6 ms·

What's wrong with JIRA? It looks good and does its job well.

simonbarker87 3y ago
In my opinion tech internet loves to dunk on Jira as it's seen as the manifestation of all the problems of Scrum and Agile. It's a "thing" people can point to so it becomes Jira's fault. People will nit pick over, sometimes justifiable, UI/UX issues with the product but the level of hatred you see can't be explained by that alone. In reality the problem is with Scrum and Agile.
- gjvc 3y ago
  Atlassian, through their flagrant and wanton behaviour of enabling and encouraging such activities, are the main drug dealers to and for Scrum and Agile junkies.
- orangepanda 3y ago
  My nit pick over Jira's UX - they recently changed how board is implemented, breaking ctrl+f
- lmm 3y ago
  Nope. Scrum and Agile are great. Jira is in many ways the antithesis of them: it favours processes and tools over individuals and interactions, it elevates comprehensive documentation over working software, and it encourages following a plan over responding to change.
  - simonbarker87 3y ago
    Sorry I should have been more clear and said "manifestations of all the problems of Scrum and Agile have become". Jira has implemented all those features because that's what the industry (managers and people that like control) wanted Agile to become, so, to make money they did so. I don't blame them for that, they aren't the defenders of Agile. Again, the problem isn't Jira. If you strip away all the reporting, burn down charts etc what you are left with is an exceptionally powerful Kanban board with, in my opinion, a solid user experience.
    - XorNot 3y ago
      If you strip away all that stuff, you could be using another, better product and should be.
      - simonbarker87 3y ago
        I'm yet to find one to be honest. - Trello feels like a toy (it's not, we use it extensively for core business activities but I don't like it for software) - GitHub issues feels too focussed on devs - Todoist is clearly designed for solo use - Monday.com is for more generic project management - Notion is a mess when you have a lot of tickets - I don't want to use ClickUp After going though all of those I realised that Jira is pretty good for me.
        lmm 3y ago
        I don't know exactly what your problem with Trello is - IMO it's the right tool for that space, or was until Atlassian bought it and started making it bloated and slow. Linear is also fine. It's possible to use Jira well (ish) but it requires constant effort. If you ever take your eye off the ball you'll have irreversible transitions and workflows that only certain people can do and you'll start using ticket numbers instead of issue descriptions and end up fighting the tool more than working.
        bengale 3y ago
        Linear is that tool IMHO.
        turtles3 3y ago
        Can you elaborate on why you don't like ClickUp? I've been long in search of a Jira replacement (haven't we all) and the only one that I'm seriously considering is ClickUp. Are there any show stoppers you've seen in practice?
        simonbarker87 3y ago
        To be fair to them I've not actually looked at the product, I just remember something about their marketing rubbed me the wrong way and put me off the brand. Give it a go though, you might like it.
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    Scrum and agile work great for small and independent teams, but in practice a lot of companies (that claim to have moved to those) still work in corporate structures, that is, teams that are not independent, work needs to be coordinated across teams (which led to Scaled Agile Framework (https://scaledagileframework.com/ https://scaledagileframework.com/ ... yeah), and there is a chain of reporting that requires tooling to do, especially with remote and / or distributed teams.
- itomato 3y ago
  Sorry. We have bugs that block UX changes that are old enough to drink.
- dbingham 3y ago
  Jira's UX is a nightmare. Prior to "next generation projects" everything was shared across all projects. Every single issue type, custom field, screen, etc was shared across every project and board in an entire instance. For even medium sized teams that would quickly become an untenable mess of toe stomping. On top of that, good luck making changes to anything. The structural configuration for board, screens, and fields is buried in a maze. Something as simple as changing the options on a single select custom field (say, to add a new team) consistently took me upwards of 30 mins of clicking fruitlessly through the UX every time I had to do it, because it was so unintuitively buried and hidden. Personally, that's why I despise Jira.
- bilekas 3y ago
  > In my opinion tech internet loves to dunk on Jira as it's seen as the manifestation of all the problems of Scrum and Agile Not from my perspective, I will happily 'dunk' on it because the UI/UX is so ridiculously slow and non responsive sometimes. It's a nightmare when we need to close a particularly large sprint out. Everything doesn't need to be 'drag & drop' . Trying to navigate the right fields to update is a numbers game, even if its a simple waterfall flow. They tried to do everything and that's great. But the UI suffers for it, its slow, incredible memory heavy to run on-premise, crashes in the browser frequently. It's not the best tool for the job.
- angrygoat 3y ago
  it feels like every time I go into Jira with the intention to do something, I'm shown a needy modal about some new feature that I really don't care about. and then I can't remember why I went in there in the first place. it's horrible to use.
lmm 3y ago
It performs terribly and gets in the way of doing productive work. The part it does well is enabling obstructive micromanagers and giving them pretty-looking charts to help create a false impression that development is predictable.
- laurent_du 3y ago
  Could you explain how Jira gets in the way of doing productive work? I genuinely don't understand where is the issue.
  - lmm 3y ago
    You usually have to fill in a bunch of unnecessary mandatory fields before you can do anything, and by default you have to follow the workflows that have been set up by someone with more permissions than you. In particular that means that if you ever accidentally drag a card to the wrong column or something (very easy to do with the incredibly slow UI) you can't undo it and probably have to remake the ticket from scratch. Also it nudges you towards using the ticket ID rather than any actual descriptive name everywhere, so everything you do accumulates this extra layer of indirection.
    - p_l 3y ago
      The workflow thing is why the usual advice with JIRA is to keep to Atlassian-supplied workflows instead of developing your own. The custom workflows are often mandated by clueless managers, and often even if you have clueful JIRA admin they will silently try to fix manager's dumb idea instead of having the manager eat the turd sandwich. Once, a coworker of mine decided that enough is enough, and decided to implement a workflow exactly as specified by management. After week or two of totally lost productivity and reporting, system-supplied workflow was returned to and the manager never again tried to play with workflows.
      - DrBazza 3y ago
        Absolutely this. Useless product managers adding custom fields and values that make zero sense. Developer issues (eg. github issues) aren't the same as helpdesk requests, and aren't the same as customer enquiries. Yet Jira happily smashes them all together.
KronisLV 3y ago
> What's wrong with JIRA? It looks good and does its job well. I don't really like Jira: * it is on the slower side of things, unless you throw a decent amount of hardware at it in a self-hosted deployment (then again, something like OpenProject is similarly slow, the only truly fast piece of software in the class I've experienced was Kanboard, but it's very specialized and really light on features, so not a 1:1 competitor) * the API isn't all that pleasant to use, even though you can sort of understand that due to the level of complexity/customization (I recall struggling with a Java client library, when I had to find issues based on the values of custom fields and some other constraints I think, but it was a while ago) * their text formatting was pretty horrendous and unreliable on the version that I used, which is perhaps my biggest actual gripe: if you had snippets of code under and issue, as well as lists, images and a bunch of other formatting, it *reliably* broke for me whenever I tried making any changes, when I tried pasting stuff in, or using the UI buttons for formatting That said, it looks okay and I have no problem with the actual design system. In addition, if Jira lets you do what you need to, then there's nothing wrong with that either - keep using whatever works! Take my "complaints" with a grain of salt: I last used it a while ago and therefore don't remember super specific details, aside from the text formatting being an absolute pain every single time.
- doix 3y ago
  The API and the search are probably the only positive things I can say about Jira. JQL is probably peak issue-tracker searching, I don't see how it can be improved. Maybe in 5 years from now LLMs can accept arbitrary input and find what I'm looking for, but until then, JQL is great. Also I thought API is great, or at least the community python package is[0]. It's probably the best experience I had integrating with an issue tracker. FWIW, I used it in a semiconductor company that used it to manage work on their ASICs, so things were fairly heavily customized and there were over 100k tickets. [0] https://github.com/pycontribs/jira https://github.com/pycontribs/jira
DrBazza 3y ago
Clearly you've never tried to format code in either an issue description or comment. And I can only guess you've never had a product manager justifying their jobs by adding in a bajillion custom fields and field values into an issue. And then filters that use those. This case is a user problem, but the Jira does little to prevent or help.
dbbk 3y ago
It looks good?? It's a mish-mash of UI dating back to seemingly the 90s. Take one wrong turn and the UI falls apart.

In my opinion tech internet loves to dunk on Jira as it's seen as the manifestation of all the problems of Scrum and Agile. It's a "thing" people can point to so it becomes Jira's fault. People will nit pick over, sometimes justifiable, UI/UX issues with the product but the level of hatred you see can't be explained by that alone. In reality the problem is with Scrum and Agile.

gjvc 3y ago
Atlassian, through their flagrant and wanton behaviour of enabling and encouraging such activities, are the main drug dealers to and for Scrum and Agile junkies.
orangepanda 3y ago
My nit pick over Jira's UX - they recently changed how board is implemented, breaking ctrl+f
lmm 3y ago
Nope. Scrum and Agile are great. Jira is in many ways the antithesis of them: it favours processes and tools over individuals and interactions, it elevates comprehensive documentation over working software, and it encourages following a plan over responding to change.
- simonbarker87 3y ago
  Sorry I should have been more clear and said "manifestations of all the problems of Scrum and Agile have become". Jira has implemented all those features because that's what the industry (managers and people that like control) wanted Agile to become, so, to make money they did so. I don't blame them for that, they aren't the defenders of Agile. Again, the problem isn't Jira. If you strip away all the reporting, burn down charts etc what you are left with is an exceptionally powerful Kanban board with, in my opinion, a solid user experience.
  - XorNot 3y ago
    If you strip away all that stuff, you could be using another, better product and should be.
    - simonbarker87 3y ago
      I'm yet to find one to be honest. - Trello feels like a toy (it's not, we use it extensively for core business activities but I don't like it for software) - GitHub issues feels too focussed on devs - Todoist is clearly designed for solo use - Monday.com is for more generic project management - Notion is a mess when you have a lot of tickets - I don't want to use ClickUp After going though all of those I realised that Jira is pretty good for me.
      - lmm 3y ago
        I don't know exactly what your problem with Trello is - IMO it's the right tool for that space, or was until Atlassian bought it and started making it bloated and slow. Linear is also fine. It's possible to use Jira well (ish) but it requires constant effort. If you ever take your eye off the ball you'll have irreversible transitions and workflows that only certain people can do and you'll start using ticket numbers instead of issue descriptions and end up fighting the tool more than working.
      - bengale 3y ago
        Linear is that tool IMHO.
      - turtles3 3y ago
        Can you elaborate on why you don't like ClickUp? I've been long in search of a Jira replacement (haven't we all) and the only one that I'm seriously considering is ClickUp. Are there any show stoppers you've seen in practice?
        simonbarker87 3y ago
        To be fair to them I've not actually looked at the product, I just remember something about their marketing rubbed me the wrong way and put me off the brand. Give it a go though, you might like it.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Scrum and agile work great for small and independent teams, but in practice a lot of companies (that claim to have moved to those) still work in corporate structures, that is, teams that are not independent, work needs to be coordinated across teams (which led to Scaled Agile Framework (https://scaledagileframework.com/ https://scaledagileframework.com/ ... yeah), and there is a chain of reporting that requires tooling to do, especially with remote and / or distributed teams.
itomato 3y ago
Sorry. We have bugs that block UX changes that are old enough to drink.
dbingham 3y ago
Jira's UX is a nightmare. Prior to "next generation projects" everything was shared across all projects. Every single issue type, custom field, screen, etc was shared across every project and board in an entire instance. For even medium sized teams that would quickly become an untenable mess of toe stomping. On top of that, good luck making changes to anything. The structural configuration for board, screens, and fields is buried in a maze. Something as simple as changing the options on a single select custom field (say, to add a new team) consistently took me upwards of 30 mins of clicking fruitlessly through the UX every time I had to do it, because it was so unintuitively buried and hidden. Personally, that's why I despise Jira.
bilekas 3y ago
> In my opinion tech internet loves to dunk on Jira as it's seen as the manifestation of all the problems of Scrum and Agile Not from my perspective, I will happily 'dunk' on it because the UI/UX is so ridiculously slow and non responsive sometimes. It's a nightmare when we need to close a particularly large sprint out. Everything doesn't need to be 'drag & drop' . Trying to navigate the right fields to update is a numbers game, even if its a simple waterfall flow. They tried to do everything and that's great. But the UI suffers for it, its slow, incredible memory heavy to run on-premise, crashes in the browser frequently. It's not the best tool for the job.
angrygoat 3y ago
it feels like every time I go into Jira with the intention to do something, I'm shown a needy modal about some new feature that I really don't care about. and then I can't remember why I went in there in the first place. it's horrible to use.

lmm 3y ago

It performs terribly and gets in the way of doing productive work. The part it does well is enabling obstructive micromanagers and giving them pretty-looking charts to help create a false impression that development is predictable.

laurent_du 3y ago
Could you explain how Jira gets in the way of doing productive work? I genuinely don't understand where is the issue.
- lmm 3y ago
  You usually have to fill in a bunch of unnecessary mandatory fields before you can do anything, and by default you have to follow the workflows that have been set up by someone with more permissions than you. In particular that means that if you ever accidentally drag a card to the wrong column or something (very easy to do with the incredibly slow UI) you can't undo it and probably have to remake the ticket from scratch. Also it nudges you towards using the ticket ID rather than any actual descriptive name everywhere, so everything you do accumulates this extra layer of indirection.
  - p_l 3y ago
    The workflow thing is why the usual advice with JIRA is to keep to Atlassian-supplied workflows instead of developing your own. The custom workflows are often mandated by clueless managers, and often even if you have clueful JIRA admin they will silently try to fix manager's dumb idea instead of having the manager eat the turd sandwich. Once, a coworker of mine decided that enough is enough, and decided to implement a workflow exactly as specified by management. After week or two of totally lost productivity and reporting, system-supplied workflow was returned to and the manager never again tried to play with workflows.
    - DrBazza 3y ago
      Absolutely this. Useless product managers adding custom fields and values that make zero sense. Developer issues (eg. github issues) aren't the same as helpdesk requests, and aren't the same as customer enquiries. Yet Jira happily smashes them all together.

KronisLV 3y ago

> What's wrong with JIRA? It looks good and does its job well. I don't really like Jira: * it is on the slower side of things, unless you throw a decent amount of hardware at it in a self-hosted deployment (then again, something like OpenProject is similarly slow, the only truly fast piece of software in the class I've experienced was Kanboard, but it's very specialized and really light on features, so not a 1:1 competitor) * the API isn't all that pleasant to use, even though you can sort of understand that due to the level of complexity/customization (I recall struggling with a Java client library, when I had to find issues based on the values of custom fields and some other constraints I think, but it was a while ago) * their text formatting was pretty horrendous and unreliable on the version that I used, which is perhaps my biggest actual gripe: if you had snippets of code under and issue, as well as lists, images and a bunch of other formatting, it *reliably* broke for me whenever I tried making any changes, when I tried pasting stuff in, or using the UI buttons for formatting That said, it looks okay and I have no problem with the actual design system. In addition, if Jira lets you do what you need to, then there's nothing wrong with that either - keep using whatever works! Take my "complaints" with a grain of salt: I last used it a while ago and therefore don't remember super specific details, aside from the text formatting being an absolute pain every single time.

doix 3y ago
The API and the search are probably the only positive things I can say about Jira. JQL is probably peak issue-tracker searching, I don't see how it can be improved. Maybe in 5 years from now LLMs can accept arbitrary input and find what I'm looking for, but until then, JQL is great. Also I thought API is great, or at least the community python package is[0]. It's probably the best experience I had integrating with an issue tracker. FWIW, I used it in a semiconductor company that used it to manage work on their ASICs, so things were fairly heavily customized and there were over 100k tickets. [0] https://github.com/pycontribs/jira https://github.com/pycontribs/jira

DrBazza 3y ago

Clearly you've never tried to format code in either an issue description or comment. And I can only guess you've never had a product manager justifying their jobs by adding in a bajillion custom fields and field values into an issue. And then filters that use those. This case is a user problem, but the Jira does little to prevent or help.

dbbk 3y ago

It looks good?? It's a mish-mash of UI dating back to seemingly the 90s. Take one wrong turn and the UI falls apart.