5 ms·

What are the pains of using Jira and confluence?

by charles_f 5y ago

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

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