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GitHub and GitLab workflows are much more convenient in my opinion. They were made with actual workers in mind: developers, QA, release managers, DevOps, etc. J

by xvilka 3y ago

GitHub and GitLab workflows are much more convenient in my opinion. They were made with actual workers in mind: developers, QA, release managers, DevOps, etc. Jira, on the other hand, is purely manager's toy with all it's useless features that often stand in a way of daily routine. I never saw any developer who was happy about Jira.

vertigolimbo 3y ago
You can make it as useless and as powerful as you want. I have worked on many projects and developers loved it (no joke). But it was down to having it properly setup and using just the bare minimum that enabled to do work. What often happens, is that JIRA "experts" (usually incompetent PMs or Scrum masters) let JIRA dictate your workflow. That's where discontent arises. (No affiliation to Atlassian).
- Zigurd 3y ago
  Unlike most IDEs, where using more of the tools means better productivity, Agile project management doesn't benefit from more features and capabilities. A memory leak finder or profiler or better lint has no downside. Not true for project management features like, for example, "velocity" measurements denominated in story points (unitless) over time (seconds). Management metrics bullshit seldom benefits a project. In feature-monster tools like JIRA you have to do a lot of work to un-feature a project and those features are still lurking.
- cassianoleal 3y ago
  You can make good workflows on Jira, yes. That doesn't fix the horrible UX, sluggishness, confusing options, forms that present a lot of useless fields but don't give you the option to present other, more useful ones, ... I could go on. Jira is a terrible tool.
  - oneplane 3y ago
    Sounds like your experience mostly revolves around older self-hosted JIRA versions? The UX on modern JIRA has been fine for years, and the options and forms are easy to use. Granted, you can add useless restrictions and weird field configurations, but if someone configures it until it's broken, that would be on them, not really on the product.
    - dijit 3y ago
      This is so divorced from my experience. The only Jira setups I have been with that worked were ones where we were actively diminishing its use in the company. Small companies where only a small(er) unit of people use Jira (cloud) is fine, large teams, large workflows, selfhosted or cloud: doesn’t matter. It was always terrible. We actively discriminate against Jira in our company at the moment, and for us it works pretty good. But that is because it is not essential and we do not lean into it.
      - oneplane 3y ago
        We don't have any instances with more than 500 users so perhaps that's the key difference here. We also don't have any PMs or 'admins' that do heavy handed top-down "you must use it this way" configuration. We do have all product owners meet up at least once each month and the project collaboration methods are often on the agenda to make sure we don't end up with too many different workflows that are essentially duplicates of each other. Besides the workflows (mostly oriented around kanban boards and backlogs) we just make sure that collaboration across teams use compatible workflows and epics so you don't have to copy-paste information and instead just share stuff. Each individual team is no larger than 8 people, most are smaller.
    - Macha 3y ago
      I worked at a company that bailed on a JIRA Server to Cloud migration and went for enterprise instead because cloud's performance was so poor compared to the self hosted version.
      - oneplane 3y ago
- SamWhited 3y ago
  I used to work for Atlassian (not on Jira) and the Jira "experts" that worked there set it up in such a way that everyone there hated it too. If your product has such bad defaults and is so flexible that this can happen, you've made a bad product whether it's technically possible to use it right or not.
  - esafak 3y ago
    Defaults matter, and flexibility can be bad. Apple really gets this.
Aurornis 3y ago
> I never saw any developer who was happy about Jira. We did a clean Jira setup from scratch as set up by developers for developers. It was fine. It wasn’t until the company hired full time TPMs who made it unnecessarily complicated with an endless list of plugins and processes that it got to be miserable. The real killer was the way they wanted us to use it: They declared that only TPMs could move tickets, and only in meetings. So instead of us moving our own work along we had to queue it up and wait for an hour long meeting where we waited our turn to tell the TPM which tickets needed to be moved, then sparred with him in debate for 5 minutes as he tried to debate the done-ness with us through a game of 20 questions. Repeat those meetings 3X a week and I developed a visceral objection to Jira. Only later did I realize that what I hated most was actually the pomp and ceremony that came with Jira-toting TPMs. Jira itself wasn’t too bad when we used it efficiently on our own. The modern versions are much faster than the sluggish experience of the days of old
- calvinmorrison 3y ago
  I still absolutely miss the really early iterations of JIRA. better than a bug tracking system but none of the complexity on top. we were still managing our projects as waterfall using Microsoft Project Planner but devs were doing all their work in Jira. we had complex workflows that were managed really well, approvals built in all sort of good stuff.
- piva00 3y ago
  Jira's UX is quite bad though, even when there's not much red tape from management on how to manage your tickets. The response time for a "Create ticket" flow gets in the way, I like how snappy Trello feels, I can create a ticket in seconds with just shortcuts and a few keystrokes so it's pretty effortless to split a task in multiple tickets to be worked on. The clickety-clicky nature of Jira gets in the way for that, I need to click "Create", then select the "Project", then click on the modal's text box for writing the description, it doesn't support Markdown so I need to keep in mind (increasing the cognitive load) how Jira's formatting work. Then I need to click "Create" while checking the box "Create another" so I can keep the flow of adding more tickets. Over time this workflow is fucking terrible, sometimes I avoid splitting some larger task into multiple tickets because I can't be bothered to go through this flow yet-again. If Jira just simplified the way to create tickets, throwing them into an "Inbox" to be sorted later it'd improve the experience a lot, the way it's designed doesn't help to be fast with it and breaks my train of thought. My workflow right now is to open a text editor, write down all the tickets I want to create, their descriptions, etc. and later I just copy-paste into Jira's UI when I have the energy to go through the whole song and dance of creating tickets. It's death by a thousand cuts, the ergonomics of it is pretty bad.
davinci123 3y ago
Funny anecdote - "Jira is still growing and I have personally talked to many developers who love it". There is an inherent bias in Hacker News on certain stories or perceptions getting amplified. This is primarily the silicon valley echo chamber. I have been reading about how Jira is going to die for the last 10 years. It has not happened yet. And I don't foresee it happening in the near future - there are so many competitors in the graveyard: Asana, Monday, ClickUp, Product Board, Clubhouse, and Linear will be next.
- manquer 3y ago
  Jira will not die , even if every last developer on the planet hate it , they are not the buyers . I have never seen a manager express negative feedback let alone hate it . As long as managers keep liking it over anything else , nothing will change . There are no realistic peers to Jira for, developers or knowledge workers have to use the product , it only has to designed for the buyer , which atlassian does very well
paradox460 3y ago
Try out zenhub. It gets enough of the manager juice in there that they can feel comfortable with it, but sits happily in GitHub, atop GitHub issues and pull requests and all that
deterministic 3y ago
30+ years of experience developer here. I am happy with JIRA. It isn’t perfect but nothing is.

by xvilka 3y ago

vertigolimbo 3y ago

You can make it as useless and as powerful as you want. I have worked on many projects and developers loved it (no joke). But it was down to having it properly setup and using just the bare minimum that enabled to do work. What often happens, is that JIRA "experts" (usually incompetent PMs or Scrum masters) let JIRA dictate your workflow. That's where discontent arises. (No affiliation to Atlassian).

Zigurd 3y ago
Unlike most IDEs, where using more of the tools means better productivity, Agile project management doesn't benefit from more features and capabilities. A memory leak finder or profiler or better lint has no downside. Not true for project management features like, for example, "velocity" measurements denominated in story points (unitless) over time (seconds). Management metrics bullshit seldom benefits a project. In feature-monster tools like JIRA you have to do a lot of work to un-feature a project and those features are still lurking.
cassianoleal 3y ago
You can make good workflows on Jira, yes. That doesn't fix the horrible UX, sluggishness, confusing options, forms that present a lot of useless fields but don't give you the option to present other, more useful ones, ... I could go on. Jira is a terrible tool.
- oneplane 3y ago
  Sounds like your experience mostly revolves around older self-hosted JIRA versions? The UX on modern JIRA has been fine for years, and the options and forms are easy to use. Granted, you can add useless restrictions and weird field configurations, but if someone configures it until it's broken, that would be on them, not really on the product.
  - dijit 3y ago
    This is so divorced from my experience. The only Jira setups I have been with that worked were ones where we were actively diminishing its use in the company. Small companies where only a small(er) unit of people use Jira (cloud) is fine, large teams, large workflows, selfhosted or cloud: doesn’t matter. It was always terrible. We actively discriminate against Jira in our company at the moment, and for us it works pretty good. But that is because it is not essential and we do not lean into it.
    - oneplane 3y ago
      We don't have any instances with more than 500 users so perhaps that's the key difference here. We also don't have any PMs or 'admins' that do heavy handed top-down "you must use it this way" configuration. We do have all product owners meet up at least once each month and the project collaboration methods are often on the agenda to make sure we don't end up with too many different workflows that are essentially duplicates of each other. Besides the workflows (mostly oriented around kanban boards and backlogs) we just make sure that collaboration across teams use compatible workflows and epics so you don't have to copy-paste information and instead just share stuff. Each individual team is no larger than 8 people, most are smaller.
  - Macha 3y ago
    I worked at a company that bailed on a JIRA Server to Cloud migration and went for enterprise instead because cloud's performance was so poor compared to the self hosted version.
    - oneplane 3y ago
SamWhited 3y ago
I used to work for Atlassian (not on Jira) and the Jira "experts" that worked there set it up in such a way that everyone there hated it too. If your product has such bad defaults and is so flexible that this can happen, you've made a bad product whether it's technically possible to use it right or not.
- esafak 3y ago
  Defaults matter, and flexibility can be bad. Apple really gets this.

Aurornis 3y ago

> I never saw any developer who was happy about Jira. We did a clean Jira setup from scratch as set up by developers for developers. It was fine. It wasn’t until the company hired full time TPMs who made it unnecessarily complicated with an endless list of plugins and processes that it got to be miserable. The real killer was the way they wanted us to use it: They declared that only TPMs could move tickets, and only in meetings. So instead of us moving our own work along we had to queue it up and wait for an hour long meeting where we waited our turn to tell the TPM which tickets needed to be moved, then sparred with him in debate for 5 minutes as he tried to debate the done-ness with us through a game of 20 questions. Repeat those meetings 3X a week and I developed a visceral objection to Jira. Only later did I realize that what I hated most was actually the pomp and ceremony that came with Jira-toting TPMs. Jira itself wasn’t too bad when we used it efficiently on our own. The modern versions are much faster than the sluggish experience of the days of old

calvinmorrison 3y ago
I still absolutely miss the really early iterations of JIRA. better than a bug tracking system but none of the complexity on top. we were still managing our projects as waterfall using Microsoft Project Planner but devs were doing all their work in Jira. we had complex workflows that were managed really well, approvals built in all sort of good stuff.
piva00 3y ago
Jira's UX is quite bad though, even when there's not much red tape from management on how to manage your tickets. The response time for a "Create ticket" flow gets in the way, I like how snappy Trello feels, I can create a ticket in seconds with just shortcuts and a few keystrokes so it's pretty effortless to split a task in multiple tickets to be worked on. The clickety-clicky nature of Jira gets in the way for that, I need to click "Create", then select the "Project", then click on the modal's text box for writing the description, it doesn't support Markdown so I need to keep in mind (increasing the cognitive load) how Jira's formatting work. Then I need to click "Create" while checking the box "Create another" so I can keep the flow of adding more tickets. Over time this workflow is fucking terrible, sometimes I avoid splitting some larger task into multiple tickets because I can't be bothered to go through this flow yet-again. If Jira just simplified the way to create tickets, throwing them into an "Inbox" to be sorted later it'd improve the experience a lot, the way it's designed doesn't help to be fast with it and breaks my train of thought. My workflow right now is to open a text editor, write down all the tickets I want to create, their descriptions, etc. and later I just copy-paste into Jira's UI when I have the energy to go through the whole song and dance of creating tickets. It's death by a thousand cuts, the ergonomics of it is pretty bad.

davinci123 3y ago

Funny anecdote - "Jira is still growing and I have personally talked to many developers who love it". There is an inherent bias in Hacker News on certain stories or perceptions getting amplified. This is primarily the silicon valley echo chamber. I have been reading about how Jira is going to die for the last 10 years. It has not happened yet. And I don't foresee it happening in the near future - there are so many competitors in the graveyard: Asana, Monday, ClickUp, Product Board, Clubhouse, and Linear will be next.

manquer 3y ago
Jira will not die , even if every last developer on the planet hate it , they are not the buyers . I have never seen a manager express negative feedback let alone hate it . As long as managers keep liking it over anything else , nothing will change . There are no realistic peers to Jira for, developers or knowledge workers have to use the product , it only has to designed for the buyer , which atlassian does very well

paradox460 3y ago

Try out zenhub. It gets enough of the manager juice in there that they can feel comfortable with it, but sits happily in GitHub, atop GitHub issues and pull requests and all that

deterministic 3y ago

30+ years of experience developer here. I am happy with JIRA. It isn’t perfect but nothing is.