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Our company switched from GitHub / Jira to everything on GitLab because devops had the authority to make the switch and that's what they wanted. PMs now compla

by enlyth 3y ago

Our company switched from GitHub / Jira to everything on GitLab because devops had the authority to make the switch and that's what they wanted. PMs now complain that the GitLab "issue board" is nowhere near a replacement for Jira and us devs complain that GitHub had a nicer UX and less stability issues. Can't make everyone happy at once I guess /shrug

bluGill 3y ago
What management and what devs need from an issue manager is very different. Which is why every 5-10 years everyone wants to switch to a simpler tool, then slowly most of the complexity in the first tool gets added back as the people who needed that one feature complain loud enough, until the people who wanted simplicity become the loud voice and you switch to a simpler tool. It is never the tools fault above. (Some tools are better than others, but the real problem isn't the tool)
IshKebab 3y ago
The fact that Gitlab Issues aren't a replacement for Jira is a feature IMO. Jira is surprisingly awful at its main job. For example you can't have more than 2 levels of parent/child tasks (compared to Phabricator which has no limit). Changing an issue to a task or vice versa goes via a complex batch update mechanism. Over-configurability means you end up with a gazillion different task states (Done, Resolved, Finished, Closed, ...). You can't do basic things like reorder the backlog based on priority. Perhaps most critically the interface is just insanely slow! It regularly causes waits in sprint meetings while we wait for someone to drag & drop an issue or for the page to load. The only reason it's popular is because PMs like to make engineers do their job for them so they can just click a button and get pretty graphs that they can copy & paste to presentations.
- philipwhiuk 3y ago
  > For example you can't have more than 2 levels of parent/child tasks (compared to Phabricator which has no limit) They're deprecating Epic and introducing Parent right now in Cloud. Probably to solve this.

by enlyth 3y ago

bluGill 3y ago

What management and what devs need from an issue manager is very different. Which is why every 5-10 years everyone wants to switch to a simpler tool, then slowly most of the complexity in the first tool gets added back as the people who needed that one feature complain loud enough, until the people who wanted simplicity become the loud voice and you switch to a simpler tool. It is never the tools fault above. (Some tools are better than others, but the real problem isn't the tool)

IshKebab 3y ago

The fact that Gitlab Issues aren't a replacement for Jira is a feature IMO. Jira is surprisingly awful at its main job. For example you can't have more than 2 levels of parent/child tasks (compared to Phabricator which has no limit). Changing an issue to a task or vice versa goes via a complex batch update mechanism. Over-configurability means you end up with a gazillion different task states (Done, Resolved, Finished, Closed, ...). You can't do basic things like reorder the backlog based on priority. Perhaps most critically the interface is just insanely slow! It regularly causes waits in sprint meetings while we wait for someone to drag & drop an issue or for the page to load. The only reason it's popular is because PMs like to make engineers do their job for them so they can just click a button and get pretty graphs that they can copy & paste to presentations.

philipwhiuk 3y ago
> For example you can't have more than 2 levels of parent/child tasks (compared to Phabricator which has no limit) They're deprecating Epic and introducing Parent right now in Cloud. Probably to solve this.