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Jira is an interesting product everyone loves to hate. It has the do-whatever-you-want configurability to fit anyones SDLC. Really its a software product that

Jira is an interesting product everyone loves to hate. It has the do-whatever-you-want configurability to fit anyones SDLC. Really its a software product that allows you to mirror your organizational structure. That said, 99% of software projects I have been on could be managed with a simple Kanban board like Trello (which they now own). Unless your firm has staff who are full time Jira jockeys in the form of project managers, you'll never be able to leverage the more complicated workflows/linkages/planning features.

leokennis 4y ago
Personally I think that, at least for larger/enterprise customers, JIRA is the option that for every major feature is at least not the shittiest. Other solutions might be better than JIRA in A, but absolutely suck in B. JIRA is “sort of shitty” in everything, but the worst in nothing.
hcarvalhoalves 4y ago
I've never seen people use software like Jira and similar software correctly. I mean: - Actually caring about the difference between task and user story - Meaningful / accurate card descriptions - Keeping information up-to-date on TODO lists and comments - Projects and milestones that make sense - Task status and workflows that make sense (besides TODO/DOING/DONE) Nowadays, I would rather have project management software with the minimal amount features that can't be misused.
technion 4y ago
> full time Jira jockeys in the form of project managers I find that a funny description because I've worked with many many different full time project managers who always took the view that putting data in Jira or equivalents and pulling reports before the project meetings were entirely a technician's job.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  This stuff blows my mind but tends to occur everywhere What is the value add of an engineer doing project management work in an environment where project managers exist Should the project managers need to do a little coding then? Also the quiet part out loud - project managers tend to be vastly cheaper (often 2:1) than engineers. Any and every task that an engineering team can offload to a project manager is big dollars saved by the firm. I frequently find myself in engineering roles where I am doing most stakeholder comms, requirements gathering, JIRA ticket entry/management, project planning, user documentation, support runbooks, PR reviewing, a bit of dev, occasionally testing, deployments, and sit on the support escalation pager rotation. Any of the above tasks you can offload to a non-engineer saves the firm money.
ratww 4y ago
It's kind of amusing: I've seen a few times developers rebelling and moving to whatever other random tool (Atlassian's own Trello, Pivotal Tracker, Github's thing, stickers on the wall) as soon as a hardline PO/PM left the job. Only for JIRA to return when another PO/PM that "really really needs the reporting features" (but didn't really use them) was hired.
- jethro_tell 4y ago
  heh, I was once on a dev team that some how got moved into the project management section of a company. The thought was we'd help out and fix the little stuff that the PMs needed done that they couldn't get other teams to prioritize. Obviously a bonkers idea, but they went for it. It was just jira all the way down. They wanted us to create separate tracking jiras for pages, before we worked the issue in the middle of the night. Nobody was actually doing anything, especially the devs I lasted a couple months before I moved. At the end of the year, everyone that stayed got promoted a level as a dev. I went back though git and couldn't find a single commit from any of them. Just bananas, they all got promoted to a higher level as devs for busy work, but jiras don't lie, right?
- steveBK123 4y ago
  My fave thing about Jira is how between the tool & it's plugins, you can roll up all sorts of views for management reporting purposes. Despite this, exactly zero shops I have worked do management believe their managers will understand those views. Therefore at a weekly/monthly/quarterly cadence, "someone" (dev leads) have to spend hours hand updating some horrific excel view of project statuses for big management to understand.
  - kdinn 4y ago
    > Therefore at a weekly/monthly/quarterly cadence, "someone" (dev leads) have to spend hours hand updating some horrific excel view of project statuses for big management to understand. You're spot on about that. I've been the "someone" dev lead doing this so often I decided that someone should build a system that does this. You can see my progress so far at fixed.pm
  - 4y ago
djbusby 4y ago
GitLab is where we moved, they've got boards to visualize. Great replacement for Trello.
notjustanymike 4y ago
While I miss the ability to create epics, I would say is an Asana otherwise wonderful replacement for Jira.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  Jira almost has too many hierarchy options / flexibility. Epics, Milestones, Initiatives. No two firms, and often within a firm.. no two teams has a similar definition / system in how they are used. My last manager it was like a sniff test / definition of art thing. Constant arguments about epics being too granular or not granular enough. Bumping tickets up or down the hierarchy was hell and lead to many many hours of wasted efforts.

leokennis 4y ago

Personally I think that, at least for larger/enterprise customers, JIRA is the option that for every major feature is at least not the shittiest. Other solutions might be better than JIRA in A, but absolutely suck in B. JIRA is “sort of shitty” in everything, but the worst in nothing.

hcarvalhoalves 4y ago

I've never seen people use software like Jira and similar software correctly. I mean: - Actually caring about the difference between task and user story - Meaningful / accurate card descriptions - Keeping information up-to-date on TODO lists and comments - Projects and milestones that make sense - Task status and workflows that make sense (besides TODO/DOING/DONE) Nowadays, I would rather have project management software with the minimal amount features that can't be misused.

technion 4y ago

> full time Jira jockeys in the form of project managers I find that a funny description because I've worked with many many different full time project managers who always took the view that putting data in Jira or equivalents and pulling reports before the project meetings were entirely a technician's job.

steveBK123 4y ago
This stuff blows my mind but tends to occur everywhere What is the value add of an engineer doing project management work in an environment where project managers exist Should the project managers need to do a little coding then? Also the quiet part out loud - project managers tend to be vastly cheaper (often 2:1) than engineers. Any and every task that an engineering team can offload to a project manager is big dollars saved by the firm. I frequently find myself in engineering roles where I am doing most stakeholder comms, requirements gathering, JIRA ticket entry/management, project planning, user documentation, support runbooks, PR reviewing, a bit of dev, occasionally testing, deployments, and sit on the support escalation pager rotation. Any of the above tasks you can offload to a non-engineer saves the firm money.

ratww 4y ago

It's kind of amusing: I've seen a few times developers rebelling and moving to whatever other random tool (Atlassian's own Trello, Pivotal Tracker, Github's thing, stickers on the wall) as soon as a hardline PO/PM left the job. Only for JIRA to return when another PO/PM that "really really needs the reporting features" (but didn't really use them) was hired.

jethro_tell 4y ago
heh, I was once on a dev team that some how got moved into the project management section of a company. The thought was we'd help out and fix the little stuff that the PMs needed done that they couldn't get other teams to prioritize. Obviously a bonkers idea, but they went for it. It was just jira all the way down. They wanted us to create separate tracking jiras for pages, before we worked the issue in the middle of the night. Nobody was actually doing anything, especially the devs I lasted a couple months before I moved. At the end of the year, everyone that stayed got promoted a level as a dev. I went back though git and couldn't find a single commit from any of them. Just bananas, they all got promoted to a higher level as devs for busy work, but jiras don't lie, right?
steveBK123 4y ago
My fave thing about Jira is how between the tool & it's plugins, you can roll up all sorts of views for management reporting purposes. Despite this, exactly zero shops I have worked do management believe their managers will understand those views. Therefore at a weekly/monthly/quarterly cadence, "someone" (dev leads) have to spend hours hand updating some horrific excel view of project statuses for big management to understand.
- kdinn 4y ago
  > Therefore at a weekly/monthly/quarterly cadence, "someone" (dev leads) have to spend hours hand updating some horrific excel view of project statuses for big management to understand. You're spot on about that. I've been the "someone" dev lead doing this so often I decided that someone should build a system that does this. You can see my progress so far at fixed.pm
- 4y ago

djbusby 4y ago

GitLab is where we moved, they've got boards to visualize. Great replacement for Trello.

notjustanymike 4y ago

While I miss the ability to create epics, I would say is an Asana otherwise wonderful replacement for Jira.

steveBK123 4y ago
Jira almost has too many hierarchy options / flexibility. Epics, Milestones, Initiatives. No two firms, and often within a firm.. no two teams has a similar definition / system in how they are used. My last manager it was like a sniff test / definition of art thing. Constant arguments about epics being too granular or not granular enough. Bumping tickets up or down the hierarchy was hell and lead to many many hours of wasted efforts.