for us. We moved all our documentation into Git, which the devs found more convenient and usable. I think there might’ve been some survival bias: the people who kept using it after the breaking change liked it. The people who dropped it immediately because it ruined their workflows just moved on (or put it in read-only mode).
      - hobos_delight 5y ago
        Oh completely agree regarding the survival bias - I think the over-arching plan was to make it more accessible to more than just dev teams, and it seems to have worked. "Like MS Word" was thrown around a bit.
- karaterobot 5y ago
  Here's one that bothers me. If you use Jira to track sprints, and you want to view the previous sprint, how would you expect to do it? I don't mean a sprint from 5 years ago, I mean the one from last week. Let's say you want to view stories that didn't get completed last sprint, or you just want to see what happened because you're doing a retrospective. How would you expect to go about this in a mature product for which your organization pays money? You might say "well, there's probably a button on the current sprint that lets you go back in time to the last sprint. Like, some form of pagination. Or, maybe you can even set a date on a calendar and see the active sprint during that date. That would be cool." According to Atlassian's support forum, there is "no way to currently do this"[1]. [1] https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-questions/How-to-view-a-previous-sprint-that-has-been-closed/qaq-p/1017041#M42220 https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-questions/H... You can approximate it by building a custom query, or going into a reporting dashboard (if you have access). You shouldn't need to.
  - mustyoshi 5y ago
    I'm able to view previous sprints for a board by going to the reports tab on the left sidebar.
  - phkx 5y ago
    There’s something hidden in the sprint reports. One of the different views there let‘s you see the stories from any previous sprint. Not sure whether it reflects the state of the stories as of that sprint, though.
- redisman 5y ago
  Terrible UX and performance so it’s extremely frustrating to use. I’ve used JIRA in 3 companies and it was always the worst piece of software I had to interact with. Now we just use Github issues and their “Projects beta” and it’s a huge improvement. Engineer first workflow rather than optimized for creating some pseudo insightful views for useless managers
d3nj4l 5y ago
IME Jira is fine when on-prem and managed by a good admin, but that's become impossible as they're forcing customers to move to their cloud offering.
- MikePlacid 5y ago
  Our company moved to Jira from Siebel by Oracle - THAT was a true nightmare and so Jira was a huge relief to us. But yes, it was on-prem and managed by a good admin.
- bamboozled 5y ago
  Our on-prem sucks too…
AceJohnny2 5y ago
We use Confluence (on-premise). It's fine. Certainly no worse than any other wiki that just accretes content. (Then again, we're not doing anything overly sophisticated with it, or relying on any of its features for critical workflows.)
- kadoban 5y ago
  It is impossible to find anything in Confluence. The search is useless. Anything that's not in my list of recently worked-on/viewed is basically gone forever.
  - gjvc 5y ago
    thank you for saying this -- I thought it was just me!
  - AceJohnny2 5y ago
    Frankly, that's no better or worst than any other wiki I've used. It's certainly not something I blame Confluence for particularly.
    - kadoban 5y ago
      I can search for strings that exactly exist in pages and it still doesn't find them, it has no way I can find to limit searches to pages I've modified, and its search result ordering is awful, partial search results crowd out full matches. I'm sure there's worse search features, but this is supposed to be decent, well-supported software. It's not some crap noname wiki, supported by one guy parttime.
      - exikyut 4y ago
        Mumbles noises about a continuous-scraping system (which possibly runs overnight) and chucks everything into a 3rd-party search solution (If there isn't that much content, now would definitely be the time to do this, so you entrench the capability and get everyone to depend on it to the extent that it must be fixed once it can't keep up. :P)

Consider yourself fortunate, you were spared pain of using JIRA and Confluence

by acd10j 5y ago

Consider yourself fortunate, you were spared pain of using JIRA and Confluence

charles_f 5y ago

What are the pains of using Jira and confluence?

lifthrasiir 5y ago
Slow, complex (in terms of feature), painful (in terms of UX)---pick any three.
- WantonQuantum 5y ago
  Inconsistent user experience between the products. “Oh this is Jira so I can’t use those formatting options that I use in confluence.”
  - chrisweekly 5y ago
    It's worse than that; even within Jira the editing contexts are completely inconsistent. And the cache behavior is apparently nondeterministic. It boggles my mind that such awful UX is tolerated in software used in so many companies. It's like Atlassian put all its eggs in the "crack the enterprise sales code" basket, met wild success, and that was all they were capable of. If my job required me to work in Confluence and Jira all day I'd change my job or my career.
dzhiurgis 5y ago
Rage inducing formatting
zemo 5y ago
Jira requires a person to tailor it to your org. It can be pretty good if you have people who configure it correctly and have a workflow that suits your team/org, but that's kinda the problem: making Jira be good is a full time job. Confluence is just a terrible experience overall. Terrible editing, terrible browsing, terrible search. I've used both at multiple orgs, I've seen Jira be good, I've never seen Confluence be good.
- d3nj4l 5y ago
  Yeah, same experience here. Confluence is just dogshit: the only positive thing I can say about it is that it's better as a wiki than using Google Drive with Docs, which can memory hole even faster if it's not set up correctly.
pragmatic 5y ago
Confluence content is write only. Good luck finding it ever again unless you know exactly what you are looking for.
- boyter 5y ago
  So much so I wrote a app that I used for finding things in my own confluence and then released as a marketplace application. You can mitigate the issues in the search if you are organise your content well but the search is still deficient in other ways.
RachelF 5y ago
Trello is also terrible software. It's basically a web interface for agile post-it notes. Compared to decent project management software it has almost no project management features.
- N4der 5y ago
  can you give me a good project management software to use? alternative to Trello.
  - higeorge13 5y ago
    Shortcut
- viraptor 5y ago
  That's exactly what Trello is though - boards of cards. Do not expect the usual project management features from it.
- charles_f 5y ago
  This is a funny one. People usually give all the rage to Jira because it's so complex, and Trello because it's post-its. I feel like there's no good middle-ground, people are gonna hate one or the other
lostdog 5y ago
Put a sleep(60000) in every request of your own webapp and it will still be more responsive than JIRA.
kstrauser 5y ago
Confluence supported Markdown (or was it HTML? It’s been a long time.). We wrote a lot of automation that would pull comments out of code, format them that way, and load them into Confluence. Voila! Documentation that’s always synced with production code. And then a point upgrade removed that support in favor of their own rich text format, so in an instant all our tooling died. We were not happy campers. I have other thoughts about Jira: https://honeypot.net/post/jira-is-a-code-smell/ https://honeypot.net/post/jira-is-a-code-smell/
- hobos_delight 5y ago
  It wasn't a point upgrade - Confluence 4.0 got rid of markdown in favour of an "XHTML" storage format, then a layer on the editor to autocomplete markdown into the rich-text as you typed. Personally I preferred the ability to edit pages as markdown, and we toyed with ways to allow users to edit the rich pages in markdown (i.e. a new transformer from the storage format to wiki-markup, instead of the editor format) - but it wasn't possible to not come up with a diverging solution for the transformations here (at the time, given the time we had spent on it). Whilst we copped a lot of flack from the die-hard Confluence users when this was done, the vast majority of users liked the change. Also from a different angle, this was a really fun time at Atlassian - we had run out of space in the CornX (office at the time) so we had leased the floors above the pub next door (The Dundee Arms), and there were five of us in there, all with out machines crammed around a single table in this tiny room. Good times.
  - kstrauser 5y ago
    It was a death knell for us. We moved all our documentation into Git, which the devs found more convenient and usable. I think there might’ve been some survival bias: the people who kept using it after the breaking change liked it. The people who dropped it immediately because it ruined their workflows just moved on (or put it in read-only mode).
    - hobos_delight 5y ago
      Oh completely agree regarding the survival bias - I think the over-arching plan was to make it more accessible to more than just dev teams, and it seems to have worked. "Like MS Word" was thrown around a bit.
karaterobot 5y ago
Here's one that bothers me. If you use Jira to track sprints, and you want to view the previous sprint, how would you expect to do it? I don't mean a sprint from 5 years ago, I mean the one from last week. Let's say you want to view stories that didn't get completed last sprint, or you just want to see what happened because you're doing a retrospective. How would you expect to go about this in a mature product for which your organization pays money? You might say "well, there's probably a button on the current sprint that lets you go back in time to the last sprint. Like, some form of pagination. Or, maybe you can even set a date on a calendar and see the active sprint during that date. That would be cool." According to Atlassian's support forum, there is "no way to currently do this"[1]. [1] https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-questions/How-to-view-a-previous-sprint-that-has-been-closed/qaq-p/1017041#M42220 https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-questions/H... You can approximate it by building a custom query, or going into a reporting dashboard (if you have access). You shouldn't need to.
- mustyoshi 5y ago
  I'm able to view previous sprints for a board by going to the reports tab on the left sidebar.
- phkx 5y ago
  There’s something hidden in the sprint reports. One of the different views there let‘s you see the stories from any previous sprint. Not sure whether it reflects the state of the stories as of that sprint, though.
redisman 5y ago
Terrible UX and performance so it’s extremely frustrating to use. I’ve used JIRA in 3 companies and it was always the worst piece of software I had to interact with. Now we just use Github issues and their “Projects beta” and it’s a huge improvement. Engineer first workflow rather than optimized for creating some pseudo insightful views for useless managers

d3nj4l 5y ago

IME Jira is fine when on-prem and managed by a good admin, but that's become impossible as they're forcing customers to move to their cloud offering.

MikePlacid 5y ago
Our company moved to Jira from Siebel by Oracle - THAT was a true nightmare and so Jira was a huge relief to us. But yes, it was on-prem and managed by a good admin.
bamboozled 5y ago
Our on-prem sucks too…

AceJohnny2 5y ago

We use Confluence (on-premise). It's fine. Certainly no worse than any other wiki that just accretes content. (Then again, we're not doing anything overly sophisticated with it, or relying on any of its features for critical workflows.)

kadoban 5y ago
It is impossible to find anything in Confluence. The search is useless. Anything that's not in my list of recently worked-on/viewed is basically gone forever.
- gjvc 5y ago
  thank you for saying this -- I thought it was just me!
- AceJohnny2 5y ago
  Frankly, that's no better or worst than any other wiki I've used. It's certainly not something I blame Confluence for particularly.
  - kadoban 5y ago
    I can search for strings that exactly exist in pages and it still doesn't find them, it has no way I can find to limit searches to pages I've modified, and its search result ordering is awful, partial search results crowd out full matches. I'm sure there's worse search features, but this is supposed to be decent, well-supported software. It's not some crap noname wiki, supported by one guy parttime.
    - exikyut 4y ago
      Mumbles noises about a continuous-scraping system (which possibly runs overnight) and chucks everything into a 3rd-party search solution (If there isn't that much content, now would definitely be the time to do this, so you entrench the capability and get everyone to depend on it to the extent that it must be fixed once it can't keep up. :P)