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At some point, I need to learn what Jira is exactly. I only used it once, at an org, for a couple of years. It tracked tasks and bugs and such, and integrated w

At some point, I need to learn what Jira is exactly. I only used it once, at an org, for a couple of years. It tracked tasks and bugs and such, and integrated with the source control. It seemed… fine? I had no idea it was specifically linked with “agile”, that org wasn’t doing agile. Is Jira “fine”? Is it really the Agile process that people are hating on?

tgv 2y ago
It's not particularly agile. It's just another tool. If you just use it for bug tracking, it's fine. At least, for a small team. But when a manager starts using all the other features (progress tracking, time administration), it may become your enemy.
mcluck 2y ago
I actually kind of like the subset of Jira that I use. Put tickets in a project, create related tickets when I'm breaking down larger projects, expose the project as a Kanban board so we can see at a glance if the right things are being worked on. That's it. I've essentially built this for myself a few times over so I doubt this is what people are actually paying for so I must be missing all of the features that people hate
bena 2y ago
I think most of these solutions are "fine" for their stated goals, but the problem is that bookkeeping is tedious. And that's what Jira (or insert ticket system of your choice here) exposes, the tediousness of the task of keeping proper book of your work. You want to know what's being done, what needs to be done, who's working on what, where they are, what branches or repos are related to that work, how long will it take, etc. And someone's got to write that down, someone's got to keep that up. There are ways to get things to talk to each other to automate some things, but at the end of the day, you gotta enter the data. It's a lot like the "blockchain" in that regard. The issue has hardly ever been the tools around asset management, the issue is about getting reliable data into the system. Bookkeeping also takes time from actual development. So estimating how long something takes and recording that estimate makes that task take even longer.
randomdata 2y ago
I am under the impression that Jira is a really poorly designed text editor, with the addition of boxes that can be dragged around to serve as a fidget toy for those who have nothing better to do.
makeitdouble 2y ago
JIRA is a management tool with an enormous amount of configurability and absolutely no opinion on how thing should be done. That directly means it will only be as good as their manager, and also the process manager's vision will be perfectly reflected for the better, and in many cases for the worse. If they want to review every ticket and manually accept state changes, they can. If they want to keep track of every minutes you spent on micro-tasks, they can. If the manager has no idea how the team process should work JIRA won't give them any direction and will perfectly reflect the chaos in the manager's head. Of course from the admin side it can also be a nightmare to host, as any similar long lived B2B product. I think people are mostly hating on Agile, and JIRA helps experience the full blown of it the most.

tgv 2y ago

It's not particularly agile. It's just another tool. If you just use it for bug tracking, it's fine. At least, for a small team. But when a manager starts using all the other features (progress tracking, time administration), it may become your enemy.

mcluck 2y ago

I actually kind of like the subset of Jira that I use. Put tickets in a project, create related tickets when I'm breaking down larger projects, expose the project as a Kanban board so we can see at a glance if the right things are being worked on. That's it. I've essentially built this for myself a few times over so I doubt this is what people are actually paying for so I must be missing all of the features that people hate

bena 2y ago

I think most of these solutions are "fine" for their stated goals, but the problem is that bookkeeping is tedious. And that's what Jira (or insert ticket system of your choice here) exposes, the tediousness of the task of keeping proper book of your work. You want to know what's being done, what needs to be done, who's working on what, where they are, what branches or repos are related to that work, how long will it take, etc. And someone's got to write that down, someone's got to keep that up. There are ways to get things to talk to each other to automate some things, but at the end of the day, you gotta enter the data. It's a lot like the "blockchain" in that regard. The issue has hardly ever been the tools around asset management, the issue is about getting reliable data into the system. Bookkeeping also takes time from actual development. So estimating how long something takes and recording that estimate makes that task take even longer.

randomdata 2y ago

I am under the impression that Jira is a really poorly designed text editor, with the addition of boxes that can be dragged around to serve as a fidget toy for those who have nothing better to do.

makeitdouble 2y ago

JIRA is a management tool with an enormous amount of configurability and absolutely no opinion on how thing should be done. That directly means it will only be as good as their manager, and also the process manager's vision will be perfectly reflected for the better, and in many cases for the worse. If they want to review every ticket and manually accept state changes, they can. If they want to keep track of every minutes you spent on micro-tasks, they can. If the manager has no idea how the team process should work JIRA won't give them any direction and will perfectly reflect the chaos in the manager's head. Of course from the admin side it can also be a nightmare to host, as any similar long lived B2B product. I think people are mostly hating on Agile, and JIRA helps experience the full blown of it the most.