26 ms·

I fucking hate Jira

• RadixDLT 4y ago
  if you hate jira try Trello, "the baby version of jira"
• karimmaassen 4y ago
  What I find the real problem is not JIRA itself, but the fact that most of the time JIRA, is abused up to a point where it's become unusable. The inability or unwillingness (or both?) of the teams I've worked with to structure their work, write good user stories and keep things simple is in my experience the root cause of any shitty JIRA experience I've had. Of course it doesn't help per se that JIRA allows you to do that, but I guess that's not the tool's fault. (You can write bad and good essays with Microsoft Word).
• meowface 4y ago
  I'm sometimes kind of surprised at how often I see people say they don't mind it. It's by far the tool I like the least out of everything I've used at any job I've ever been in.
  • kzrdude 4y ago
    I don't mind it. Maybe because I only peek into it about once per week or so, so we don't really drive daily work using it.
    • codebolt 4y ago
      Same, I check into Jira once per day, max. It's useful to give an overview of what everyone is working on in the "Kanban" meetings twice weekly. I use quotes because we really don't follow any strict rules or structures, everyone just kind of does what needs to be done to keep things moving forward.
      • hinkley 4y ago
        Maybe a couple times a day for me, but mostly if I somehow have two things going at once. Meanwhile I’m battling Bamboo regularly, and I hate everyone who has ever worked on that crime against humanity.
  • bpodgursky 4y ago
    The UX is annoying as hell but I am almost never unable to do what I need to do. I can't say that for all SaaS tools.
  • pydry 4y ago
    It's quite easy to have a minimized exposure to jira as a developer. I hate its guts but if my interactions are limited to writing a few tickets and changing statuses then its awfulness is more somebody else's problem and it doesnt bother me nearly as much.
  • happytoexplain 4y ago
    If it's set up properly, it's easy for developers to browse the tickets, log work on them, and update their status - and that's all they will need to do. So, from their perspective, it's fine. However, getting to that point is unnecessarily difficult, and if you fail, that difficulty spills over into the developer experience.
  • hinkley 4y ago
    I would fight you about how Bamboo is the worst tool I’ve had to use, but since they’re both from Atlassian that feels a bit like splitting hairs.
  • 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
    It's a tool for the boring part of software engineering- I don't expect it to spark joy. I wish it were faster, scaled the full width of my monitor, allowed external editors, etc. Overall it gets the job done well. Everything else that I've used is horrible which makes it the best in my experience but that's still not saying much.
    • tommoor 4y ago
      But what if it _did_ spark joy… https://linear.app/readme https://linear.app/readme
      • camer0 4y ago
        We use Linear at my job too - it's very smooth and easy to use and certainly does spark joy
      • 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
        This looks really nice but it scares me to think of what my large (60,000+ employees) employer would do to it. Thanks for sharing though- I'm going to check this out.
      • jbluepolarbear 4y ago
        I use linear and I hate it more than jira. It’s jira with all the useful production features removed, making it useless for large teams and qa teams. Beyond simple task tracking it has been a chore to use.
      • conradfr 4y ago
        We use it at my current work and I'm not impressed. We even moved back some workflow steps to Notion because of lost work in the editor. Frankly, I miss the limited GitHub PM tools we used at my previous job. Even their one true limitation, no sub-issues, is very meh on Linear.
      • oehpr 4y ago
        I looked it over, but the properties provided prevent us from organizing and prioritizing the tickets on things that matter to us. Doesn't look like we can add properties to issues. So, if we have some kinda numerical metric, call it "foo", we can't ask linear to give us all foo's over 6. So if we wanted to do any kinda metrics, basically, we have to export our whole project as CSV and do the calculations there? I just checked the export system. It exports everything only. I don't think this is tenable for project management. I can see it work for a personal task list or a small team doing simple sprints. But... I wouldn't see it used beyond that. Maybe I'm off base on all this, I did just give the product a quick once over. If I missed ways to make all this work, then that's on me.
  • tormeh 4y ago
    There's lots of worse shit here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_version-control_software#Proprietary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_version-control_softwa.... I remember IBM ClearCase in particular as vile.
    • ilc 4y ago
      Only if you toss in multi-site for fun. :)
  • jrib 4y ago
    What tools do you like the most?
  • wyldfire 4y ago
    I only use Jira for defect tracking and not project planning. In that regard it seems to be only slightly worse than Github/Gitlab's issue tracking. It'd be kinda nice if it supported Markdown but it's not a big deal. The only things I need it to do are: (1) record an archive of comments describing the progress on the issue's resolution, (2) be able to store attachments, (3) be able to cross-reference other issues. Maybe I have a really low bar? But it seems to do those without much problem and in my case it doesn't seem to be slow.
  • Tao3300 4y ago
    I don't love it, but I sure hate it less than just about everything that came before it.
    • anothernewdude 4y ago
      I'd prefer any kanban board app over jira.
  • grumple 4y ago
    Jira is terrible until you try other tools for managing dev work.
• felixgallo 4y ago
  Jira is the worst possible choice, except for all the others.
  • cowmix 4y ago
  • TLadd 4y ago
    Yep. Jira is far from perfect, but I've not had any better luck with anything else.
  • labster 4y ago
    I was honestly really pleased when we moved to Jira at a previous job, having lived through three other worse ticket systems. It’s just more powerful, and has ways of keeping tickets from falling into a black hole. None of that is an excuse for the slow, terrible frontend for Jira, or the complete lack of discoverability in Confluence.
  • bko 4y ago
    Has anyone tried to use something like notion? Depending on your size you don't necessarily need all the stuff around it. Whats the difference between a story and an epoch? Most people don't really care. They just need something to track stuff being done, like a glorified to-do list with rich text.
    • jitl 4y ago
      Disclaimer: I work at Notion. I think Notion works well for tasks if your organization is small, or you are happy with lightweight process. There is no way to ensure all updates to a Notion page follow a strict state machine like Jira. Notion just doesn’t have those kind of validation / restriction tools yet. For our 100ish engineers it works well especially because planning docs flow seamlessly into project specs and then tasks… but we suffer a bit from loosely defined workflows around 2-week sprints that take more clicking than anyone wants.
      • 4y ago
• sefrost 4y ago
  I wish the comments were more specific about which features they don’t like. For me a particularly frustrating aspect is the way the UI moves around a lot. I’m quite anxious to click anything until all the loading spinners have stopped in case I click the wrong thing. Then I could be taken to a page or feature I’ve never seen before. Also it’s really annoying when I try to copy something from a ticket description but it starts editing the whole description field. EDIT - I'd also like to add that as a developer, once I finish my ticket I assign it to a QA. Then I can never get back to the ticket. I'd like a really easy way to see all of the tickets I've ever completed. But completed tickets aren't assigned to me, they're assigned to QA.
  • hkgjjgjfjfjfjf 4y ago
  • pydry 4y ago
    It's such a bloated mess that it's hard to point to a specific thing.
  • nikanj 4y ago
    It’s like trying to describe why a McDonalds $1.99 burger is bad, to someone who just lists ingredients and insists it has just the same mayo, cheese & patty as a $12.99 burger does. It’s not about any single feature being missing, it’s just terrible the same way Vista was terrible
  • daigoba66 4y ago
    > I'd like a really easy way to see all of the tickets I've ever completed. Can be solved by creating a custom person field called “Developer”. Then you can customize the Status transition for your In Progress status to automatically set that field to the current user or maybe the issue assignee. For better or worse, Jira is quite powerful and flexible. But it’s not always simple to setup.
  • monkeybutton 4y ago
    Everything turning into an edit action when I just want to click a link or copy a bit of text is super annoying! Also is thinking you're in a text field, typing out something and realizing you've done a whole bunch of random actions because of all the hotkeys.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• greatgib 4y ago
  I used to hate Jira, and then, I had to use Asana...
  • pcthrowaway 4y ago
    Wow, I like Asana much more than Jira. We're using Linear now, which I know is a favourite here, but I actually think Asana is pretty close in quality (better in some ways)
  • yAak 4y ago
    Yeah, I've yet to use something that doesn't make me sad and aggravated at the same time. On my "hate" list: Jira, Asana, Zenhub &/or Github Issues, Trello.
• GoOnThenDoTell 4y ago
  Jira need to fix their loading times
  • snowstormsun 4y ago
    This
• geekamongus 4y ago
  I like Jira because it hides the crap I don't want to do or think about in this thing called the backlog, which I can point to as a "see, it is something in the works but we don't have enough resources" thing, and then I can focus on the things I need/want to do by putting them in the Will Do Soon column.
• CivBase 4y ago
  I'll start complaining about JIRA when I find a reasonable alternative for my organization. Until then, I'm just glad we're not using IBM Rational ClearQuest anymore.
• givemeethekeys 4y ago
  The two people who drove our company to Jira from other tools: - One of them resigned soon after the migration. - The other barely uses it today - in fact, he found other tools for his team because Jira is too cumbersome. The rest of us are left holding the bag because "Jira is the industry standard".
  • hinkley 4y ago
    Struts was an industrial standard for longer than most things, and everyone hated using it for most of that time. A quarter pounder with cheese is an industry standard too, but that doesn’t mean you should give it preferential treatment. Industry standards are often more like consolation prizes than a special experience.
• ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  Reminds me of this classic piece of Internet lore: https://www.internetisshit.org https://www.internetisshit.org
• lordleft 4y ago
  What are some alternatives to JIRA? Also, how much of the hate directed towards JIRA buried resentment towards Agile and other project management paradigms?
  • y0ssar1an 4y ago
    https://monday.com https://monday.com
  • bobbygoodlatte 4y ago
    Linear https://linear.app/ https://linear.app/ It's a joy to use
  • ianbutler 4y ago
    PivotalTracker, GitLab has pretty great project tracking and ticket management if you’re on them. These are the two I can think of off the top of my head. Personally I really like Pivotal.
    • halostatue 4y ago
      Pivotal Tracker is only good if you buy into the way that it works and are willing to lose all knowledge that your tickets represent. Pivotal is really only good at a particular type of project tracking (mostly building greenfield features and projects), and absolutely godawful at issue tracking. I’ll use JIRA over Pivotal any day.
      • ianbutler 4y ago
        Pivotal was just a normal board based tracker when I used it. Better than Trello and less complex than Jira which is all I really want, I’ve never been in an organization that has any more context attached to a ticket than what the work is and who’s working on it. I think I can count on my hand the number of times anyone has actually had a conversation on a Jira ticket for me. It also helps that right now I don’t have tickets for my work, I’ve been lucky enough to work on exploratory/skunkworks work for my team at my current org.
  • 4y ago
• Sebguer 4y ago
  The real problem with Jira is that every company adopts it without sufficient support. It needs dedicated admins. You can't just let every single team YOLO things. Unfortunately, what happens is a company adopts it from the start, and then it grows into an impossible-to-use forest where there's no meaningful way to bring things back to actually usable, and everyone is miserable.
  • jokethrowaway 4y ago
    If a tool needs this level of support it's not a good tool and not even a tool - it's the no-code equivalent of a framework. I'd rather pick any other ticketing system which has things done in one way than waste my life configuring jira
    • Pasorrijer 4y ago
      Just about every enterprise tool requires a proper implementation and system admins and business process analysis and change management to get setup. A lot of enterprise tools are "crap, why would the company ever use this", and 90% of that is in the implementation (or lack thereof)
      • Sebguer 4y ago
        Yep! It also comes down to a difference between the people the tool is primarily targeted at, and who actually has to interact with it. Salesforce's CRM (and its various sub-products) is very similar.
    • Sebguer 4y ago
      This is an inane take. Almost every system we use in a business requires support, and management to be used effectively. You wouldn't fire the people responsible for maintaining your other services. You can either have something incredibly powerful, like Jira, with a lot of sharp edges, or you can use something incredibly similar. The latter would be more like 'no-code' since it's going to be drastically limited in terms of adapting to how your business does work, versus Jira which can be transformed into just about anything. That 'just about anything' is the root of the problem, since over years a business will let dozens of people alter configurations and do special little bespoke things on their projects until it's unsustainable.
• stevebmark 4y ago
• amelius 4y ago
  Ripe for disruption.
• sto_hristo 4y ago
  I've seen absolutely ridiculous workflows on Jira. Things like - "i'm gonna make the most ridiculous workflow out of spite and boredom just to troll you." From that perspective it's easy to hate it, but you hate the actual use of the tool not the tool itself. Currently i enjoy more sane use of it. Simple workflow. You get in, read the ticket, clicky a button, get out. Slowness in that regard is very tolerable.
  • easytiger 4y ago
    Wait till you hear about servicenow
• Maakuth 4y ago
  Single letter hotkeys are pretty bad. If it's not an input field you've focused but the page itself, you might assign the ticket to yourself and set it to some crazy state before you realize the focus is all wrong. Ask me how I know...
  • iso1631 4y ago
    I do believe I managed to disable those in preferences or similar
• cptcobalt 4y ago
  I came from Apple (and their excellent Radar issue tracking tool) to a company that uses Jira. Jira is the worst. I routinely lose data in jira, like saving errors. Dragging and dropping attachments sometimes causes the page to crash and reload. Everything in the UI moves around or obscured behind some tabs. I want to be able to file a network of issues all at once, something Radar did great. Jira workflows are much to complicated, and their flexibility just increases your administrative hell. I can go on and on.
  • NonNefarious 4y ago
    Also ex-Apple here. Radar does suffer (to a lesser extent than Jira) from a profound defect, though: Searches are "exact match" for whatever text you put in the title. To find a bug YOU filed, you have to remember the exact words and sequence you used in the title. Did I say "resize window" or "resize a window?" I filed a bug against Radar for this behavior, and developers from other teams added comments expressing surprise that the tool was crippled in this manner. I think a year later, someone said, "Yep, our team got bit by this today again. We assumed this was fixed years ago." This fundamental flaw may explain why some widely-encountered bugs in Apple products don't get fixed, or at least fixed in a timely manner. A dozen Radars could be filed for the same defect, but if they aren't phrased the same way you'll never find all the dupes. So dumb. Still... I could construct queries based on status and product more easily in Radar than in Jira.
    • phist_mcgee 4y ago
      Well it's obvious then. Apple needs to create a new and bespoke issue tracker just for radar.
      • quickthrower2 4y ago
        Or you need a “Queen’s English” standard way of describing everything enforced to all users.
    • momothereal 4y ago
      That seems weird... is it too hard to feed everything into an Elasticsearch index? Even with default settings and some decent hardware you'd get good stemming and relevance ranking pretty easily.
• airfishey 4y ago
  I'm curious what other people's thoughts are when comparing CA Agile Central (formerly known as Rally) to Jira. Which do you like more and why?
• wiremine 4y ago
  Jira is bloated. Full stop. It feels like there isn't a strong unified product vision for Jira. It's just trying to solve everything. It's all "just configurable." That likely is a selling point into Enterprises who need some level of flexibility. But for a lot of situations, people just want something that works well out of the box. I often wonder what the 37signals guys would do if they ever decided to tackle this problem. They don't always hit the mark, but I give them a lot of credit for self-curating and having a strong product vision for what they ship.
  • blowski 4y ago
    > I often wonder what the 37signals guys would do if they ever decided to tackle this problem. Wouldn't they build Basecamp?
    • wiremine 4y ago
      That's fair. I see Basecamp as general project management tool, not a tool geared towards software development.
  • awad 4y ago
    Isn't that what Basecamp from 37signals is meant to be? Perhaps I'm missing something as I've only used it a bit.
• etchalon 4y ago
  Once a JIRA shop, we moved everything to Asana years ago, after trying literally everything else. Our design team just could not get on board with JIRA. It was too much "work", in their words, to track their efforts. Asana seems to be a good balance between the depth of data developers want to track and the high-level task management every other team wants.
• FpUser 4y ago
  I fucking do not hate Jira. Cause I do not use it.
• epalm 4y ago
  Ok, it's slow, and navigation sucks, and lots of other things. Workflows are easy to get out of hand, but as long as you keep your workflows lean/tame/flexible, it's mostly "good enough". I suspect a sizable portion of the "Jira sucks" crowd are under the thumb of a maniacal administrator creating intense workflows. That said, which competitor has a visual workflow editor, to which I can add custom statuses/transitions, which are applied based on various conditions/validations? And custom screen/field configurations? And custom resolutions? And time tracking? And apply security/permission schemes across all these things? I get it, Jira sucks, I agree, but what's the go-to competitor?
  • jrockway 4y ago
    Linear is much nicer. Very quick issue entry and very nice looking sprint summary/status and roadmap tabs. It's everything I want. Most importantly, it's fast. I work with issues a lot, so a slow tool like jira just isn't acceptable. Jira exists to check every checkbox so you feel serious remorse if you pick anything else, but in terms of day-to-day productivity, it doesn't do too well. "Nice to look at" and "Fast" aren't checkbox items for managers. They're eventual problems for someone to solve when they notice engineers never touch the bug tracker. At my current org, my advice to use Linear was overruled in favor of jira, and I'm pretty sure I'm the only engineer that regularly touches jira. (I intentionally write "jira" in all lowercase because I like to call it JIRA, but jira's built-in text editor unconfigurably autocorrects "JIRA" to "Jira". That's the feature they spent engineering time on? Fuck them.)
    • epalm 4y ago
      I looked at Linear and it's very software-specific. The features page says it's "the new standard for modern software development". I do use Jira for software, but also for generic state tracking of non-software processes. E.g. some projects have no use for sprints, or code integration, or user stories.
      • enra 4y ago
        It's aimed for software teams, but there are also non-software teams using it. Sprints (cycles) are turned off by default, similarly many other features can be enabled or left off if you don't need them. Code integration is also not really visible unless you integrate and use it.
• hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  I feel like hating on Jira is the pastime that is now passed down from each generation of programmers to the next. I'm going to stick up for Jira. I certainly don't "love" Jira, though I do think they've made significant improvements with "new Jira" (I think they call them team-managed projects now). The problem I have with the incessant Jira bitching is that I rarely feel that bitchers have a true understanding for the extreme difficulty of the organization-wide problem Jira is trying to solve. It's always taken on from the position of "well, it didn't make my specific use case easy", but never with an appreciation with some of the complexity that Jira needs to solve for other users at your company, never mind other companies. Obviously some of the complaints (speed, stability) are very valid, but here's a question I think is just as valid: why don't you think some other company has come along and toppled the Jira crown? Certainly tons of them have tried, and while many have their supporters, they are almost equally likely to have their detractors. The fact is, building a generic project management and tracking tool is a really difficult, hard problem. In my old age as a programmer I feel like Jira is kind of like our form of government: "Jira is the worst project management tool, except for all the others".
  • asah 4y ago
    +1 to all this. Plus, Jira *scales* - all the cutesy drag-and-drop tools are good for 100 tickets/issues/etc and then fall over. JQL and bulk edit are just warming up at 1,000 tickets.
    • sidlls 4y ago
      You must have been using some alternate-universe Jira. The Jira installations I've had to suffer with fall over bulk editing a handful of issues. I've never seen a "bulk edit" like feature implemented as poorly as it is in Jira. It shouldn't take 15 seconds to complete a simple bulk edit of a handful (single-digits) of issues.
  • blowski 4y ago
    I totally disagree with you, but I upvoted you for making me think about it differently.
  • 4y ago
• lisper 4y ago
• amerine 4y ago
  One word: GUS. IYKYK
  • Jach 4y ago
    The worst part about it is that it's actually not the worst, proved if only by getting worse over time, but also that Jira can easily be configured by management to be worse...
• gboss 4y ago
  Jira drives me crazy. Why do I need to mark an epic as closed two different ways? Why is it really difficult to see what tickets were in a closed sprint? Why is it so slow or why does it sometimes get in infinite reload loop? Features randomly break like the ability to create tickets from confluence. My company is locked in and I doubt we would change, I just wish Atlassian focused on performance and consistency
• akamaka 4y ago
  I’m starting to wonder if one of the best features of Jira is that it directs all of the developer hatred away from management and toward the task-management software. I’ve worked on projects that used Jira very effectively, so I’m convinced that all of the complainers actually not fully aware of how bad their managers are.
  • alephxyz 4y ago
    JIRA configs are usually the visible manifestation of your organisation's processes. It's Conway's law applied to task management workflows.
• sshine 4y ago
  I don't remember Jira as being that bad. It was mostly the Scrummy culture that seemed like a bit of a waste of time. I wasn't a big fan of the wysiwyg editor. This seems to address mostly non-technical people. I would always go for "Markdown with preview" (HackMD split-screen, or GitHub issue tabs, or Discord apply-formatting-to-codes). I also don't like that it isn't an integrated part of a pull request system. GitHub/Gitea issues inter-linking with PRs in the same namespace is... golden. With the right habits, you can become an effective time-traveler.
• rsstack 4y ago
  I was one of the Jira admins two jobs ago (in additional to more normal responsibilities of product management & engineering). I finally got back to Jira at my current company and I texted an ex-colleague who was also an admin of the same Jira server (also part-time): "We're starting the migration to Jira. The next sprint will be entirely in Jira. Honestly, I kind of missed it." She replied: "That's the real test of a tool. Not 'would you recommend it to a friend?', but 'if you were to start a company, would you use it again?'" And - I would and did with Jira. If you know the tool well, and your company doesn't have stupid technical workflows and human processes, it's just great. Too many people suffered from using it wrong or suffered from using it with the wrong colleagues.
  • lolc 4y ago
    What's the secret of making it acceptably responsive? Asking for a friend.
    • wizofaus 4y ago
      From what I've read it's the cloud hosted version that's slow. Seems to be fine locally hosted, and probably if you host yourself with another cloud provider. Unless by "responsive" you mean works well on tiny screen devices...
      • plorkyeran 4y ago
        The self-hosted version is discontinued and you can't buy it any more if you aren't already a customer.
        • originalvichy 4y ago
          Incorrect. The cheapest license version is discontinued, ”server”. Data center license is not.
          • wizofaus 4y ago
• system16 4y ago
  Examples escape me at the moment, but there have honestly been so many times I've hit a wall trying to do - what seem to me like - basic things in JIRA; I couldn't comprehend how such a complex tool could not accommodate them. And the stuff that can be done is often so comically painful it's mind-blowing. Trying to do something as seemingly simple as create a useful saved search in JIRA is so painful I can't imagine its creation was not an act of sabotage.
• MediumFalse 4y ago
  Due to the slow loading, I ended up writing some simple Jira API wrapper scripts for submitting bug reports quicker in our systems. I don't see our organisation switching anytime soon.
• djhaskin987 4y ago
  > Also LOL to SourceTree. The git command line commands aren’t exactly rocket science. This one caught me off guard. I know of no other free GUI for git that's as easy to use or install.
• imdsm 4y ago
  <!-- Atlassian, please don't sue me. -->
• imdsm 4y ago
  "<!-- Atlassian, please don't sue me. -->"
• linsomniac 4y ago
  One real benefit of Jira is that almost everything else out there has an importer for Jira. We chose to move from FogBugz to Jira ~3 years ago, in part because we knew if it didn't end up working for us, it would be relatively easy to move to another platform. Many of the competitors don't fully understand this. They offer importers for Jira, but not an *exporter to* Jira. It's a pretty hard sell to even consider something else if I know I'm going to be stuck there. I wrote the tools for FogBugz to Jira migration and it took a stupid amount of time to do. FYI: FogBugz provided a Jira exporter but it was abandoned (much like FogBugz as a whole), and was totally unusable for the migration.
• chillingeffect 4y ago
  I also hate: The gray text. Cmon, we have a roomful of ppl and 1 monitor. Subtasks fuck up the whole layout. And appear above everything. Suggestions that only include the 1st N values from a list. You have to know what youre searching for. Can't preview fakeSprint until it's started. No easily-available view of each developer's workload.
• blowski 4y ago
  OK, so what don't I like about Jira? 1. It's extremely slow. 2. It's difficult to predict the effect of making any kind of change. 3. The permissions system is so convoluted, I can be the admin of a board, and yet not have permission to see a ticket on it. 4. It relegates the conversation to a second-class UI element, when this is the most important part of any project management system. 5. Trying to operate on a bunch of tickets all at the same time (e.g. move all tickets in this status into some other status) requires a lot of time. 6. Every Jira setup is so different, trying to compare a piece of work from one area of the organisation to a similar piece of work elsewhere is useless. 7. The UI is extremely buggy. I can add a mandatory field to a ticket, then when I try to use a shortcut to create a new ticket, it won't work because I can't fill out that mandatory field. 8. There are random side-effects when one person does something on one bit of the system, and VOILA everybody's workflow is broken, with no obvious warning that would happen.
  • devoutsalsa 4y ago
    I still can’t figure out how to search it
    • sophacles 4y ago
      This is a solved problem. The most efficient way to search Jira is to type random characters into the search bar until you find the ticket you were looking for on page 3 of the results.
    • exyi 4y ago
      I just wrote the search query to our PM, since I was unable to find anything myself... I don't understand why just couldn't use, IDK, a shared spreadsheet, even that would be more productive (from my perspective)
    • cuteboy19 4y ago
      Find the person in your organization who knows JIRA. After he doesn't manage to find it, open outlook and search for it in the notifications@jira folder, where you would most likely find it
  • 4y ago
• tdgs 4y ago
  Wait until you use notion. I’ve been forced to use it for the last year, and I miss jira. I never thought I’d say this, but I really do miss it.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• geocrasher 4y ago
  The main problem with Jira is that it echoes the people who manage it almost perfectly. Crappy Management = Jira Hate, but it's really Manager Hate. I figured this out at my last job. Then I left.
• pyrolistical 4y ago
  Jira is practically called out in the phoenix project. Their solution? 1. Don’t use it 2. Do a manual process 3. Get buy in and deliver actual value 4. Run into scalability issues 5. Now automate which could be Jira but now you know what value your process is achieving 6. Don’t let Jira be the end in itself. Focus on the value of the process and tune that https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/17255186-the-phoenix-project https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/17255186-the-phoenix-...
• greenthrow 4y ago
  Jira is as good or bad as you configure it to be. It's a tool. We long ago learned how to use JavaScript effectively despite its numerous flaws. If you're at an organization where you have to use Jira, surely you can find a way to make it work. That said, it's certainly not the Right Answer for everyone. But unilaterally hating on it is just kinda childish.
  • snowstormsun 4y ago
    You cannot really configure Jira so that the interface is free of lags and loads faster, though. Or that it does not make tons of network requests in the background. It's a tool, but there are bad also tools.
• gjvc 4y ago
  Maybe the web is/was shit for this kind of application which has caused it to become the beast it is.
• ngvrnd 4y ago
  Ooh ooh! Now do git.
• 29athrowaway 4y ago
  I fucking hate JIRA because it encourages people to create and abandon tickets for years, creating an alternate dimension of irrelevant trash that gets in the way of doing things. If your team has an append-only doctrine to information, like most tech debt mills in the industry have, JIRA will become an extension of that ever increasing pile of unmaintained, disgusting, revolting monolith of excrement that captures every activity in software development. Nothing can be done about the gigantic monolith of soul crushing chaos therefore we need to embrace it, at the expense of our sanity. Nothing can be done about the hopeless hoarding of irrelevant, duplicate tickets that distract people from work. JIRA makes it very easy to create new tickets, and much harder to close them. So naturally it becomes a virtual sewer. JIRA is about being able to present a large amount of information to easily impressionable people so that so some people can justify their job.
• dvtrn 4y ago
  I wanted to make a site very similar to this but for Jenkins. Even bought a domain for it. And never built the thing. Some of these made me chuckle.
• tormeh 4y ago
  I suspect issue tracking software is one of those domains where if a piece of code hangs around for long enough it will become a mess due to incentives. Which begs the question: What are y'all's opinion on the open source competitors? Redmine, OpenProject, Apache Bloodhound, and whatever else exists?
• smileybarry 4y ago
  I used to like JIRA, back when it was only issues/tickets. It was essentially a nice, organized database for humans that you could sift through with precise filters & searches. Bug applies here, workflow describes where handling it is in the pipeline, issue types meant you could filter by "what is this", etc. I loved using "basic" JIRA, mentioning issue IDs in places to clearly reference a web of "why this bit of code is the way it is", so someone digging into source code can self-answer stuff like "why not do X". (e.g.: because it caused a bug for Y) Now there's stories, and boards, and sprints, and agile, and the worst part is that they all interact like crap. Why do "tasks" and "stories" exist? Why not the old: New Feature, Bug, Improvement? At least with those you could always see at a glance what that issue is.
• throwaway787544 4y ago
  I don't. I use it every day and rarely ever have an issue. It's well integrated with Confluence. There's even some decent CLI tools now (still young but have promise) that mean we could automate away the interface. All the reviews I see on that site seem to be upset that it might require training, or that their project's admins have made it a nightmare. It's not a nightmare out of the box.
• Nextgrid 4y ago
  What I really hate is not Jira itself, it's the company behind it and its engineering practices. Their mediocrity goes beyond Jira. They've had server-side-rendered features that while slow, contained the slowness to the backend and bundled it into one single slow request - once you waited for that, you had a fully-working page in your browser. Since it was all on the backend, your browser remained responsive while waiting. Nowadays however there's no longer a single operation to wait for - they've split their pile of shit and offloaded it to your browser. You have to wait for the backend which is slow, but then you also have to wait for megabytes of JS to load & execute in your browser, all while the page moves around and your CPU is pegged at 100%. And God help you if you click on something by accident, as "undoing" that means waiting for another load. To add insult to injury, everything is clickable and triggers some actions, even elements that represent content and that you wouldn't normally expect to be clickable (nor would want to - let's say you wanted to copy the text). Recently they've added another annoyance - in Bitbucket they've done some changes with regards to diff rendering and obviously have to let you know. They do so via a persistent floating popover in the bottom-left of the screen that you have to manually dismiss and the dismissal status seems to be contained to the browser - if you switch browsers or use private mode you have to deal with it continuously. My experience with Atlassian products has actually deteriorated despite CPU speeds, browser performance & network connections improving. I used to have a mostly positive opinion of the company 5 years ago but that's no longer the case.
  • wronglyprepaid 4y ago
    I think calling Atlassian mediocre is a bit generous. Confluence is a steaming pile of burn garbage that still can't get basic thing's like SVG working[1]. Atlassian can't give a darn, they have their captive market and they are just riding the gravy train now. The last good thing they did seems to be to buy trello, but they will likely turn it into garbage if the rest of their portfolio is any indication of what to expect. [1]: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-1762 https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-1762
    • CRConrad 4y ago
      > The last good thing they did seems to be to buy trello, but they will likely turn it into garbage if the rest of their portfolio is any indication of what to expect. Either that (turn it into a "JIRA Light", with just a little less of the annoyances?) or just kill it off altogether -- either way, it eliminates the competition from what Trello used to be. Which was of course precisely why they bought it, so them doing that was actually not at all a good thing.
• t43562 4y ago
  It appeals to companies that think they only have to pay for one tool. It's awful for agile work but your boss sees the "agile" tickbox and says "fine"
• kerblang 4y ago
  In my experience, Jira is the dog that begins to resemble its owner. If you are working in a toxic, dysfunctional organization, Jira will reflect that: - Giant forms with dozens upon dozens of nonsensical fields (preferably with abbreviations as names, like "IFE App.") half of which are required so you just stuff random words in them to make it shut up - Thousands of tickets that would probably take 30+ software devs 100+ years to implement - Can't find your project because your project's name is nonsense (also preferably with abbreviations) - Task descriptions have hundreds of words of nonsensical boilerplate but don't actually say anything at all - 50 different ways each to say "Finished", "Started" or "Abandoned" - Workflow state transitions reminiscient of the outdoor maze in The Shining (crazy man with axe optional)
  • alephxyz 4y ago
    One I found particularly annoying was having too many hierarchical levels for taks. Something like : Client, Contract, Deliverable, Product, Release, Change Request, Requirement, Task, Sub-tasks
  • audunw 4y ago
    > - Thousands of tickets that would probably take 30+ software devs 100+ years to implement I feel like the company I'm working for has a reasonable attitude towards Jira, and they recently just batch closed all tickets that were older than some date in many projects. So you'd have to actively re-open tickets you had created to keep them alive, if needed. Great decision IMO. It's an interesting exercise to be forced to deal with old tickets you've created. It gets you thinking.. "well, this thing should probably be done at some point, but then if it's actually important we'll probably think of it again and can re-create the ticket then". Might give you experience that encourages you to be careful when creating new tickets too.
    • EnderWT 4y ago
      We've automated this in our propriety system. After an amount of time with no activity, change requests expire and someone can resubmit if they're still valid, otherwise they close after a number of days. They also get a notification in advance in case they want to investigate validity before expiration. Has worked well for us since our software is decades old and the number of change requests are substantial.
• dboreham 4y ago
  I've probably said this before here but I just don't see what was wrong with Bugzilla. We spent years getting it honed to suit a good bug lifecycle model. Everything since has been fubar one way or another.
• apocalyptic0n3 4y ago
  Jira isn't perfect, but it fit our agency's needs well enough and the short comings haven't been bad enough to cause us to rethink it. The truth is that there's very few project management tools out there that offer the flexibility to run individual projects the way an individual team wants to. When you're an agency with hundreds of projects in the system, that's invaluable. I researched 2-3 dozen competitors to find a better solution and there just wasn't. Other than maybe Redmine and its derivatives, which the team basically dismissed for being too outdated. ETA: I should clarify that I'm using Jira Cloud and we don't have many issues with speed (at least today, anyway. Maybe in a few years, who knows)
• SilverBirch 4y ago
  Shout out to the programme manager at my old company. His attitude was "Use jira in the way that works for you". He could set up and modify workflows for me, he had good useful advice, and in total I probably spent 20 minutes a week dealing with jira. Which as a manager of a decent sized team I think is fairly good. As one of the comments on that site said "I'd rather use trello" I disagree, it was much better for having multiple views on things and by standardising across the company it was much easier to just get an informal view on what other teams were doing. Most of the problems with jira are the people using it.
• newobj 4y ago
  So say we all
• mberning 4y ago
  These people are pampered brats. Try being forced to document all your time and projects in Rally or Version1. You will beg to get Jira back. Software “engineers” are such divas. “I don’t play other people’s song.” As if they are some kind of celebrity.
• vjust 4y ago
  Its like you can't be fired for buying Microsoft (as an IT purchase decision). You can't be fired for buying JIRA. JIRA makes everything, the most broken or dodgy processes look respectable. It keeps Managers and scrum masters busy. They have a toy to play with, and why not?, why should only devs have toys. I'm not saying I hate JIRA, or that it doesn't work. Its just that sometimes the tail wags the dog.
• AtNightWeCode 4y ago
  Not going to read this rant because of time. But let me guess. Jira is a giant time waster. My main problem with Jira though is that it takes a lot of effort to configure it in good way. Jira is a piece of software that comes with plain horrible defaults.
• wly_cdgr 4y ago
  I think Jira development is secretly supported by Microsoft to make sure there's always at least one enterprise software product that developers hate more than Windows
• simonbarker87 4y ago
  I’ve used it at three companies and thought it was fine. Maybe my tastes aren’t refined enough or something but I thought it was fine. Confluence is terrible but that’s a different product.
  • BitwiseFool 4y ago
    For me, the worst part is how the search feature naturally defaults to searching over the entire organization and there is no setting to preserve space preference. I'm sure a product manager or sales person pitched this as a wonderful thing, but in a massive organization I really only want to search within a small number of spaces, over and over again. I rarely, if ever, want to access the entire company's confluence but that's what the search bar does.
• andreime 4y ago
  You should try VersionOne :) That tool made me appreciate JIRA.
• mixedbit 4y ago
  Issue tracking is difficult in general. Any piece of software can be improved or extended in an infinite number of ways. Ideas for improvements are often too eagerly turned into issues, which looks like an easiest way to quickly deal with an idea, but soon issues management becomes an overwhelming activity.
• khalladay 4y ago
  Where I work got rid of Jira and switched to some other, ostensibly better(?) competing product. I never had strong opinions about Jira before the switch, but now, after nearly 2 years of a Jira free existence... I miss Jira dearly. The grass is always greener. Does Jira suck? sure maybe, but my personal experience suggests that everything else sucks equally as bad if not worse, and I know where all the buttons are in Jira.
• arnvald 4y ago
  I've used Jira in my last 3 jobs. I tried to like it, I tried to tolerate it, now I just try to spend as little time using it as possible. I'm an engineer, I'm a problem solver. I want to add a task, move task to "doing" and then "done" and that's it. But Jira is not created for me. Jira is created for SAFe expert who wants to create workflow so complex nobody understands it. Jira is created for Scrum master who wants to create 25 reports to show their boss how beautifully our burndown looks sprint after sprint. Yes, Jira doesn't force anyone to do this stuff, but it enables it, because Jira is created for process managers, for people who just report things. But that's not me. Jira is not for me and the best I can do it to use it as little as possible.
• derelicto 4y ago
  Not affiliated but linear.app looking good
• ch_123 4y ago
  Jira is a product which serves two masters - one are development teams which use it to track bugs, tickets, projects, etc. The other one are middle management types who use it for project tracking, reporting to upper management, tracking metrics of different teams (no matter how dubious) etc. The people who decide which software gets adopted internally generally care about the latter, and thus Jira is selected, and thus Jira grows to their needs - where complexity is often a bonus, and poor day to day performance a minimal concern.
• oneplane 4y ago
  Ironically, most of the stuff seems to be about Confluence. And almost all of the commentary is about bad company workflows and bad company processes and not really about the product itself at all.
• kerbs 4y ago
  I can't take credit for this, but I also don't recall where I heard/read it from: "Most teams would be better off using a shared spreadsheet for task management than they would using Jira" Rings true to me to this day.
• therufa 4y ago
  part of the hatred has to come from the fact that it's a tool used for hidden micromanagement. Whenever I experienced Jira being introduced into the workflow, human connection vanished, work became laboring and many times the better devs left the team due to lack of autonomy. Who remained were the people who didn't mind to just work and never question, like factory workers of the 1900's. I don't mind using Jira as a verbose platform which aims to map project state and helps communication BETWEEN all participants, but this is rarely the case, especially with all those pseudo-agile practices that are part of mainstream software development. Another part of the hatred may come from the fact that it's an overcomplicated tool for a moderately simple task. This complexity is standing in the way most of the time. I just want a simple board for a simple project with simple issues/user stories/whatevers and update their state which gets reflected on the board. For additional features i want to install/write a plugin and that's it. If I need a manual for software in 2022 it's either trash or something far from mainstream (in which case complexity and/or lack of ux might be acceptable).
• more_corn 4y ago
  The worst thing about jira is it leaves the door open for confluence which is the actual worst thing.
• hancholo 4y ago
  Thankfully my company built its own internal tool similar to Jira. Unfortunately this is not the case for other companies or smaller companies since it can be cost-prohibitive.
• Tehchops 4y ago
  Jira is bad, but the worst part about it is that it makes it non-trivially more likely you'll also be using Confluence, which is an absolute blight upon the software landscape.
• kringo 4y ago
  JIRA is the definition of building everything for everybody and let them customize it, it's got complex and to a point highly productive engineers don't want it anymore, it's a OVERKILL!
• 7357 4y ago
  I fucking hate software.
• scotty79 4y ago
  Jira should just start configured out of the box to look and work like Trello.
  • yamadapc 4y ago
    This is the experience team-managed projects should have out of the box in Cloud if using kanban. You create a kanban team-managed project and it'll pretty much be a Trello board. If you want sprints or a backlog or reports you can go into the project features page and flip a switch.
• jarek83 4y ago
  Part of our company started using Click-up. If JIRA is really bad, Click-up is levels worse than it. I hate JIRA too, but maybe there is no a better thing out there?
• s0uthPaw88 4y ago
  Jira works well for my organization. I think the simplicity of our setup is the key. We have just 4 issue statuses: Not Started, In Progress, QA, Done… also no restrictions on state transitions. Any status can move to any other status. Each team gets their own project so that they can easily manage their own issue backlog. That’s pretty much it. My team also uses a plug-in for async planning poker which is useful.
• gladed 4y ago
  Jira does for software engineering what software engineering does for everything else.
• lazyant 4y ago
  Meh Jira is OK and people who hate Jira I feel like they really hate any process. I've used other tools and they are mostly the same.
  • dijit 4y ago
    I enjoyed working with RT, though someone had gone to the effort of making it easy to use and integrated nicely with IRC (in much the same way we have jira issues in Slack I guess). In comparison I feel like Jira hides stuff from me, that the UI is excessively slow, that it's easy to get wrong and add oodles of mandatory fields..
• Graffur 4y ago
  Wait until you try Microsoft DevOps boards
• brailsafe 4y ago
  I'm fine with Jira now. As long as I don't have to use it that much. I agree about conversation being a second class citizen. I wish I could get integration with my mac notification system more easily. But the positive is that I can do a screen recording and drag and drop that video straight into a comment which is cool
• hansoolo 4y ago
  I don't really get the hate to be honest. Maybe it's just me, but our DevOps team seems to have squeezed the best out of Jira. They organized the workflow very well, the Bitbucket Integration is seemless and I can easily get to the builds of my current issue and see what happens there. The only gripe I have about Atlassian suite is confluence. It's a mess. I think it really depends on how Jira and the overall workflow is taken care of. For our part, it has been a pretty good experience and the DevOps team used the APIs pretty well and wrote their own tools. To be honest, I don't have used many other tools, but it seems like our company has made a good choice in configuring the whole system "just right".
• anonytrary 4y ago
  Jira was supposed to help us do the work, not become the work. We have at least three people employed who's sole responsibility is to pester people about ticket status, apply bulk changes in Jira, define conventions, and ultimately make life harder for individual teams who wanna follow their own processes. As an EM, my higher-ups would rather have me ensuring ticket status is perfect to the T instead of pairing with and assisting my engineers. I kid you not, we have directors of engineering who spend half their working day making bump/nudge comments on tickets.
• avignome 4y ago
  I hate BitBucket more!
• baal80spam 4y ago
  Is there a way (setting?) to completely disable keyboard shortcuts (hotkeys) on Jira sites?
• mm007emko 4y ago
  After spending some time with Trac, Redmine and IBM ClearCase, I have to say that Jira and MS AzureDevOps are not THAT tragic. However it's a tool targeted at managers, not us, developers. At my previous company one of the KPIs was a number of closed Jira issues. Total BS, needless to say.
• janaagaard 4y ago
  I agree that Jira isn't wonderful, but I can't think of any of any task management system that I have used, that I would recommend. Are GitHub Issues the answer? I have only tried those for small open source projects and not big enterprise projects.
• shadowtree 4y ago
  The people hating on JIRA never worked in a shop without it. If you're old enough to remember before Atlassian came along - just how was it better? Spreadsheets? Trax? You don't want structured workflow? Don't work in a company with more than 5 people. "I am an accountant and hate ERP" .. tough shit, for real.
  • 01100011 4y ago
    For the first 20 years of my career I worked with organizations that used Gantt charts and MS project combined with a dedicated project manager to keep things in sync with actual progress. It was minimally invasive to engineers and didn't require them to do the soul-sucking JIRA dance. It also generally delivered dozens of projects on time or with reasonable delays and surprises. Even when working on 'buckets of tasks/bugs' where Gantt charts don't make sense, a locally customized version of Bugzilla or other bug tracking software(i.e. Phabricator or whatever) worked very well. There is a generation of engineers that has only known Agile, 2 week sprints, and shitty software to manage it. After having used Jira at two companies for the last 4 years I can say it is one of the worst pieces of software I have ever been forced to use and lowers productivity from multiple angles.
• bitwize 4y ago
  Just be glad you don't have to use VersionOne. Anyone who's coped with VersionOne will nope back to Jira in a hot second.
• Tade0 4y ago
  My Jira experience improved a lot when I wrote a tool that parses and serves the content of HTTP Archive files - not having to wait for all those panels, menus etc. was a huge boon, even if this view was necessarily read-only. Also I'm pretty sure Jira saved my friend's marriage because he used the free version to coordinate finishing up their house. Lastly while JQL has limited capabilities, it's better than having a bunch of API endpoints. That being said it still baffles me how badly some UI elements are done there. Especially the menus would benefit greatly from some caching or preloading.
• Minor49er 4y ago
  The problems with Jira can be extended to the rest of Atlassian and all of their offerings. Their company culture is very much one of "we're right, no matter how many people bring up the same issues." Things like: - Shoving political messaging into git terminal messages - Renaming "blame" to something else without notifying the userbase ("annotate"? It's been a while) because, despite "blame" being a git term, its usage hurt someone's feelings (yes, seriously, even though no proof or elaboration has ever been provided) - Not fixing a bug for 6+ years where, if someone's typing a comment and accidentally hit the escape key, the entire post gets deleted with no option to recover it (I'm not sure if this ever actually was resolved) That said, for a while, Jira had a lot of good things going for it. But by now, enough competitors have popped up with similar offerings that are easier to use without all of the unnecessary self-importance buried within it. For a Jira alternative specifically, I've been using Linear.app for the last 8 months and enjoying it overall
  • eterm 4y ago
    Annotate was the SVN term, have you considered it might just pre-date git?
    • Minor49er 4y ago
      That's interesting. This change certainly came post-SVN. I don't recall that ever being used as an explanation, though. Still, quite a silly thing to do based on the presumption that a benign word hurt a hypothetical person's feelings
      • layer8 4y ago
        Git actually also has annotate: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-annotate https://git-scm.com/docs/git-annotate
        • Minor49er 4y ago
          That's not the same as blame, though, which is the functionality that was renamed in Atlassian's products
• nlh 4y ago
  I promise I am not a shill: Our team is on the verge of switching 100% to ClickUp. Are we crazy? Nobody really loves Jira, and we've gotten our Product, Design, Sales, and Customer Success teams using ClickUp and everyone is really happy so far (especially with the speeeeeeeeeeed. OMG coming from Jira it's a breath of fresh air). We are chasing the dragoon of having a single tool and everything in one place. So far the eng team seems amenable to give it a shot (although we're going to transition slowly). Are we crazy?
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• zaphar 4y ago
  Jira's web interface I can live with. I've internalized the workaround for the UI bugs and I've learned to live with the slowness. Sure it reflects all the worst aspects of your organizations structure and process but that's not really it's fault. What is it's fault is their REST API. In theory it's a well architected API. Follows REST principles. You can tell they read the whitepaper. But you have to jump through a ton of hoops to get any data beyond surface details. Example: Want to find what epic a User Story is part of? It's a custom field. Which one? depends on how your instance has evolved over time. You'll have to scan through all the fields to find the field id. This is what happens when an API isn't designed to fulfill a particular need but instead is meant to be infinitely customizable. Ergonomic APIs are impossible.
• irusensei 4y ago
  Good. I’d also like one of these but with Citrix.
• avh02 4y ago
  I tried giving atlassian some feedback recently when they asked for it (via email). Unfortunately the very end of their survey had some fancy widget to upload a recording (which was absolutely unnecessary). The widget didn't load, and because of that the form didn't allow a submission - so I didn't bother figuring out how to give them my feedback, even after i had done a 3 page survey. I hope it was a widespread issue.
• teilo 4y ago
  This is not a rant about Jira. This is a rant about doing Agile in the enterprise. I can rant about Jira, but it's about the horrible UI. It's buggy. The settings system is a mess. It's not intuitive. Even clever people need hand holding to figure out what's going on. Things randomly break for no apparent reason.
• lizardactivist 4y ago
  Edgy.
• bradwood 4y ago
  Gitlab Enterprise. It's _far_ from perfect, but Gitlab Issues is a damn sight better than JIRA IMHO...
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• originalvichy 4y ago
  I read some of those rants and almost 50% of them were not rants but people ignorant of features and how they work getting angry. I’m not saying they deserve to be angry, but if a passionate rant can be dismissed by a ”you’re holding it wrong” it isn’t really a rant. There are tons of real issues like ages old bugs or weird design decisions years ago that make something that feels very sane feel impossible to deliver. All in all my point is that most of these rants are against knowledge of features/design and misuse by colleagues.
• EastSmith 4y ago
  I use Jira for 10, 20 minutes a day every day, and it almost always works just fine. Not spectacular or anything, but just fine.
• hkgjjgjfjfjfjf 4y ago
• phendrenad2 4y ago
  Not using Jira is a red flag for me, and I won't work for any company that doesn't use Jira. The reason is, Jira is so standard at this point, if a team uses a non-Jira product, they must have an overly powerful CTO or team lead who rules with an iron fist. Sure, it sucks, but working under such conditions is worse.
  • kstrauser 4y ago
    That’s insane to me. Atlassian pushes very hard for everyone to use the cloud-hosted version, as the on-prem version is hella expensive. You know, that SaaS app that was recently down for over 2 weeks for some customers.[0] I don’t know many companies that would be OK with having no access to their ticket tracker for an indeterminate length of time. Do you have a customer, or worse, regulatory deadline coming up, and all your planning was done in the now-offline tool? Sucks to be you! [0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/atlassian-estimates-cloud-outage-could-take-another-two-weeks-to-fix/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/atlassian-estimates-cloud-outa...
    • not_really 4y ago
      Was any data actually permanently lost? Also looks like they've taken steps to prevent this from happening again. https://www.zdnet.com/article/atlassian-implements-soft-delete-policy-and-improves-backups-to-avoid-another-outage/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/atlassian-implements-soft-dele...
    • phendrenad2 4y ago
      The downtime only affected a small percentage of accounts, and unless this happens again, this is likely a freak occurrence, and just as likely to happen to any other random cloud service. As for mission-critical data in Jira, it's easier to replicate that to salesforce or something (where it belongs) than switch off of Jira entirely.
• balls187 4y ago
  Came to the comments hoping to find some solid Jira alternatives "the community" recommends. Sadly not the case. Instead this is my take-away: * Jira sucks big time, and people hate it. * There are no other tools that do what jira does, that doesn't also suck. * After trying Jira alternatives that suck worse, folks move away from the Jira sucks camp to no-longer minding using Jira.
  • bamboozled 4y ago
    People here aren't going to bother talking about alternatives because there are thousands, it's just if you work at a company has invested years in trying to figure out JIRA, no one is going to admit it sucks and just let you use something simpler. I've seen many brave soul suggest something different and it didn't end well.
    • balls187 4y ago
      I've seen several comments about alternatives, and many more replies that say they suck worse than Jira.
      • bamboozled 4y ago
        1. Have a competent trustworthy project manager work with product to come up with a roadmap, you then document the roadmap in a simple easy to read document which is hierarchical, and contains a list of initiatives to fit the roadmap. Under each initiative you can set a status and a target date and importantly, a team or individuals name who is in-charge of the roadmap. Project managers keep this document up to date. 2. Next, don't deploy JIRA here, just make sure everyone, and I mean everyone understands the roadmap and how they fit into it. 3. Work with those in-charge (who actually do the work) can choose their issue tracker of choice, or whatever method they like and the product management team ensures and trusts those they work with will have made the correct decision here. 4. Allow the dev teams to happily work in something simple like GH issues and be productive. When the product team wants updates, humans get together and talk about each initiative and how it's going. Simple. You might ask about tracking cOmPlEx iNtErDePeNdEnCiEs!!! that killer feature JIRA is about solving...I think that can be solved easily by ensuring managers have situational awareness (they should anyway) and everyone having the same issue tracker. For example GH issues so issues can be easily referenced.
• ggm 4y ago
  Love the idea, hate the implementation. How can it be proper to show me the outcome of applying JQL to a db query but refuse to show me the JQL because of an ownership/acl problem. Want automation? Chain tasks but it has no "this" or "self" so that last thing you made? Have fun reconnecting to it. So many options but no way to flatten them and define a template with specific ones: some are baked in and some can't be easily specified as important to float to top. Still no clean way to uplift org to confluence with native support
• cosmiccatnap 4y ago
  Yea yea yea...but you still use it because the alternatives while better performing and even more secure...are not as feature rich or as well known. I feel like this thread comes up in one way or another every few months but in a place where people almost have a hellbent desire to reinvent wheels nobody has reinvented this one in say...go or rails or whatever. Why? Because for all of the hate jura actually does what it does pretty well when it's working and for most people and most businesses that aren't your homelab it works just fine provided you pay someone to maintain and administer it.
• antux 4y ago
  Not surprised that many are having a bad user experience with Jira. The interface design and usability is atrocious because it's a tool designed by developers. Developers lack the UX training and thinking that's needed to make the tool intuitive and easy to use.
• monkeybutton 4y ago
  All the confluence hate speaks to my soul. It's where ideas go to die. If you want to start a successful internal project and someone tells you to start documenting your ideas there, you might as well just move on to something else. Whatever you were going to do is already dead. It's just so ignorable. Nobody gives a shit about a confluence doc. Write up your thoughts and send it as an email to your boss, your peers, whoever. That demands a response and you'll get one, for good or ill! Getting outright rejected is still better than the sad withering away that is putting it into confluence. Anyways, what's the most common signal that people hate confluence? When they use it as a link repository to docs stored elsewhere.
• kstrauser 4y ago
  I don’t hate Jira. I strongly dislike working with people who love it. From https://honeypot.net/post/jira-is-a-code-smell/ https://honeypot.net/post/jira-is-a-code-smell/ : > A useful task manager will be somewhat opinionated. It will almost, but not quite, do what everyone wants, and will annoy everyone equally with the few things they think it does wrong. A tar pit of a task manager will claim to be everything to everyone after customization, meaning that a few people will think it's heavenly and everyone else will despise it with the heat of a thousand suns.
• oth001 4y ago
  Where is dark mode???
• glenngillen 4y ago
  We’re in the midsts of a move to JIRA, and my own previous experiences with it are >10 years old at this point so I assume it to be a different experience and I’m willing to give it a shot. I made a glib JIRA hate comment to a very experienced friend and he retorted with this quip which I found amusing and suspect is probably very accurate: “There’s only two types of people that hate JIRA: 1) those that haven’t tried any of the alternatives or 2) those that didn’t have a dedicated team to configure and maintain JIRA for them”
• rafaelvasco 4y ago
  Problem, is mostly with bad PMs, POs, Scrum masters and all the other potato heads, not Jira itself.
• not2b 4y ago
  It depends on how it is used. As a bug tracker it is perfectly adequate, and I prefer having all of the information connected to a given issue in one place. It took us some time to get the flows right, but what we have now seems to work well enough. It is certainly better than the crap system we had before we adopted Jira, though that isn't saying much. Edit: weird that an honest description of personal experience with Jira was downvoted to zero.
• subtledigital 4y ago
  Ex project manager (few years Jira experience with local and overseas teams). I believe a lot of the hate comes from the input rather than the software; aka what others are putting in. If you've got a really bad PM/BA your experience with the platform is going to be negative. As far as everything else what are the alternatives? Most other platforms are horrible or lacking features.
  • wronglyprepaid 4y ago
    Lacking features is not always a bad thing. I am much happier with github issues than Jira. And a good PM is to Jira as lipstick is to a pig. It might give the pig redder lips, but that won't make anyone want to kiss it. Even with the best PM Jira still had severe usability issues and bugs that atlassian shows no interest in fixing.
• sirmarksalot 4y ago
  To everyone asking "what else works better," I remember using Product Studio at Microsoft, which was a thin client over an SQL database. It had some flexibility problems, but it was so, so fast. It's the only ticket management system I've ever used that didn't feel like it was getting in the way. Unfortunately, about 10 years ago Microsoft chose to modernize/dogfood on Team Foundation Server, which was just awful, probably worse than JIRA. I have no idea what they're using nowadays. I wonder if the performance we got out of Product Studio had more to do with having a locally hosted instance, vs. running in the cloud, and I wonder if teams that host their own JIRA/Confluence/Bitbucket servers have a better experience. I do find that one of the major gripes people have with planning tools is that they break flow, and I wonder how much of that comes just from the amount of stamina required to maintain focus while waiting for all the spinners.
• formerkrogemp 4y ago
  Just a friendly reminder that all Australian software companies are required to install backdoors at any time at the behest of law enforcement.
• iLemming 4y ago
  I used to hate Jira with all the fervor and more. And then one day I discovered go-jira. Jira command line client written in Golang (hence the name). I wrote a few tiny emacs-lisp wrappers: to read the current backlog; to find a ticket; to list all the tickets assigned to me, etc. And that was all great. I realized - I hated Jira's UI, but its API is quite all right. At some point, our infrastructure engineers changed something that made it difficult to login to Jira without the web interface (I don't remember what that was exactly - SSO or something...), and I wrote a Puppeteer script that would login to Jira [in a headless browser] and grab the token and use it to authenticate with go-jira. I thought about cleaning up my elisp experimentation and making a proper Emacs package. Sadly, a few month later COVID hit the US and a bunch of us got laid off. At my new job, we don't use Jira, and I never made the package. And I don't miss Jira. And I don't hate it anymore (I think). But yeah, fuck Jira all the same.
  • orzig 4y ago
    A true hacker! Though not sure what to think about the security of that headless browser setup
    • iLemming 4y ago
      I made sure that the credentials are stored in GPG encrypted file and could only be decrypted on my machine. github.com/agzam/jira-okta-puppet/blob/master/src/jira_auth/auth.cljs Basically, it was no different if I'd have to login manually, then open browser's dev-tools, and copy&paste the token. Arguably, my automated approach made it slightly more secure, since there's no clipboard involved. It was stupid, I should've figured out the proper way of authenticating, but something was missing, I either needed to ask admin to give me OAuth access, or some other bullcrap. Well, you know how the saying goes, right? "It ain't stupid if it works".
  • arminiusreturns 4y ago
    Org-jira is in melpa and works fine with the new Atlassian token format. So much better and there are a few riders you can add for extra features.
• coldtea 4y ago
  There are two kinds of programmers: those who hate Jira, and those with Stockholm syndrome.
• _8j50 4y ago
  This site is courtesy of folks that never used bmc remedy or ivanti heat. I was similarly shocked when people bitched about confluence. First, do you have a better alternative? Second, do you undrstand the nightmare before jira and confluence?
• gorgoiler 4y ago
  Ticket := (title, description, time, tags, links, *Comment) Comment := (name, time, text) …and everything else is culture or auxiliary tooling. It’s a schema as old as Web 2.0 and it works because most people just want to talk to each other and search for stuff they think or know is there. 100% of the time I just want to announce either what I want to do, or comment on something that’s in progress. The communication and progress tracking are the most important things for keeping me and my team aligned. What does Jira get wrong? Bureaucracy. Modern day online triplicate form filling disguised as “agile” is still pen pushing. Pro-forma for bugs is friction — I should be able to file a bug without having to think about how to categorise it. Have another tool / view for nagging me about that, not the create-bug workflow. Epics / stories / tasks / sprints / bugs: what if I make a task when I wanted a bug? What if made a spike that’s really a task? Why does this matter so much at the top level of the “task” entity — it should just be a tag on a task and nothing more fundamental than that. Let me modify the structure of my task tree myself. Clutter, of course. Jira has 15 fields of stuff per issue that could just all be tags once we’ve spent the first week shaking out what kind of patterns are appearing in our own team’s workflow. Projects: why is it a three stage process to move an issue between projects, and why should the issue id change when it moves? What if a piece of work is small but spans two projects? Tagging not taxonomy please. Jira feels like it was designed for contributors and teams with zero discipline. Tech teams with any kind of serious hiring bar and leadership structure should have zero problem with trusting their staff with being succinct and meaningful with communication, including with how they track tasks. If you need Jira to enforce this, then I feel sorry for you as I pass you by to join a different team who know how to and want to work together without form filling.
• gcanyon 4y ago
  A friend once said, "You can't software your way out of an organizational problem." The complaints on the site generally criticize Jira from a technical standpoint, but it's important to realize that every "technical" shortcoming is based on a perceived organizational need: you never need the feature just for the feature itself. So yeah, Jira is far from my favorite software -- it's bloated, slow, and embodies many product choices that make no sense to me -- but it's also possible to hate it because it doesn't support <obscure feature X> in exactly the way your organization has been doing it since you were working with spreadsheets, and that's not Jira's fault.
• uda 4y ago
  1. I hate Jira, but that isn't the main issue 2. Atlassian has a terrible way of managing feature requests priorities, not unique to them, but they definitely have an impact on many developers, which is why they (deserve and) get the huge shaming 3. I managed to move my company from Bitbucket to GitLab, for many reasons, but the main reason for me was that I simply couldn't manage the settings using their APIs, they have a very weird concept of APIs 4. They send people to fill in tickets and on Uservoice, but rarely do they actually listen to reasonable requests (tickets I still get notifications: Bitbucket user public SSH keys and Archiving projects in Bitbucket) 5. So the issue is not this or that product, it is that Atlassian doesn't have the real end users in mind, just the paying users, the end users can suffer, but not many people will resign over a product used at their company, so nobody really fights the company over it, and thus Atlassian keeps getting paid for terrible products that get new terrible interfaces from time to time Edit: line spacing
• citizenpaul 4y ago
  I'm kinda interested in the underlining element from the site. Is that some sort of sentiment analysis tool or is it just a manual "highlight" of the loud parts?
• RhysU 4y ago
  JIRA might be OK if the organization on the receiving end of the JIRA queue is OK. JIRA can be no better than that organization.
• ian_lotinsky 4y ago
  https://shortcut.com/ https://shortcut.com/ is your savior. Try it.
• iandanforth 4y ago
  Recall the root cause here. The buyer is not the user. This isn't just true for Jira but the vast majority of enterprise software. Enterprise software is bad, not just Jira, or Confluence or whatever Atlassian product you hate most. If you are working on enterprise software it's probably bad. Even if your sales and stock are doing well, your software is still probably very frustrating to end users because they have no say in how it's made. The only users who do are admin, governance, legal, or other non-productive user. Their voices get heard and they tell the Director/VP/CTO they are happy and then the software gets renewed and seats expanded. Nowhere in there is the end user who is beating their head against a wall consulted. Enterprise software is bad and it's worst for people who make software because we know it could be good.
• oldjavacoder 4y ago
  I watched Margin Call. The huddling that goes on between the higher ups and the peons when the chips are down is what JIRA does for companies every day. If the firm in that movie had been using JIRA (and it it were real life and not a movie); I believe they would have had daily, much better communications and coordination and could have avoided the whole scenario the movie is about. Spoiler alert, Spacey's character's dog would still have died. The poorly optimized performance of JIRA almost makes me believe they don't even use their own product. Perhaps performance is on the backlog of the backlog.
• mgoforth 4y ago
  Historically JIRA has toed the line of being minimally acceptable to keep teams from transitioning to competitors, but their recent outage has left such a sour impression of their engineering and operations processes that they have finally crossed the line from minimally acceptable to completely unacceptable. We're currently evaluating alternatives and what a transition plan may look like for ~5k issues with attachments/comments/mockups etc. Any products out there with a built-in JIRA migration tool?
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• boboche 4y ago
  The day I needed to bookmark the url to manage my options list because I couldn’t get to it intuitively due to probably be being wrong (like 90% of their current customer base I guess) was when it started to go seriously south for me.
• pacifika 4y ago
  Jira is a great example how a slow application can frustrate users. Most of my complaints went away after upgrading my broadband over 50Mb and switching away from wifi to minimise request latency and throughout. Yes that should be ridiculous.
• hiperlink 4y ago
  What I had figured in this past ~10 years since working with Jira: it is not this software that made my life hard but the project managers, administrators etc. who are misusing it. E.g creating lots of fields with overlapping meaning. Creating very basic/lame status-flows but not enforcing it. Or creating very hard to follow status flows. Or misreading the data from tickets status history. Or never trying to learn how to use it but find the guy at (my) table, to create the queries, dashboards etc. (and then misuse them). Or the devs who were complaining about missing info but creating one-liner comments as well (if at all). Or the devs who are not searching for duplicates, similar issues and/or link them so it can be tracked. It is far from perfect, and JQL is so far from being intuitive, but I can live with it - until there is a better alternative that is capable AND I have to use that.
• Bayart 4y ago
  My org is using an in-house solution. Jira is the object of our wet dreams.
• CRConrad 4y ago
  Software like Jira and Fauxgile processes like Scrum feed off and mutually reinforce each other.
• fullstackchris 4y ago
  All the content on this site are symptoms of not using Jira properly. That is all.
• ConceptJunkie 4y ago
  People, have you _used_ enterprise software? Jira is the first piece of enterprise software I've ever used that I _don't_ hate! Well, if Bugzilla counts, then I don't hate that either. But in the past I've been exposed to BMC's products, which were, at least when I was exposed to them 10 years, horrible. And going further back, Lotus Notes, which even in the early aughts wasn't up to basic standards of UI from the 1980s. Could Jira be better? Sure. But I think a lot of the complaints about Jira might only be relevant to the way their instance of Jira happens to be set up. Setting up a proper workflow that meets the demands of the organization is not an easy thing to do. Now, I've never administered Jira, and maybe that's not good, but as someone who's used it for about 10 years, I'm fine with it.
• chadlavi 4y ago
  I thought I hated jira, then I joined a company that uses Pivotal tracker.
• eftychis 4y ago
  Problem with Jira: Its customers are not its users. My past managers had a great time with Jira. But if I have to migrate or create tasks in Jira the only efficient and effective way I have found is paying for a desktop license. It doesn't suck -- that much. Otherwise, it is a destroyer of productivity for its users. It is also a source of lock in, that is usually unnecessary. I find Github projects to cover most if not all of the needs, for instance, in an efficient manner. Most managers though also don't/shouldn't care about the micro tasks of a project, so an excel sheet has done that job. The consequence of who the Jira customer is, is its lack of efficiency and chaos. It is too customizable and fails to preserve any form of usability to offer that customizability. I have seen Managers being joyful of achieving the "ultimate Jira," only for everyone in the team to have to learn to abide by the new process, only so that 1-2 people can keep track of tasks and velocity without hitting github or gitlab. You get great statistics, but if I have to spend 1/5 of my workweek on petting Jira, you lose that. Managers love Jira, that is why it keeps coming up. You need one new manager to come in, say they know Jira, and using it will solve all of the company's velocity issues, to end up with people writing articles of how they hate Jira.