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No, it isn't. We have plenty of setups in multiple organisations where even within the org only the administrative settings of the server are locked down and ev

No, it isn't. We have plenty of setups in multiple organisations where even within the org only the administrative settings of the server are locked down and everyone else is free to do whatever they need. Lots of teams just use it as a kanban board, while others setup a state machine-based funnel to process user/business input into usable tickets. JIRA in its default configuration essentially lets you create anything, anywhere in any state. Anything beyond that is just bad product configuration. Now, there are plenty of products out there that suck no matter how you configure it (looking at you, ServiceNow). Especially the comments about "I would rather use trello" seem extremely uninformed as you pretty much *are* trello when you just stick to one kanban board and one project.

Ensorceled 4y ago
> JIRA in its default configuration essentially lets you create anything, anywhere in any state. Anything beyond that is just bad product configuration. That's kind of the point, JIRA has been made into monstrosity at many organizations because the "create anything" mindset.
- oneplane 4y ago
  How does that make it a monstrosity? Unless we're talking about things that are shared across multiple teams, does it really matter how people use it? Nobody is going to care what someone else does in JIRA when they aren't touching that part anyway. Even with 1000 differently configured projects, your 1 or 2 projects you actually work with and configure are the only ones that matter.
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    Because it attracts somebody 4 layers up to tell somebody 3 layers up to come up with a common Jira platform for everybody and then you don't control how your project is run and then Jira becomes the enemy, a faceless micromanager driving your work life that has strong opinions on how you do everything, a dozen steps that need to be done "right" or you get your half a dozen managers asking if you read the memo about TPS reports, er, Jira tickets.
    - oneplane 4y ago
      So that is not a JIRA problem since you can do a > it attracts somebody 4 layers up to tell somebody 3 layers up to come up with a common with pretty much everything, including a spreadsheet or a plain text file. Conflating bad business practises with tool configuration or products in general doesn't help anyone. If a business is very stiff and scared of its employees, they will try out all sorts of useless control methods hoping it will somehow make some metric 'better'. You can do that with Trello too. Doesn't make Trello a bad product, and it doesn't make JIRA a bad product. At the same time, pretending a larger organisation with many teams can function without any form of state tracking is a nice dream but not a reality either, so it's not like you can do without anything at all. But like reposted a bunch of times, how you do it and who is responsible for it is pretty important.
      - colechristensen 4y ago
        The point is that there are tools that enable and encourage bad behavior. The kinds of organizational toxicity simply aren’t possible with some tools, sure an ambitious executive could try but the attempt would fail very quickly. Such attempts to do the broken overburdened nonsense that frequently comes with Jira don’t fail, they are enabled and encouraged. What is technically possible and what is likely are two very distant things.
        msla 4y ago
        "The tool can't do it" is an excuse. Excuses aren't tolerated. Now, make it happen. Tools can't prevent bad management because bad managers don't care about tools. They care about getting what they want, and if the tool doesn't enable it, that's their underlings' problem, not theirs. Jira doesn't stand in their way because nothing stands in their way.
        CRConrad 4y ago
        That's precisely why Jira sucks: Because it doesn't stand in their way. And why you want simpler software, which by not being able to bend to their misguided will, does stand in their way.
  - Ensorceled 4y ago
    We're just talking past each other, I'm saying Jira is bad because "it's a foot gun, and bad people keep shooting me in the foot" and you're saying "they shot you in the foot because they are bad". We are both right, technically, but I don't like working with foot-guns for this reason.
    - RayFrankenstein 4y ago
      JIRA empowers bad management to be so, so much worse. JIRA is the assault rifle of footguns.
colechristensen 4y ago
And how long is this going to last before someone further up decides that Jira needs to be unified for reporting purposes? Eventually somebody with the organization obsession is going to get hired and put somewhere important and their goal is going to be making something complicated and unified and dissent will be "discouraged".
- femiagbabiaka 4y ago
  “Data needs to be unified for my executive use case” sounds like an org problem not a JIRA one. I’ve encountered it at companies that didn’t use JIRA at all
- oneplane 4y ago
  Depends on where you work I guess. In reality, reporting really has nothing to do with SWE state tracking. You can also just write a report in a letter and mail it to the board. It's not like they are going to log in to JIRA or even have an account or SSO-allowed credentials since they don't need to be there. On the other hand, like almost copy-pasted here, if a top-down 'unification make it worse for everyone' effort is started, no vendor or tool is going to stop that and your work will get worse.
  - sherifmansour 4y ago
    Spot on. One of the reasons we created Atlas (new product) was precisely this: help stakeholders and dependent teams focus on common language between teams over this misconception that task-level reporting is how they help understand the true state of work. Disclaimer: I work for Atlassian on Atlas, and I didn’t think I could ever get so passionate about soling this problem.
- geraldwhen 4y ago
  This happened to me!
asfhagsdf 4y ago
It amazes me how much hate Jira gets compared to ServiceNow. My last two roles have been heavy on the ServiceNow, and I'd take a fresh breath of Jira any time. My guess is it's because Jira actively targets SMB, while ServiceNow is almost strictly enterprise, and folks in enterprise have already resigned to their fate.
- mathattack 4y ago
  And try to get a straight answer on pricing from the ServiceNow rep…
  - _jal 4y ago
    The answer is "way more than is sensible, even factoring in how absurd pricing on crap like this has gotten." We dropped SN a couple years back over this. They were charging us about 6-7x what we pay for Jira, and we still use the on-site enterprise version of Jira.
    - oneplane 4y ago
      We have a few of those around as well. While they work fine, I don't really get why anyone would want to self-host JIRA or any COTS product like that anymore. Most instances now seem to be just a case of "our hosting company is fully responsible for it and it's pretty cheap and reliable" and until it starts failing or falling behind the cloud offering it'll probably stay like that. Usually, if it isn't better from a staff-perspective or better for the customer, self-hosting or self-building is less likely to be the answer these days.
      - shagie 4y ago
        Self hosting is sometimes easier to do than to argue with data governance about putting the information out a system that is offprem. The additional precautions for HIPAA or PII data that may show up in the comments or attachments can problematic. There are far too many users of all stripes that copy and paste data that they have access to without doing a check on it to see if it really does belong there (and if it does belong in the issue, then applying appropriate permissions to the object).

Ensorceled 4y ago

> JIRA in its default configuration essentially lets you create anything, anywhere in any state. Anything beyond that is just bad product configuration. That's kind of the point, JIRA has been made into monstrosity at many organizations because the "create anything" mindset.

oneplane 4y ago
How does that make it a monstrosity? Unless we're talking about things that are shared across multiple teams, does it really matter how people use it? Nobody is going to care what someone else does in JIRA when they aren't touching that part anyway. Even with 1000 differently configured projects, your 1 or 2 projects you actually work with and configure are the only ones that matter.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Because it attracts somebody 4 layers up to tell somebody 3 layers up to come up with a common Jira platform for everybody and then you don't control how your project is run and then Jira becomes the enemy, a faceless micromanager driving your work life that has strong opinions on how you do everything, a dozen steps that need to be done "right" or you get your half a dozen managers asking if you read the memo about TPS reports, er, Jira tickets.
  - oneplane 4y ago
    So that is not a JIRA problem since you can do a > it attracts somebody 4 layers up to tell somebody 3 layers up to come up with a common with pretty much everything, including a spreadsheet or a plain text file. Conflating bad business practises with tool configuration or products in general doesn't help anyone. If a business is very stiff and scared of its employees, they will try out all sorts of useless control methods hoping it will somehow make some metric 'better'. You can do that with Trello too. Doesn't make Trello a bad product, and it doesn't make JIRA a bad product. At the same time, pretending a larger organisation with many teams can function without any form of state tracking is a nice dream but not a reality either, so it's not like you can do without anything at all. But like reposted a bunch of times, how you do it and who is responsible for it is pretty important.
    - colechristensen 4y ago
      The point is that there are tools that enable and encourage bad behavior. The kinds of organizational toxicity simply aren’t possible with some tools, sure an ambitious executive could try but the attempt would fail very quickly. Such attempts to do the broken overburdened nonsense that frequently comes with Jira don’t fail, they are enabled and encouraged. What is technically possible and what is likely are two very distant things.
      - msla 4y ago
        "The tool can't do it" is an excuse. Excuses aren't tolerated. Now, make it happen. Tools can't prevent bad management because bad managers don't care about tools. They care about getting what they want, and if the tool doesn't enable it, that's their underlings' problem, not theirs. Jira doesn't stand in their way because nothing stands in their way.
        CRConrad 4y ago
        That's precisely why Jira sucks: Because it doesn't stand in their way. And why you want simpler software, which by not being able to bend to their misguided will, does stand in their way.
- Ensorceled 4y ago
  We're just talking past each other, I'm saying Jira is bad because "it's a foot gun, and bad people keep shooting me in the foot" and you're saying "they shot you in the foot because they are bad". We are both right, technically, but I don't like working with foot-guns for this reason.
  - RayFrankenstein 4y ago
    JIRA empowers bad management to be so, so much worse. JIRA is the assault rifle of footguns.

colechristensen 4y ago

And how long is this going to last before someone further up decides that Jira needs to be unified for reporting purposes? Eventually somebody with the organization obsession is going to get hired and put somewhere important and their goal is going to be making something complicated and unified and dissent will be "discouraged".

femiagbabiaka 4y ago
“Data needs to be unified for my executive use case” sounds like an org problem not a JIRA one. I’ve encountered it at companies that didn’t use JIRA at all
oneplane 4y ago
Depends on where you work I guess. In reality, reporting really has nothing to do with SWE state tracking. You can also just write a report in a letter and mail it to the board. It's not like they are going to log in to JIRA or even have an account or SSO-allowed credentials since they don't need to be there. On the other hand, like almost copy-pasted here, if a top-down 'unification make it worse for everyone' effort is started, no vendor or tool is going to stop that and your work will get worse.
- sherifmansour 4y ago
  Spot on. One of the reasons we created Atlas (new product) was precisely this: help stakeholders and dependent teams focus on common language between teams over this misconception that task-level reporting is how they help understand the true state of work. Disclaimer: I work for Atlassian on Atlas, and I didn’t think I could ever get so passionate about soling this problem.
geraldwhen 4y ago
This happened to me!

asfhagsdf 4y ago

It amazes me how much hate Jira gets compared to ServiceNow. My last two roles have been heavy on the ServiceNow, and I'd take a fresh breath of Jira any time. My guess is it's because Jira actively targets SMB, while ServiceNow is almost strictly enterprise, and folks in enterprise have already resigned to their fate.

mathattack 4y ago
And try to get a straight answer on pricing from the ServiceNow rep…
- _jal 4y ago
  The answer is "way more than is sensible, even factoring in how absurd pricing on crap like this has gotten." We dropped SN a couple years back over this. They were charging us about 6-7x what we pay for Jira, and we still use the on-site enterprise version of Jira.
  - oneplane 4y ago
    We have a few of those around as well. While they work fine, I don't really get why anyone would want to self-host JIRA or any COTS product like that anymore. Most instances now seem to be just a case of "our hosting company is fully responsible for it and it's pretty cheap and reliable" and until it starts failing or falling behind the cloud offering it'll probably stay like that. Usually, if it isn't better from a staff-perspective or better for the customer, self-hosting or self-building is less likely to be the answer these days.
    - shagie 4y ago
      Self hosting is sometimes easier to do than to argue with data governance about putting the information out a system that is offprem. The additional precautions for HIPAA or PII data that may show up in the comments or attachments can problematic. There are far too many users of all stripes that copy and paste data that they have access to without doing a check on it to see if it really does belong there (and if it does belong in the issue, then applying appropriate permissions to the object).