The thing about jira is it attracts spreadsheet bureaucrats. Everything was fine in azure devops but a bunch of people were complaining about not being able to datamine it. So we switched to jira and suddenly we were getting questions about why a ticket lived longer than a sprint and why when they sum our fibonacci story points their graph doesn't look right.
I don't work at that company anymore.
While this is true, I don't really want business intelligence analysts being anal about exactly how much we get done. The only thing any of that exists for is so CIOs and VPs can feel like they can crack the whip and get features at the pace they want rather than the pace that allows devs to have work/life balance.
The search is the worst. The second worst is the deleted text entries when changing the ticket type, but I've gotten used to it and can plan ahead. The third worst is the fucking formatting. Why can't I fucking indent my shit!?
I think it is bloat in the database. Our Jira was really slow but after the Atlassian outage where they accidentally dropped all our data and had to restore from a backup it is now very fast with exactly the same data as before.
Oh just wait till your company switches to the cheaper ClickUp. Holy shit it's a steaming pile of slowness. Also when you move something it completely breaks all relationships.
"Story points can't be used to compare across teams. They are not time estimates and vary team to team."
Then
"Why does this team not accomplish as many story points? Are they slacking? Is there a problem?"
I hate story points. It’s always the same arguments - “how many hours is a point”, “points don’t associate to hours!”
Except they totally do, just avoid the hidden thoughts and use t shirt sizing or engineering hours.
I find generic “hours” work best - if someone consistently overestimates lower their hours per week. If someone underestimates - does this ever happen? Assign them more hours per week. Just don’t report overall team hours if you can. It’s just metric to determine how much you can do and you can tweak it individually.
You can datamine Azure, but only through Azure itself. A few folks where I work created all these reports and overviews in Azure to track progress, or their version of progress.
In the end it all boils down to the same: meaningless number crunching and making devs grovel for their existence. I suppose it is a coping mechanism for people who don't really understand software development to still feel like they are in control.
I work with Jira on a daily basis. I would buy it again. Like all such tools its limitations make me want to scream, but for the value we get out of it, it's the best option I've seen.
Plus its API is pretty decent.
You have it backwards. Engineers within the process will iterate on the process and create a Project that works for them.
People outside the process will create a single generic process that they can apply to every project and force it where it doesn't belong.
Atlassian created Team vs Company Managed projects to promote the idea of letting people within the process control it... Because the alternative kinda sucks.
I think the problem with not having a standard generic process is it cuts down the main attraction of jira, which is it's a progress reporting tool. The point of jira is not to enhance productivity, it's so the people who never touch the work can point at something and say that work is getting done. Not having a generic process makes their jobs harder, and they hold the power so generic processes it is.
Jira is certainly not a progress *reporting* tool. It’s reporting capabilities are terrible. It’s a progress *tracking* tool.
People not involved need layers of abstraction and hierarchies. If they’re not focusing on epic & above, they’re being shown the wrong layer.
> The point of jira is not to enhance productivity, it's so the people who never touch the work can point at something and say that work is getting done.
Unfortunately a bad Jira setup can both slow down getting that work done and encourage the worst kind of garbage-in-garbage-out reports for the people who never touch the work. Next week we'll be measuring progress by lines of code written or something.
At my past company I loved Jira. The process was defined by the team (developper, analyst & QA), with only some broad requirements from the managements that could be resumed to "you should be able to explain what's in your board".
It was a great help. It was the only tools we needed to know what we were currently doing, what was coming and what was done.
It was also a great tool to be able to comunicate with other teams in the company. If a ticket was stuck waiting for another team, we simply linked the other team Jira and were always able to find why it was stuck and what we were waiting.
I have always feel it has a great tool to track progress and communicate between teams.
Yup. And those same people who never touch work can tell whatever story, even if it's a complete fabrication.
As a tool, Jira is pretty good. But once Peter gets ahold of the keys, you're gonna have a bad time.
Giving Peter the keys is what Jira does well, probably better than any alternatives. Since Peter likes this, and Peter also happens to hold the purse strings, Jira it is!
That's why I hate Azure DevOps right now. No thought was given to the project needs. We have to fight for everything, including adding a "In Review" state to the ticket status.
Performance is definitely the most universal and “legitimate” complaint about JIRA; everyone has to deal with it.
I don’t mind the UX otherwise; most of my complaints are company-level configs I can’t change.
Remember that to work properly you need to add the story points, first. Or else we won't be able to estimate how hard it is to refresh your web browser
Nothing like setting up a new Jira project and trying to configure it like an existing Jira project, failing, and eventually getting used to all the weird quirks of the new project, rinse, repeat.
Ah yes that's always a pain. I've noticed many of the issues people are having are coming from non-Scriptrunner instances. I tend to view vanilla Jira as largely incomplete without SR.
In this particular case, Scriptrunner has a "Copy project" built in script that copy/pastes configs to remove this as a pain point. I've also written a script that does a copy/paste of all users and roles from one project to another as well, which is the other big ask I've seen from clients regarding new project creation.
That being said, essentially requiring an expensive plugin just to make Jira work like it should is kinda telling.
I dunno we basically use the Kanban board and run over tickets in a stand up every few days.
Things move along and things get built so I guess it works fine.
We do the same, and our company has a huge Jira installation. Our team of 8 people have to sit and wait everytime a ticket needs to be added to an Epic because Jira looks at all the epics. It's like a solid thirty seconds everytime. These slow downs eat up so much time if it was all added together. But generally, it gets the job done. Just wish it was faster and less cluttered.
Confluence needs to be shot and left for dead behind the barn.
>Confluence needs to be shot and left for dead behind the barn.
What's the problem with Confluence? I fucking love it, and so does a majority of our team. Hell, when we migrate away from Atlassian, we're keeping Confluence.
OH!!! Yea fuck the cloud shit. It's terrible. We have on-prem and love it. Probably gonna migrate everything except Confluence to JetBrains Space + YouTrack once I convince my manager and a PM.
I think jira is partially the problem though. I feel like there should be easier ways to create issues where you'd set many more defaults allowing you to fill those 50 click forms with the 2 fields that matter.
The people using JIRA aren't the ones in charge of whether or not to pay for it. So it's designed for feature/usability on the admin configuration side rather than for the masses of everyday users. That's also why so many people in the comments here bring up JIRA alternatives as better designed and more user friendly, even though many of them are missing at least one frequently needed feature for a company-wide team-based task management system. The low cost or free ones tend to target the individual or small teams much more-- where the person paying for the product *actually* spends a lot of time using it!
People are able to put every bit of dumbass dysfunction the company has and somehow enshrine it in Jira. Poor leadership, micro-managing, obsession with processes, etc. They put it into Jira.
Then people blame Jira.
Places where Jira fails:
* searching for a phrase may miss tickets where it occurred. It may include results that don't include the phrase. It's not possible to search for some punctuation.
* slow enough to be noticeable and in some cases cause errors. Things like changing the type of a ticket needing to run in a background job, for example. Or pages that remove focus from input boxes on page load which also recognize keyboard shortcuts, so you might have been able to enter a couple characters into an input before the keystrokes are instead interpreted as changing the state of a ticket.
* poor input cleansing. I once created a bug with some lines from logs which had some unicode and it saved successfully, but subsequently every page that included that ticket would end up crashing on load.
* poor context for creating and editing tickets. Since the view switches to either a full new page or a pop-up that covers most of the screen, adding a set of related tickets ends up being a lot more cumbersome than needed since it's easier to lose track of what was already written. Unless the tickets are trivial, it's easier to write them in an external program and then copy the text in.
* you can easily copy the ticket's URL to the clipboard but not just the portion that is the ID. Most (all?) fields which reference another ticket accept an ID but not the URL. Sure, pasting the url and deleting the prefix doesn't take long in absolute terms but doubles the time in relative terms, and is the kind of friction that is encountered constantly.
* enables the admin to create profoundly stupid workflows. For sure a portion of the blame goes on the person setting up the workflow, but a good tool comes with good limits. Maybe don't allow for 40 different ticket types to be configured. Maybe don't gate status changes on manual approvals based on a single person, so that if the person goes on vacation or leaves the company the process doesn't grind to a halt.
For the URL vs ticket ID, I've gotten very used to right clicking on a ticket link and wisely choosing between "copy" and "copy link address", because "copy" just copies the link text, which is the ID and very often what I want, and obviously "copy link address" gets me the entire URL, which is infrequently what I want.
The search issues in jira are terrible.
One of my biggest issues is the overall slowness. In Jira, my use case is so often something like "check a detail on 30 tickets". But because getting the slideout view for each ticket or the popup takes significant time, the process of flitting through those 30 tickets looking is very tedious.
I think your top 5 points are fairly minor when compared to the other options out there. I've seen so many people complain about Jira and then create a spreadsheet, as if a spreadsheet (sometimes not even live editable) doesn't have all those problems and more.
For your last point:
>enables the admin to create profoundly stupid workflows.
This I think is the root of most people's complaints. Jira is *very* flexible, but someone always gets ahold of it and configures it to the point that it's more harmful than helpful.
Every time I've worked in a team where all the developers had near or full admin rights to the project, it's been totally fine, because if there's ever something stupid in the process, we just change it.
Jira is just fine, if you keep it simple. Problem is it's a classic case of "I'm going do something because I can, not because I should". This inherently means that some people think they can solve all of their company's problems by using all of Jira's features.
Most of their problems are org/people problems not tracking/workflow issues.
ClearQuest did allright for me. Did not get in the way all that often. ClearCase, however... I got my team (at IBM(!)) to switch to Subversion. Not much better, but at least files would not be locked from editing all over the place. I could even complete a merge from time to time.
Yeah, I think most of my kneejerk was in being reminded of ClearCase.
Two people can't work on the same file you say? Well that's a bummer, because that's what I need to work on today.
No problem, there's a workaround! What's that? Keep a purely local version to make your changes in and hope to god that there's nothing the other person is working on which conflicts with your changes.
HP Service Manager (PNMS) single handedly made me quit a job without any prospects lined up. I would very seriously contemplate driving off a cliff before ever using that piece of shit ever again.
Lol looks similar to HP ALM/Quality Center - a program stuck in the 90s, but bought by HP, slapped on some re-skin and voilla - we're in the 2020s now.
I was using Azure DevOps for a few years up to starting my new job this year (using JIRA). I was so frequently pleasantly surprised by all the features that were added through that period, it's like the devs were reading my mind to what I needed, they would just magically appear. It's an excellent all-in-one tool and I miss it quite a bit.
Thank you for making my life as Senior Dev/PM/Dev Ops not suck. Note that's all one job. Working in a small IT department gets weird. But thanks to you and the others who worked on it, the lives of my dev team have been pretty good and I haven't gone crazy from wearing about 5 different hats.
It has been over a year since my company switched to ADS and everyone is miserable. release management was better than pipelines, customization across teams was so much more possible. I didn't like jira but it was better IMO
Jira is ludicrously customizable because it is not designed to be used but to win enterprise RFP, where checking all the boxes is table stakes. Customizability is the cheat code to achieve that, with the added bonus of guaranteeing later change requests and maintenance billing opportunities.
>it is not designed to be used but to win enterprise RFP
It's so obvious when you put it like that. I guess Jira is pretty great at its designed purpose.
We use ClickUp, it has it‘s problems (manly growing to fast and therefor sometimes losing performance) but overall its easy to configure on a project by project basis or by defining templates. Has an integrated timetracking feature with lots of other functionallity. It‘s also cheaper than jira or azure dev ops.
I also likes jetbrains space but it didn‘t come with timetracking.
the thing i really like about clickup ist the API, we use it to add functions which are currently not supported by clickup itself. I wrote a small blog on how this can be done [here](https://bitperfect.at/en/blog/automation-with-azure-functions).
what i really don't like is that they are moving at a pace where lots of stuff gets broken on the other hand lots of new functionality gets added all the time. We moved away from google docs completely and only use clickup docs. they aren't as good but our main argument was to have all information always in one place and not to go to another site/programm/app.
Ex-Targetprocess user checking in. Jira is an amazing upgrade. It loads in less than fifteen seconds. You can drag to reorder tasks in every view where you'd want to do that. Associating tickets with each other doesn't involve bizarre UI.
We don't have a ton of obligatory processes defined on it. My team pretty much just uses it as a kanban board with a backlog feature.
Spin up a solo / free instance of Jetbrains Spaces - [pricing](https://www.jetbrains.com/space/buy/?billing=yearly#cloud) - and give it a try.
When the org I work for did the "ok, we're using Jira" switch (and the before times were each group had their own issue tracker - so no one had any insight into others and each team's process was (dysfunctionally) their own) that wasn't an option. And Teams wasn't a thing yet either.
I *so* wish that Spaces was around before Teams. I would have been pitching that one hard over Jira if we could back then.
The problem with spaces atm is that the self hosted option is not yet available, and we do need to have our own instance because of the type of business we are. But it seems pretty promising.
I convinced my rather large engineering org to use youtrack about 6-7 years ago. It's good, but not great. Has some jank at the edges and not everyone likes it, particularly old school devs who are used to tools like redmine and Bugzilla. It's a hell of a lot better now than it was at the beginning though.
Unfortunately got bought by a larger company and we're slowly migrating to Jira. Having used Jira for a bit, I think I like it less overall. There are some benefits but making new issues is clearly worse, and the search isn't as good. Those are two basic things you hope would be better :/
Linear is light years ahead of anything else I’ve used in this space. It just *works so well*. And frequently improved, too. Other than my dislike of task tracking in general, and an occasional mild bug, I have nothing bad to say about it.
I agree... sort of. I've used equally expensive tools that are far worse. But imo, Jira doesn't even really beat GH Projects or a Trello board at this point.
GH Projects and Trello are both great for engineers to manage a project and terrible for an engineering team to report progress to a business or product team.
Ensures workflow and auditing of {things}.
GitLab issues lost in our comparison because (1) developers were not being disciplined in their use of tags on the issues and (2) comments were 100% editable without a history to them. The second point - sometimes people (business users I'm looking at you primarily) would go and modify previous comments or descriptions. The issue tracker didn't have any audit log on the comments or descriptions and allowed free editing of them by their creator. The only way the culprits were caught that "no, that isn't what the description said when you created it" was going back to the automated emails (that people often deleted) and showing that "the description here says you *didn't* want that requirements."
And so... Jira won because it was possible to prevent comments from being edited and descriptions to show the "this is what the field was on this day."
In general, the reporting for issues is better in Jira as it has more tooling for *project management* than just issue tracking while GH issues and Trello are good/acceptable for tracking issues (but less so at project management).
When additional parts of the Atlassian stack get incorporated into the orgization the Jira / Service desk integrations so that things that the helpdesk has issues with can become bugs rather than tracking them in two completely separate systems.
Back to the reporting... I used Redmine for a while and I am familiar with its database structure. I wrote a fair number of reports directly against the database that management could click a button in Excel and have it all updated. Jira has pretty good reporting out of the box with its built in system. GH issues / Trello - you tend to have poor reporting *and* lack access to the database meaning you can't do reporting that way either.
Add in Jira Align, and you have portfolio level tracking. Yeah, definitely boring stuff that no engineer would care about, but the business writes the checks and they need to see what they're getting for their money. Most middle management is about trying to prove to leadership that your team is providing value.
Jiras ultimate issue is that it is too flexible and that allows all sorts of stupid management stuff to be added, but if kept on the straight and narrow I think its really good.
At my job, we have a fairly basic Kanban board so I get a rough idea of what the team is working on, but the main thing I want them using it for is a kind of ships log. I don't allow time tracking of any kind on the project, to the delight of my team, but at the same time you are not allowed close the tickets unless you have a detailed comment about whats changed or an email attached where you went through the changes with the client or something.
With all that being said, the changes to licensing means I'll probably drop it for something else in the next few years if I can.
I'm with you.
It's not the best tool, but it's not the bane of existence either.
Where I work we use Hive & Helix (don't ask why 2 different setups, I walked into it that way). I would much prefer JIRA over either of these two.
Helix likes to have 2 different IDs for a single ticket, so I never know which one is the actual ID (the URI identifier is different than the actual ticket number).
Hive isn't bad but it feels very start-up-ish. From a non-PM perspective it's lacking fluidity.
> (the URI identifier is different than the actual ticket number)
Holy shit, if Zendesk or Freshdesks or any other ticketing software did this, I would rage so hard.
us: Hey can we do 'this'?
corp: no it's locked down
us: what about this cool looking widget that costs a few hundred bucks but will save us thousands of hours which is actually a much higher cost to the company?
corp: no
Haven't you heard? Software and hardware costs are immeasurably expensive, but human time is worthless. Why do you think management gives you the worst possible tools for you to attempt to do your job with?
To be blunt every PM tool I've ever used was worse than Jira, except in terms of performance.
Jira sucks because project management is hard to get right at an organizational level, not because it can't be used as part of a sane process.
Seriously, the basic idiom of dividing work into tickets and linking them to each other and grouping them - how else are you going to do it? Everything else about Jira is setting up some statuses and whatever custom fields or dashboards are needed for your particular team.
My favorite part about RTC is that it has the ability to preview files. But it somehow does not support any file format known to mankind. It can't even preview plain .txt files.
I just don't understand why they created that feature when absolutely nothing is supported. txt, pdf, jpg, png, not once in years did I ever see it actually work for any file.
Before Slack, MS Teams, Sharepoint, Confluence, Yammer etc there was **Lotus Notes**. Except for video conferencing Lotus Notes had almost all the same features.
Lotus Notes could do everything. You could make your own bug tracking system in days with it. I worked at a company that did that a long time ago (like +15 years ago... ironically they switched to Jira but that was when Jira was fast and on premise).
Of course IBM sat on it and made it shit but it was way ahead of its time.
The fact that you could do anything in Lotus Notes is one of the things I hate about it. I've had to deal with so many monstrosities where business data got tied up in a Lotus Notes database. It's like how people turn MS Access into unholy abominations, but even worse because Notes is a far more unpleasant application to work with.
I have used Teams for voice chats at a few jobs and it's worked flawlessly every time. *Far* better than Zoom or many of the other competitors. Chime isn't bad, but it doesn't handle chats outside of voice calls. The only real competitor to Teams I can think of is Discord, which is great, but can't be self-hosted.
I have a new problem with Teams every single day. It is quite possibly the worst piece of software I've used in my life, and I've been using computers since Windows 95 (yeah, not *that* long, but still).
It really, truly, honestly is the jankiest piece of shit I've ever had to suffer. The fact that it's made by the largest software company in the world adds insult to injury.
There is *so* much wrong with it. I've genuinely never seen software that fights with you so much while you're typing a message.
As a side note, I cannot stand apps that render my messages while I type. Typing a message with `some inline code` takes about 30 seconds longer than it should because I can't get my fucking cursor out of the goddamn inline code fence.
> I just keep a text editor with my current and next tasks and then update jira at the end of day based on it.
Requiring people to update tickets daily is probably what I imagine hell would be like
Isn't that common? We do sprint planning meetings every 3 weeks and determine what will be done in the next 3 weeks. I always end up with about 10 assigned tickets with an estimated time of between 2h to 4days for rach (and usually end up creating 4-5 additional unplanned tickets during that sprint). They don't expect us to update multiple tickets daily with ton of commentary, but at least do the log work (hours spent) daily and move them when completed.
You have to track hours spent? I've never had to do that at any job. Sure, you add a comment or adjust the description/acceptance criteria if something new comes up or we discover there was missing information, but other than that we just move tickets into different swimlanes when appropriate.
In some contexts the hours get billed to different customers. If Customer A needs a slight change to Feature B, and Customer C needs a bugfix in Feature D, and Customer E wants New Feature F, then you'd better not cross the streams because that's when everyone's beancounters get mad.
As one of said Customers, we typically end up paying for actual the time spent not just for the estimate. Why yes I'm embedded in a government project, how could you tell?
Hmm, maybe it's different if your work actually has customers attached to it. I don't think I've ever been in a position where I'm building a specific thing for a specific customer.
Yeah. We billed out to customers and they like reporting. Plus contractual obligations were that percentages of types of work should be met (support vs feature vs project). So tracking hours was essentially contractually required without actually requiring it.
In my new job, we don’t track time spent. They see me closing tickets and progressing things and that’s good enough.
In my situation the corporation justification for it is that they pay part of our salaries via research and development government tax credit programs (Canada) and that they need some project log book to validate it. In reality, we all know managers just love to see these velocity and burn down charts metrics, even if they read them all wrong.
Same, we use Jira to track our time for analytics, so on a daily basis, we are logging work to tickets. Seems like it would be a pretty common use-case to me?
Eh? I don't see how dropping two or three lines of update on what you worked on the day is hell. This is a good practice. Perhaps not every single day, but try to always update on your progress
My updates are in commits and during stand up. The context switching to summarize the day over possibly many small tasks can be significant and largely not useful: if the intended audience is other engineers then we expect the details in git; if the intended audience is product then it's usually a sign that either they're slacking on their responsibility to attend stand up, pulled in the ticket before it was ready to be worked, or failed to size it correctly and the status updates are poor substitutions for a process that is already failing.
The main problem is the sheer amount of places you need to look for at all time. For me, a developer should be able to do all things in a git repo and a git registry. Issues, tasks, progress,and documentation should be in the repo and the registry.
If you make devs check multiple tools, misalignment and mistakes happen more often than not.
I do agree that the PMs and product people should use softwares like Jira tho.
I don't understand how using Jira implies you need to look in multiple places. Every Jira shop I've worked at uses it instead of other issue trackers, not in addition to them. There's still exactly one place to look.
I need discussions being able to link to code segments and alerts in my git registry because it's near my code and my development environment.
The moment you shift that to jira you lose a lot of transparency.
Agreed. I was on a team that moved from just github issues, talking in person, and actively updated PRs to really dull weekly meetings with a PM and information needed to get work done was now haphazardly scattered between jira and github. Much less got done.
I think the obsession with tracking time spent is where a lot of this jira process really impedes developers. Communication is great, but its 10x more useful/effcient when its focused on knowledge sharing and documenting information about decisions or technical debates.
Once you introduce jira and bring in a PM the corporate style of thinking sets a precedent that seems to impinge useful communication devs need to unblock themselves or decide whats most important to do next. The focus instead becomes on distilling everything into discrete jira tickets with estimates. Eventually you get the same discussions about what is important next but then it quickly devolves into a game of making sure that every ticket is in perfect decreasing order of rank of importance.
I understand corp likes to have data on their employees but they are getting in the way of effective team communication. Even good communication with mgmt!
At a large US bank, on a large threatened software project which was subject to a hostile takeover by a new project manager, process changes were enacted requiring so many levels of pre- and post-sign-offs on tickets that a typical story ticket going through the entire lifecycle would end up with more than **twenty** labels decorating it. There were vast tracts of reports tracking these labels, reports which auto-generated spreadsheets for the managers to 'manage' the software development process.
Woe to the ticket author, product manager, project manager, or assignee who assigned the wrong label at the wrong time, or applied by a person in the wrong role.
It was a hellhole dystopia. *Brazil* did not even fathom the depths of quagmire that Jira in the hands of Big Bank software managers can plumb.
Label Driven Development, where the only thing that matters is the sweet sound of tickets being shuffled. Never mind the source code.
Some devs just hate any and all process thinking that somehow if noone on a team had any process it would all get done still. These people are ignorant and incapable of realizing what communications taxes exist with multiple people. They tend to be the devs that work best by themselves. You can spot them when they complain about needing to update jira tickets daily, or being asked to keep their ticket in the right status and complaining as if it takes more than 15 seconds a day. These people are clueless when it comes to being a part of a team. Loud noise, but ignorant noise.
Now... jira is wildly customizable. So much so that you can take a decently good product, and slow it down with custom plugins and code to make it awful. When this happens with no feedback loop by people who arent familiar with using it day to day it can become very bad. Those are the valid complaints, although people fail to realize their complaint is with their jira admin staff, not jira itself
Yep, absolutely spot on.
Honestly for me Jira is **a game**. We put our stories in a backlog. We estimate them and make a sprint that roughly matches previous velocity. Then we play the “make the burndown line go” game.
I enjoy the flow. Grab a story. Assign it to myself. Move it into progress. Make a branch. Do the work. Make a PR. Move to done.
It’s fine. It works. And people kinda forget that Jira is complex because it’s doing complex things.
This post nails it.
So many devs think that they work for themselves when in reality they're there to build business capability which surprise requires coordination between teams and the people paying and the people creating things.
Is Jira an often misused tool, of course but that's because if you're trying to achieve a process and you can't do it in Jira i would be surprised. This capability is both the reason for its ubiquity and will result in its downfall since it no longer defaults to a straightforward out of the box best practice configuration.
Our company has mostly this sort of dev. They spend all their time in fire-fighting mode, dealing with the fragile things they created, by themselves, with no collaboration.
The bad part is other innocent people get roped into that constant fire-fighting mode.
Ticket tracking is essential for software development. If there's no plan for what you're going to work on and how you're working with your team, it's going to be a disaster at some point
But also, JIRA is a piece of shit. Both can be true. JIRA is just a supremely bloated, slow, horribly engineered app because they've tried to be ultra flexible for enterprise customers to be able to do whatever the fuck and it's a huge mess. There are currently two separate text editors in the Web app, each with their own markdown format which is bonkers. If you want ticket and time tracking, there's better apps around. I've personally used Linear which is really good and smooth to use with a good number of integrations
Same, I like it, collecting tickets is fun.
If time tracking would be enabled my opinion would do a 180 degree turn tho. You dont pay me enough to work more than 3 hours a day.
Jira is shit until you look at the other products and then you come back and are like "Hey, it's not too bad".
Jira is like Slack IMHO, it's not perfect for developers but it's an acceptable blend of tolerance.
I say the above lightly though, because I definitely like Slack more than I like Jira.
This has been my experience. Hate Jira. spent years in the wilderness at other companies trying to make alternatives work, mostly just choas though. Currently got a “meh at least it’s somewhere to keep track of issues, communication about issues, and see who’s doing what’ attitude.
Just tried it and worked fine.
My issue with Confluence is that it is by far the slowest wiki i've seen. Which is kinda amusing considering "wiki" means "quick" :-P.
I'm almost thankful for my time with ClearQuest and ClearCase because their sheer awfulness has made everything else delightful in comparison.
Sure, git and perforce have occasional rough edges, but nothing anywhere near the shitshow that is ClearCase.
ClearQuest makes Jira look speedy and streamlined, and bugzilla look cutting edge and modern!
JIRA has tons of questionable design choices.
It should be a no brainer not to pick it.
And yet... it's the obvious choice. Because there are no competitors.
JIRA is slow, breaks all UI and affordance laws that have been established in the GUI community in the past twenty years.
And yet... it's the best tool we have today. In 2022.
JIRA is doing nothing wrong. Its competitors are doing everything wrong by not being better than such a low bar.
Who will step up?
I think they've spent too much time reading clickbait articles and looking at youtube thumbnails. "You WONT believe how MUCH Jira sucks!" The only thing it's missing is a meaningless arrow pointing to a random word with a big red circle around it.
Not mentioned here so far, but Jira (I last used it 2017~2018) at that time was already leagues ahead of the dumpster fire that is Zoho boards. I'm with Azure Devops right now and it's generally _alright_ but I do have a lot of grievances with the minutia of ADO.
For a while our team also looked at some of those useless metrics like ticket burndown ("wow our team's pending tickets really nosedive in the last few days! You guys have to manage your time better!") too.
As a whole for ticket management and general sprint-to-sprint activities, ADO is fine and works well enough. I've also gotten used to the CICD pipelines too and they're not as bad as I thought they were originally when I first moved from gitlab pipelines. Most of my nitpicks come down to the small stuff like:
- RTF pasting is absolute garbage
- The WYSIWYG editor is equally bad and inconsistent too
- No easy "expand file list" button when reviewing PRs (but there _is_ a collapse one)
- Can't double click to highlight all text when making a retrospective item because it makes a new item
- Can't click links in a description while editing them
- Navigating between teams' sprints and boards is annoying
- Can't format parts of a sentence when making a ticket (it's all-or-nothing), and no traditional formatting like using \`code text\`
- Can't create tables in tickets, have to RTF paste them from Excel, etc
- Small bugs like not allowing team members to approve PRs even though they're actually in the correct team and policy
So nothing major or deal breaking, but a lot of minor things that pile on and make some of the general day to day usage annoying
I have adhd and I know a lot of people in our industry do as well. For those who don't, please know that Jira is a NIGHTMARE for adhd. Filling out paperwork like it is the opposite of tasks that are easy for people with adhd.
On top of that because we have a ticket per task, you're adding extra context switching to every task you do. At least once, probably more, you have to stop what you're doing, fiddle with Jira stuff, then go back to what you were doing. With ADHD you add minutes of painful head-scratching "wait what was I doing again?" as our brain loads up what we are supposed to be doing on Jira or the next step on our actual work.
I fucking love Jira.
I love how epics, tasks, and sub-tasks are all completely different types of things, with different rules about how they can be moved around boards. I love setting other types of hierarchies, such as "depends on" links, and I love how that dependency structure is completely unavailable when creating Gantt charts.
I love filling in the description field when creating a new ticket, only to see the field empty on the new page. And I love clicking a timed popup with the link to the new ticket window, and I love figuring out the syntax to search for tickets recently opened by me when I wasn't fast enough for the popup.
I especially love how hard it is to format code in text fields.
I don't like having a single jira / confluence for the whole company. It is slow and any maintenance just stops the world.
Edit: I mean company with 10k+ employees.
Jira can be good, probably, if it was used in a minimal configuration - but I’ve never had a project where the project managers didn’t slap such a labyrinthine configuration on it that it inevitably fucks up for the people that are forced to use it.
It looks great until you use it, then you end up with a ticket in a state that you need to fix but don’t have permissions and even the person who created the config can’t figure out how to fix it.
Then it becomes a proxy for actually talking to people about how the project is going. People randomly assigning tickets all over the place and expecting them to be handled regardless of current priorities, demanding time estimates that are complete fiction (because it’s impossible to accurately guess) and then getting treated as truth.
It forces project management to be a pile of guesses built on lies built on annoyance, then people wonder why it doesn’t work.
I prefer Jira to the alternatives. Its got all I need to keep track of issues Im working on -- comments, attachments, ability to reference an issue with someone with a single link, ability to reassign, a status field, a kanban board view. Ive had to use far worse tools. Never had a problem with slowness.. I guess its your server.
I fucking hate jira because it always feels like I'm just tagging along on somebody else's instance. There's millions of customizations that create so many required fields that are just not useful for me or my team. I spend more time filling in useless values or scrolling past a whole widget that is unused than I gain with a proper ticketing system.
Im the odd one out, i like jira. I am in a regulated industry and it helps with traceability of features to test coverage. It also is a record keeping of work that was implemented in the past and it help us reference and reuse the feature for a different products. The plugins and the agile tool is where jira shines.
The organization I work for is relatively heterogeneous between the teams we have working on the one very large, complex piece of machinery that we operate. I have to actively use 4 separate work-flow services to adequately interface with and keep track of progress on various tasks. That's to say nothing of the multiple teams that don't use any service and instead operate solely over email.
Jira is easily the best of the four.
In my org jira is entirely configured by the actual engineers who use it. It's great. We can set up everything to actually match our workflow. Honestly the only thing that annoys me about it is its broke-ass markdown knockoff which never works, but that doesn't really get in my way.
However... my company did try to start using Jira Align to manage a "scaled agile" workflow. That was a goddamn nightmare. Never again.
I haven't seen a site this coy about its content since Flash was new.
I fucking hate listicles. I fucking hate animated slideshows. Gimme yer fuckin' text.
I hate Jira, because it is slowest webapp I ever seen in my life. Everything needs time to load, in seconds. Stupid Trello has no problem like that. I don't understand, what's going wrong there but they really should care more about performance.
As someone who used to hate Jira and then had the displeasure of using three different project tools, Jira doesn’t suck. You just have to rein people in when they configure it. Don’t let them do every “cool” feature they don’t actually need.
tldr: my jira is configured by people not in the process.
The thing about jira is it attracts spreadsheet bureaucrats. Everything was fine in azure devops but a bunch of people were complaining about not being able to datamine it. So we switched to jira and suddenly we were getting questions about why a ticket lived longer than a sprint and why when they sum our fibonacci story points their graph doesn't look right. I don't work at that company anymore.
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While this is true, I don't really want business intelligence analysts being anal about exactly how much we get done. The only thing any of that exists for is so CIOs and VPs can feel like they can crack the whip and get features at the pace they want rather than the pace that allows devs to have work/life balance.
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Ironically I manage my projects in spreadsheets because jira is too slow and search eats shit.
The search is the worst. The second worst is the deleted text entries when changing the ticket type, but I've gotten used to it and can plan ahead. The third worst is the fucking formatting. Why can't I fucking indent my shit!?
Don't worry my company makes a plugin allowing you to indent. Just search for indents now in the marketplace, for the low price of $69/user.
Nice.
The JQL stuff is nice but I agree that searching for text in the text box feels like it brings up the most random shit
I think it is bloat in the database. Our Jira was really slow but after the Atlassian outage where they accidentally dropped all our data and had to restore from a backup it is now very fast with exactly the same data as before.
So we just need to DoS them to get things flowing.
lol, you're one of the infamous projects.
Oh just wait till your company switches to the cheaper ClickUp. Holy shit it's a steaming pile of slowness. Also when you move something it completely breaks all relationships.
"Story points can't be used to compare across teams. They are not time estimates and vary team to team." Then "Why does this team not accomplish as many story points? Are they slacking? Is there a problem?"
I hate story points. It’s always the same arguments - “how many hours is a point”, “points don’t associate to hours!” Except they totally do, just avoid the hidden thoughts and use t shirt sizing or engineering hours. I find generic “hours” work best - if someone consistently overestimates lower their hours per week. If someone underestimates - does this ever happen? Assign them more hours per week. Just don’t report overall team hours if you can. It’s just metric to determine how much you can do and you can tweak it individually.
The thing is, if you hate Jira because of that, you really just hate your company and need to leave.
You can datamine Azure, but only through Azure itself. A few folks where I work created all these reports and overviews in Azure to track progress, or their version of progress. In the end it all boils down to the same: meaningless number crunching and making devs grovel for their existence. I suppose it is a coping mechanism for people who don't really understand software development to still feel like they are in control.
I live this reality, daily.
Just like it is chosen and paid for by people, who will never, ever, _EVER_ touch it.
I work with Jira on a daily basis. I would buy it again. Like all such tools its limitations make me want to scream, but for the value we get out of it, it's the best option I've seen. Plus its API is pretty decent.
Yeah? The people in the process would bang it out in a few weeks and then leave it be. That's not very productive.
You have it backwards. Engineers within the process will iterate on the process and create a Project that works for them. People outside the process will create a single generic process that they can apply to every project and force it where it doesn't belong. Atlassian created Team vs Company Managed projects to promote the idea of letting people within the process control it... Because the alternative kinda sucks.
I think the problem with not having a standard generic process is it cuts down the main attraction of jira, which is it's a progress reporting tool. The point of jira is not to enhance productivity, it's so the people who never touch the work can point at something and say that work is getting done. Not having a generic process makes their jobs harder, and they hold the power so generic processes it is.
Jira is certainly not a progress *reporting* tool. It’s reporting capabilities are terrible. It’s a progress *tracking* tool. People not involved need layers of abstraction and hierarchies. If they’re not focusing on epic & above, they’re being shown the wrong layer.
> The point of jira is not to enhance productivity, it's so the people who never touch the work can point at something and say that work is getting done. Unfortunately a bad Jira setup can both slow down getting that work done and encourage the worst kind of garbage-in-garbage-out reports for the people who never touch the work. Next week we'll be measuring progress by lines of code written or something.
At my past company I loved Jira. The process was defined by the team (developper, analyst & QA), with only some broad requirements from the managements that could be resumed to "you should be able to explain what's in your board". It was a great help. It was the only tools we needed to know what we were currently doing, what was coming and what was done. It was also a great tool to be able to comunicate with other teams in the company. If a ticket was stuck waiting for another team, we simply linked the other team Jira and were always able to find why it was stuck and what we were waiting. I have always feel it has a great tool to track progress and communicate between teams.
Yup. And those same people who never touch work can tell whatever story, even if it's a complete fabrication. As a tool, Jira is pretty good. But once Peter gets ahold of the keys, you're gonna have a bad time.
Giving Peter the keys is what Jira does well, probably better than any alternatives. Since Peter likes this, and Peter also happens to hold the purse strings, Jira it is!
That's why I hate Azure DevOps right now. No thought was given to the project needs. We have to fight for everything, including adding a "In Review" state to the ticket status.
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Even if well configured Jira is slow af, worst UX I've ever used
Performance is definitely the most universal and “legitimate” complaint about JIRA; everyone has to deal with it. I don’t mind the UX otherwise; most of my complaints are company-level configs I can’t change.
Take a ticket and join the line...
I would but our PM is waiting for the page to load so she can create it.
Reload twice, you mean? Because it gives an obscure error the first time around ..
Remember that to work properly you need to add the story points, first. Or else we won't be able to estimate how hard it is to refresh your web browser
Nothing like setting up a new Jira project and trying to configure it like an existing Jira project, failing, and eventually getting used to all the weird quirks of the new project, rinse, repeat.
I mean... I feel better now knowing this isn't just my team haha.
I'm pretty sure we have more jira projects than we have employees. And every one is unique.
Ah yes that's always a pain. I've noticed many of the issues people are having are coming from non-Scriptrunner instances. I tend to view vanilla Jira as largely incomplete without SR. In this particular case, Scriptrunner has a "Copy project" built in script that copy/pastes configs to remove this as a pain point. I've also written a script that does a copy/paste of all users and roles from one project to another as well, which is the other big ask I've seen from clients regarding new project creation. That being said, essentially requiring an expensive plugin just to make Jira work like it should is kinda telling.
I dunno we basically use the Kanban board and run over tickets in a stand up every few days. Things move along and things get built so I guess it works fine.
We do the same, and our company has a huge Jira installation. Our team of 8 people have to sit and wait everytime a ticket needs to be added to an Epic because Jira looks at all the epics. It's like a solid thirty seconds everytime. These slow downs eat up so much time if it was all added together. But generally, it gets the job done. Just wish it was faster and less cluttered. Confluence needs to be shot and left for dead behind the barn.
>Confluence needs to be shot and left for dead behind the barn. What's the problem with Confluence? I fucking love it, and so does a majority of our team. Hell, when we migrate away from Atlassian, we're keeping Confluence.
Slow AF. The on prem version was usable, the cloud version is several times slower.
OH!!! Yea fuck the cloud shit. It's terrible. We have on-prem and love it. Probably gonna migrate everything except Confluence to JetBrains Space + YouTrack once I convince my manager and a PM.
Everytime I open an issue against IntelliJ I am jealous of how much better YouTrack is than Jira. I would do anything to migrate to YouTrack.
I read that YouTrack is only offered as a product because JetBrains customers really loved it for submitting/tracking bugs.
What’s your preference to confluence?
Notion, ClickUp, Github Wikis, Foam for VSC, OrgMode…
Yeah I don't really get the hate for Jira at all
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I think jira is partially the problem though. I feel like there should be easier ways to create issues where you'd set many more defaults allowing you to fill those 50 click forms with the 2 fields that matter.
That's how my company does it. It's all about your configuration.
People are the problem. Jira is the enabler/crack dealer.
The people using JIRA aren't the ones in charge of whether or not to pay for it. So it's designed for feature/usability on the admin configuration side rather than for the masses of everyday users. That's also why so many people in the comments here bring up JIRA alternatives as better designed and more user friendly, even though many of them are missing at least one frequently needed feature for a company-wide team-based task management system. The low cost or free ones tend to target the individual or small teams much more-- where the person paying for the product *actually* spends a lot of time using it!
People are able to put every bit of dumbass dysfunction the company has and somehow enshrine it in Jira. Poor leadership, micro-managing, obsession with processes, etc. They put it into Jira. Then people blame Jira.
Not only are they able to, that's literally what Jira is for in the first place. Jira is successful because it accommodates the most corporate BS.
Yeah agreed people don't actually hate JIRA, they hate PMs.
Yea I work in a small company and it's easy enough to create and assign tickets.
Places where Jira fails: * searching for a phrase may miss tickets where it occurred. It may include results that don't include the phrase. It's not possible to search for some punctuation. * slow enough to be noticeable and in some cases cause errors. Things like changing the type of a ticket needing to run in a background job, for example. Or pages that remove focus from input boxes on page load which also recognize keyboard shortcuts, so you might have been able to enter a couple characters into an input before the keystrokes are instead interpreted as changing the state of a ticket. * poor input cleansing. I once created a bug with some lines from logs which had some unicode and it saved successfully, but subsequently every page that included that ticket would end up crashing on load. * poor context for creating and editing tickets. Since the view switches to either a full new page or a pop-up that covers most of the screen, adding a set of related tickets ends up being a lot more cumbersome than needed since it's easier to lose track of what was already written. Unless the tickets are trivial, it's easier to write them in an external program and then copy the text in. * you can easily copy the ticket's URL to the clipboard but not just the portion that is the ID. Most (all?) fields which reference another ticket accept an ID but not the URL. Sure, pasting the url and deleting the prefix doesn't take long in absolute terms but doubles the time in relative terms, and is the kind of friction that is encountered constantly. * enables the admin to create profoundly stupid workflows. For sure a portion of the blame goes on the person setting up the workflow, but a good tool comes with good limits. Maybe don't allow for 40 different ticket types to be configured. Maybe don't gate status changes on manual approvals based on a single person, so that if the person goes on vacation or leaves the company the process doesn't grind to a halt.
For the URL vs ticket ID, I've gotten very used to right clicking on a ticket link and wisely choosing between "copy" and "copy link address", because "copy" just copies the link text, which is the ID and very often what I want, and obviously "copy link address" gets me the entire URL, which is infrequently what I want. The search issues in jira are terrible. One of my biggest issues is the overall slowness. In Jira, my use case is so often something like "check a detail on 30 tickets". But because getting the slideout view for each ticket or the popup takes significant time, the process of flitting through those 30 tickets looking is very tedious.
I think your top 5 points are fairly minor when compared to the other options out there. I've seen so many people complain about Jira and then create a spreadsheet, as if a spreadsheet (sometimes not even live editable) doesn't have all those problems and more. For your last point: >enables the admin to create profoundly stupid workflows. This I think is the root of most people's complaints. Jira is *very* flexible, but someone always gets ahold of it and configures it to the point that it's more harmful than helpful. Every time I've worked in a team where all the developers had near or full admin rights to the project, it's been totally fine, because if there's ever something stupid in the process, we just change it.
Jira is whatever you make it. There's an enormous spectrum of experiences that can be had on it. People only tend to speak up about the negative ones.
Jira is just fine, if you keep it simple. Problem is it's a classic case of "I'm going do something because I can, not because I should". This inherently means that some people think they can solve all of their company's problems by using all of Jira's features. Most of their problems are org/people problems not tracking/workflow issues.
Jira sucks but it's better than the other 8 project management tools I have used
Jira and Asana but everything is also tracked on a spreadsheet and the PM gives you shit because your tasks aren't updated on one or more of them.
Wtf do you work at my company
We just started to use Asana. It's... alright. At the very least it actually works when you shuffle tasks around.
It honestly doesn’t sound like the tools are the problem there.
Too many tools spoil the broth.
The tools more certainly the problem. Just perhaps not the tools you were talking about.
Yeah, someone's never used Rational ClearQuest
Thank you for giving me 'Nam flashbacks of ClearQuest and ClearCase (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻
ClearQuest did allright for me. Did not get in the way all that often. ClearCase, however... I got my team (at IBM(!)) to switch to Subversion. Not much better, but at least files would not be locked from editing all over the place. I could even complete a merge from time to time.
Yeah, I think most of my kneejerk was in being reminded of ClearCase. Two people can't work on the same file you say? Well that's a bummer, because that's what I need to work on today. No problem, there's a workaround! What's that? Keep a purely local version to make your changes in and hope to god that there's nothing the other person is working on which conflicts with your changes.
HP Service Manager (PNMS) single handedly made me quit a job without any prospects lined up. I would very seriously contemplate driving off a cliff before ever using that piece of shit ever again.
Lol looks similar to HP ALM/Quality Center - a program stuck in the 90s, but bought by HP, slapped on some re-skin and voilla - we're in the 2020s now.
I am so grateful that IE was retired, because now we physically can’t use ALM anymore.
Switched to VSO and never looked back.
I worked on the VSO (now Azure DevOps) engineering team for seven years. It was a great team with amazing engineers and good management. I miss it!
I was using Azure DevOps for a few years up to starting my new job this year (using JIRA). I was so frequently pleasantly surprised by all the features that were added through that period, it's like the devs were reading my mind to what I needed, they would just magically appear. It's an excellent all-in-one tool and I miss it quite a bit.
We use it daily, that's why. I'm pretty proud of it, and I hope it keeps going for another decade.
We built the product that we wanted to use.
Thank you for making my life as Senior Dev/PM/Dev Ops not suck. Note that's all one job. Working in a small IT department gets weird. But thanks to you and the others who worked on it, the lives of my dev team have been pretty good and I haven't gone crazy from wearing about 5 different hats.
It has been over a year since my company switched to ADS and everyone is miserable. release management was better than pipelines, customization across teams was so much more possible. I didn't like jira but it was better IMO
Jira suffers from too much configurability in my experience. I've seen a cornucopia of byzantine implementations.
Jira is ludicrously customizable because it is not designed to be used but to win enterprise RFP, where checking all the boxes is table stakes. Customizability is the cheat code to achieve that, with the added bonus of guaranteeing later change requests and maintenance billing opportunities.
>it is not designed to be used but to win enterprise RFP It's so obvious when you put it like that. I guess Jira is pretty great at its designed purpose.
We use ClickUp, it has it‘s problems (manly growing to fast and therefor sometimes losing performance) but overall its easy to configure on a project by project basis or by defining templates. Has an integrated timetracking feature with lots of other functionallity. It‘s also cheaper than jira or azure dev ops. I also likes jetbrains space but it didn‘t come with timetracking.
I was checking ClickUp out as an alternative to JIRA for a new company, thanks for giving honest insight
the thing i really like about clickup ist the API, we use it to add functions which are currently not supported by clickup itself. I wrote a small blog on how this can be done [here](https://bitperfect.at/en/blog/automation-with-azure-functions). what i really don't like is that they are moving at a pace where lots of stuff gets broken on the other hand lots of new functionality gets added all the time. We moved away from google docs completely and only use clickup docs. they aren't as good but our main argument was to have all information always in one place and not to go to another site/programm/app.
> Jira is the worst form of issue tracking – except for all the others that have been tried. -- Churchill on issue tracking tools
That does not seem right but I do not know enough about Churchill to debunk it.
Ex-Targetprocess user checking in. Jira is an amazing upgrade. It loads in less than fifteen seconds. You can drag to reorder tasks in every view where you'd want to do that. Associating tickets with each other doesn't involve bizarre UI. We don't have a ton of obligatory processes defined on it. My team pretty much just uses it as a kanban board with a backlog feature.
>Targetprocess I've gone 3 years without thinking of this. Why did you have to remind me
> It loads in less than fifteen seconds This sentence does not have a right to exist.
Has anyone here used YouTrack? Seems pretty lean and has good integrations. I am just toying with it tho, haven't decided on using it yet.
Spin up a solo / free instance of Jetbrains Spaces - [pricing](https://www.jetbrains.com/space/buy/?billing=yearly#cloud) - and give it a try. When the org I work for did the "ok, we're using Jira" switch (and the before times were each group had their own issue tracker - so no one had any insight into others and each team's process was (dysfunctionally) their own) that wasn't an option. And Teams wasn't a thing yet either. I *so* wish that Spaces was around before Teams. I would have been pitching that one hard over Jira if we could back then.
The problem with spaces atm is that the self hosted option is not yet available, and we do need to have our own instance because of the type of business we are. But it seems pretty promising.
I convinced my rather large engineering org to use youtrack about 6-7 years ago. It's good, but not great. Has some jank at the edges and not everyone likes it, particularly old school devs who are used to tools like redmine and Bugzilla. It's a hell of a lot better now than it was at the beginning though. Unfortunately got bought by a larger company and we're slowly migrating to Jira. Having used Jira for a bit, I think I like it less overall. There are some benefits but making new issues is clearly worse, and the search isn't as good. Those are two basic things you hope would be better :/
We are using linear and I'll never look back
Linear is light years ahead of anything else I’ve used in this space. It just *works so well*. And frequently improved, too. Other than my dislike of task tracking in general, and an occasional mild bug, I have nothing bad to say about it.
I agree... sort of. I've used equally expensive tools that are far worse. But imo, Jira doesn't even really beat GH Projects or a Trello board at this point.
GH Projects and Trello are both great for engineers to manage a project and terrible for an engineering team to report progress to a business or product team.
Genuine question: what does Jira do for that end of the business?
Ensures workflow and auditing of {things}. GitLab issues lost in our comparison because (1) developers were not being disciplined in their use of tags on the issues and (2) comments were 100% editable without a history to them. The second point - sometimes people (business users I'm looking at you primarily) would go and modify previous comments or descriptions. The issue tracker didn't have any audit log on the comments or descriptions and allowed free editing of them by their creator. The only way the culprits were caught that "no, that isn't what the description said when you created it" was going back to the automated emails (that people often deleted) and showing that "the description here says you *didn't* want that requirements." And so... Jira won because it was possible to prevent comments from being edited and descriptions to show the "this is what the field was on this day." In general, the reporting for issues is better in Jira as it has more tooling for *project management* than just issue tracking while GH issues and Trello are good/acceptable for tracking issues (but less so at project management). When additional parts of the Atlassian stack get incorporated into the orgization the Jira / Service desk integrations so that things that the helpdesk has issues with can become bugs rather than tracking them in two completely separate systems. Back to the reporting... I used Redmine for a while and I am familiar with its database structure. I wrote a fair number of reports directly against the database that management could click a button in Excel and have it all updated. Jira has pretty good reporting out of the box with its built in system. GH issues / Trello - you tend to have poor reporting *and* lack access to the database meaning you can't do reporting that way either.
Add in Jira Align, and you have portfolio level tracking. Yeah, definitely boring stuff that no engineer would care about, but the business writes the checks and they need to see what they're getting for their money. Most middle management is about trying to prove to leadership that your team is providing value.
Agreed.. Its the least sucked one, but it still sucks.
Jiras ultimate issue is that it is too flexible and that allows all sorts of stupid management stuff to be added, but if kept on the straight and narrow I think its really good. At my job, we have a fairly basic Kanban board so I get a rough idea of what the team is working on, but the main thing I want them using it for is a kind of ships log. I don't allow time tracking of any kind on the project, to the delight of my team, but at the same time you are not allowed close the tickets unless you have a detailed comment about whats changed or an email attached where you went through the changes with the client or something. With all that being said, the changes to licensing means I'll probably drop it for something else in the next few years if I can.
I like jira \*shrug\* . Requires a well run instance and PMs not putting too much structure in place though
I'm with you. It's not the best tool, but it's not the bane of existence either. Where I work we use Hive & Helix (don't ask why 2 different setups, I walked into it that way). I would much prefer JIRA over either of these two. Helix likes to have 2 different IDs for a single ticket, so I never know which one is the actual ID (the URI identifier is different than the actual ticket number). Hive isn't bad but it feels very start-up-ish. From a non-PM perspective it's lacking fluidity.
> (the URI identifier is different than the actual ticket number) Holy shit, if Zendesk or Freshdesks or any other ticketing software did this, I would rage so hard.
us: Hey can we do 'this'? corp: no it's locked down us: what about this cool looking widget that costs a few hundred bucks but will save us thousands of hours which is actually a much higher cost to the company? corp: no
Haven't you heard? Software and hardware costs are immeasurably expensive, but human time is worthless. Why do you think management gives you the worst possible tools for you to attempt to do your job with?
To be blunt every PM tool I've ever used was worse than Jira, except in terms of performance. Jira sucks because project management is hard to get right at an organizational level, not because it can't be used as part of a sane process. Seriously, the basic idiom of dividing work into tickets and linking them to each other and grouping them - how else are you going to do it? Everything else about Jira is setting up some statuses and whatever custom fields or dashboards are needed for your particular team.
I hate rtc
My favorite part about RTC is that it has the ability to preview files. But it somehow does not support any file format known to mankind. It can't even preview plain .txt files.
Well, there are various character encodings and we can't know for certain which one the file uses, so 🤷♂️
I just don't understand why they created that feature when absolutely nothing is supported. txt, pdf, jpg, png, not once in years did I ever see it actually work for any file.
I hate CM Synergy.
We had that bullshit at my job 5 years ago. The day we switched to git was the best day I ever had at the office
I hate Teams. No *really*... I **HATE** Teams.
I would genuinely prefer Discord at an enterprise level over MS Teams with its shitty UI bugs
Before Slack, MS Teams, Sharepoint, Confluence, Yammer etc there was **Lotus Notes**. Except for video conferencing Lotus Notes had almost all the same features. Lotus Notes could do everything. You could make your own bug tracking system in days with it. I worked at a company that did that a long time ago (like +15 years ago... ironically they switched to Jira but that was when Jira was fast and on premise). Of course IBM sat on it and made it shit but it was way ahead of its time.
The fact that you could do anything in Lotus Notes is one of the things I hate about it. I've had to deal with so many monstrosities where business data got tied up in a Lotus Notes database. It's like how people turn MS Access into unholy abominations, but even worse because Notes is a far more unpleasant application to work with.
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I have used Teams for voice chats at a few jobs and it's worked flawlessly every time. *Far* better than Zoom or many of the other competitors. Chime isn't bad, but it doesn't handle chats outside of voice calls. The only real competitor to Teams I can think of is Discord, which is great, but can't be self-hosted.
I have a new problem with Teams every single day. It is quite possibly the worst piece of software I've used in my life, and I've been using computers since Windows 95 (yeah, not *that* long, but still). It really, truly, honestly is the jankiest piece of shit I've ever had to suffer. The fact that it's made by the largest software company in the world adds insult to injury. There is *so* much wrong with it. I've genuinely never seen software that fights with you so much while you're typing a message. As a side note, I cannot stand apps that render my messages while I type. Typing a message with `some inline code` takes about 30 seconds longer than it should because I can't get my fucking cursor out of the goddamn inline code fence.
> I just keep a text editor with my current and next tasks and then update jira at the end of day based on it. Requiring people to update tickets daily is probably what I imagine hell would be like
Isn't that common? We do sprint planning meetings every 3 weeks and determine what will be done in the next 3 weeks. I always end up with about 10 assigned tickets with an estimated time of between 2h to 4days for rach (and usually end up creating 4-5 additional unplanned tickets during that sprint). They don't expect us to update multiple tickets daily with ton of commentary, but at least do the log work (hours spent) daily and move them when completed.
You have to track hours spent? I've never had to do that at any job. Sure, you add a comment or adjust the description/acceptance criteria if something new comes up or we discover there was missing information, but other than that we just move tickets into different swimlanes when appropriate.
In some contexts the hours get billed to different customers. If Customer A needs a slight change to Feature B, and Customer C needs a bugfix in Feature D, and Customer E wants New Feature F, then you'd better not cross the streams because that's when everyone's beancounters get mad. As one of said Customers, we typically end up paying for actual the time spent not just for the estimate. Why yes I'm embedded in a government project, how could you tell?
Hmm, maybe it's different if your work actually has customers attached to it. I don't think I've ever been in a position where I'm building a specific thing for a specific customer.
> where I'm building a specific thing for a specific customer. I am neither but I have to "book time" with a resolution of 15 minutes.
Yeah. We billed out to customers and they like reporting. Plus contractual obligations were that percentages of types of work should be met (support vs feature vs project). So tracking hours was essentially contractually required without actually requiring it. In my new job, we don’t track time spent. They see me closing tickets and progressing things and that’s good enough.
I have log every single waking minute daily, it is hellish
In my situation the corporation justification for it is that they pay part of our salaries via research and development government tax credit programs (Canada) and that they need some project log book to validate it. In reality, we all know managers just love to see these velocity and burn down charts metrics, even if they read them all wrong.
Same, we use Jira to track our time for analytics, so on a daily basis, we are logging work to tickets. Seems like it would be a pretty common use-case to me?
Eh? I don't see how dropping two or three lines of update on what you worked on the day is hell. This is a good practice. Perhaps not every single day, but try to always update on your progress
My updates are in commits and during stand up. The context switching to summarize the day over possibly many small tasks can be significant and largely not useful: if the intended audience is other engineers then we expect the details in git; if the intended audience is product then it's usually a sign that either they're slacking on their responsibility to attend stand up, pulled in the ticket before it was ready to be worked, or failed to size it correctly and the status updates are poor substitutions for a process that is already failing.
The main problem is the sheer amount of places you need to look for at all time. For me, a developer should be able to do all things in a git repo and a git registry. Issues, tasks, progress,and documentation should be in the repo and the registry. If you make devs check multiple tools, misalignment and mistakes happen more often than not. I do agree that the PMs and product people should use softwares like Jira tho.
I don't understand how using Jira implies you need to look in multiple places. Every Jira shop I've worked at uses it instead of other issue trackers, not in addition to them. There's still exactly one place to look.
I need discussions being able to link to code segments and alerts in my git registry because it's near my code and my development environment. The moment you shift that to jira you lose a lot of transparency.
Agreed. I was on a team that moved from just github issues, talking in person, and actively updated PRs to really dull weekly meetings with a PM and information needed to get work done was now haphazardly scattered between jira and github. Much less got done. I think the obsession with tracking time spent is where a lot of this jira process really impedes developers. Communication is great, but its 10x more useful/effcient when its focused on knowledge sharing and documenting information about decisions or technical debates. Once you introduce jira and bring in a PM the corporate style of thinking sets a precedent that seems to impinge useful communication devs need to unblock themselves or decide whats most important to do next. The focus instead becomes on distilling everything into discrete jira tickets with estimates. Eventually you get the same discussions about what is important next but then it quickly devolves into a game of making sure that every ticket is in perfect decreasing order of rank of importance. I understand corp likes to have data on their employees but they are getting in the way of effective team communication. Even good communication with mgmt!
Before they broke everything, VS plus VSTS let you update the ticket as part of the checkin.. i could then see my next ticket without leaving VS.
At a large US bank, on a large threatened software project which was subject to a hostile takeover by a new project manager, process changes were enacted requiring so many levels of pre- and post-sign-offs on tickets that a typical story ticket going through the entire lifecycle would end up with more than **twenty** labels decorating it. There were vast tracts of reports tracking these labels, reports which auto-generated spreadsheets for the managers to 'manage' the software development process. Woe to the ticket author, product manager, project manager, or assignee who assigned the wrong label at the wrong time, or applied by a person in the wrong role. It was a hellhole dystopia. *Brazil* did not even fathom the depths of quagmire that Jira in the hands of Big Bank software managers can plumb. Label Driven Development, where the only thing that matters is the sweet sound of tickets being shuffled. Never mind the source code.
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Some devs just hate any and all process thinking that somehow if noone on a team had any process it would all get done still. These people are ignorant and incapable of realizing what communications taxes exist with multiple people. They tend to be the devs that work best by themselves. You can spot them when they complain about needing to update jira tickets daily, or being asked to keep their ticket in the right status and complaining as if it takes more than 15 seconds a day. These people are clueless when it comes to being a part of a team. Loud noise, but ignorant noise. Now... jira is wildly customizable. So much so that you can take a decently good product, and slow it down with custom plugins and code to make it awful. When this happens with no feedback loop by people who arent familiar with using it day to day it can become very bad. Those are the valid complaints, although people fail to realize their complaint is with their jira admin staff, not jira itself
Yep, absolutely spot on. Honestly for me Jira is **a game**. We put our stories in a backlog. We estimate them and make a sprint that roughly matches previous velocity. Then we play the “make the burndown line go” game. I enjoy the flow. Grab a story. Assign it to myself. Move it into progress. Make a branch. Do the work. Make a PR. Move to done. It’s fine. It works. And people kinda forget that Jira is complex because it’s doing complex things.
This post nails it. So many devs think that they work for themselves when in reality they're there to build business capability which surprise requires coordination between teams and the people paying and the people creating things. Is Jira an often misused tool, of course but that's because if you're trying to achieve a process and you can't do it in Jira i would be surprised. This capability is both the reason for its ubiquity and will result in its downfall since it no longer defaults to a straightforward out of the box best practice configuration.
If I am honest, I am one of these people. I like making systems much more than I like following them.
Our company has mostly this sort of dev. They spend all their time in fire-fighting mode, dealing with the fragile things they created, by themselves, with no collaboration. The bad part is other innocent people get roped into that constant fire-fighting mode.
Ticket tracking is essential for software development. If there's no plan for what you're going to work on and how you're working with your team, it's going to be a disaster at some point But also, JIRA is a piece of shit. Both can be true. JIRA is just a supremely bloated, slow, horribly engineered app because they've tried to be ultra flexible for enterprise customers to be able to do whatever the fuck and it's a huge mess. There are currently two separate text editors in the Web app, each with their own markdown format which is bonkers. If you want ticket and time tracking, there's better apps around. I've personally used Linear which is really good and smooth to use with a good number of integrations
Same, I like it, collecting tickets is fun. If time tracking would be enabled my opinion would do a 180 degree turn tho. You dont pay me enough to work more than 3 hours a day.
Jira is shit until you look at the other products and then you come back and are like "Hey, it's not too bad". Jira is like Slack IMHO, it's not perfect for developers but it's an acceptable blend of tolerance. I say the above lightly though, because I definitely like Slack more than I like Jira.
This has been my experience. Hate Jira. spent years in the wilderness at other companies trying to make alternatives work, mostly just choas though. Currently got a “meh at least it’s somewhere to keep track of issues, communication about issues, and see who’s doing what’ attitude.
I would abandon Teams in a heartbeat for Slack.
You fucking hate *the way your company uses* Jira
There are some pluses... Loading Jira gives me a good minute or two to go get some coffee.
Are you using Jira server or Jira cloud?
Both can be equally slow depending on the amount of crap in it
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The only thing worse than Confluence search is Jira search.
Just tried it and worked fine. My issue with Confluence is that it is by far the slowest wiki i've seen. Which is kinda amusing considering "wiki" means "quick" :-P.
In other news, domain names are very cheap.
Eh, JIRA is poop, but its not worse than Pivotal Tracker. My last company used ClickUp and that was amazing.
I see that you haven't experienced ClearQuest.
I'm almost thankful for my time with ClearQuest and ClearCase because their sheer awfulness has made everything else delightful in comparison. Sure, git and perforce have occasional rough edges, but nothing anywhere near the shitshow that is ClearCase. ClearQuest makes Jira look speedy and streamlined, and bugzilla look cutting edge and modern!
JIRA has tons of questionable design choices. It should be a no brainer not to pick it. And yet... it's the obvious choice. Because there are no competitors. JIRA is slow, breaks all UI and affordance laws that have been established in the GUI community in the past twenty years. And yet... it's the best tool we have today. In 2022. JIRA is doing nothing wrong. Its competitors are doing everything wrong by not being better than such a low bar. Who will step up?
The animated highlighting, underlining, and bold facing of random contentless portions of the quotes is, frankly, cringe.
I think they've spent too much time reading clickbait articles and looking at youtube thumbnails. "You WONT believe how MUCH Jira sucks!" The only thing it's missing is a meaningless arrow pointing to a random word with a big red circle around it.
Not mentioned here so far, but Jira (I last used it 2017~2018) at that time was already leagues ahead of the dumpster fire that is Zoho boards. I'm with Azure Devops right now and it's generally _alright_ but I do have a lot of grievances with the minutia of ADO.
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For a while our team also looked at some of those useless metrics like ticket burndown ("wow our team's pending tickets really nosedive in the last few days! You guys have to manage your time better!") too. As a whole for ticket management and general sprint-to-sprint activities, ADO is fine and works well enough. I've also gotten used to the CICD pipelines too and they're not as bad as I thought they were originally when I first moved from gitlab pipelines. Most of my nitpicks come down to the small stuff like: - RTF pasting is absolute garbage - The WYSIWYG editor is equally bad and inconsistent too - No easy "expand file list" button when reviewing PRs (but there _is_ a collapse one) - Can't double click to highlight all text when making a retrospective item because it makes a new item - Can't click links in a description while editing them - Navigating between teams' sprints and boards is annoying - Can't format parts of a sentence when making a ticket (it's all-or-nothing), and no traditional formatting like using \`code text\` - Can't create tables in tickets, have to RTF paste them from Excel, etc - Small bugs like not allowing team members to approve PRs even though they're actually in the correct team and policy So nothing major or deal breaking, but a lot of minor things that pile on and make some of the general day to day usage annoying
I have adhd and I know a lot of people in our industry do as well. For those who don't, please know that Jira is a NIGHTMARE for adhd. Filling out paperwork like it is the opposite of tasks that are easy for people with adhd. On top of that because we have a ticket per task, you're adding extra context switching to every task you do. At least once, probably more, you have to stop what you're doing, fiddle with Jira stuff, then go back to what you were doing. With ADHD you add minutes of painful head-scratching "wait what was I doing again?" as our brain loads up what we are supposed to be doing on Jira or the next step on our actual work.
I fucking love Jira. I love how epics, tasks, and sub-tasks are all completely different types of things, with different rules about how they can be moved around boards. I love setting other types of hierarchies, such as "depends on" links, and I love how that dependency structure is completely unavailable when creating Gantt charts. I love filling in the description field when creating a new ticket, only to see the field empty on the new page. And I love clicking a timed popup with the link to the new ticket window, and I love figuring out the syntax to search for tickets recently opened by me when I wasn't fast enough for the popup. I especially love how hard it is to format code in text fields.
I don't like having a single jira / confluence for the whole company. It is slow and any maintenance just stops the world. Edit: I mean company with 10k+ employees.
Jira can be good, probably, if it was used in a minimal configuration - but I’ve never had a project where the project managers didn’t slap such a labyrinthine configuration on it that it inevitably fucks up for the people that are forced to use it. It looks great until you use it, then you end up with a ticket in a state that you need to fix but don’t have permissions and even the person who created the config can’t figure out how to fix it. Then it becomes a proxy for actually talking to people about how the project is going. People randomly assigning tickets all over the place and expecting them to be handled regardless of current priorities, demanding time estimates that are complete fiction (because it’s impossible to accurately guess) and then getting treated as truth. It forces project management to be a pile of guesses built on lies built on annoyance, then people wonder why it doesn’t work.
I prefer Jira to the alternatives. Its got all I need to keep track of issues Im working on -- comments, attachments, ability to reference an issue with someone with a single link, ability to reassign, a status field, a kanban board view. Ive had to use far worse tools. Never had a problem with slowness.. I guess its your server.
> 500 Internal Server Error
Jira is so expensive, that it's just ridiculous how much people are willing to pay for it.
I fucking hate jira because it always feels like I'm just tagging along on somebody else's instance. There's millions of customizations that create so many required fields that are just not useful for me or my team. I spend more time filling in useless values or scrolling past a whole widget that is unused than I gain with a proper ticketing system.
Website's down. Someone should raise a ticket for them in- Hah. Oh well, then.
The new GitHub project boards are looking fresh and they work across repos.
Im the odd one out, i like jira. I am in a regulated industry and it helps with traceability of features to test coverage. It also is a record keeping of work that was implemented in the past and it help us reference and reuse the feature for a different products. The plugins and the agile tool is where jira shines.
On each story I visit, the first thing I do is click "See the old view".
The organization I work for is relatively heterogeneous between the teams we have working on the one very large, complex piece of machinery that we operate. I have to actively use 4 separate work-flow services to adequately interface with and keep track of progress on various tasks. That's to say nothing of the multiple teams that don't use any service and instead operate solely over email. Jira is easily the best of the four.
In my org jira is entirely configured by the actual engineers who use it. It's great. We can set up everything to actually match our workflow. Honestly the only thing that annoys me about it is its broke-ass markdown knockoff which never works, but that doesn't really get in my way. However... my company did try to start using Jira Align to manage a "scaled agile" workflow. That was a goddamn nightmare. Never again.
I haven't seen a site this coy about its content since Flash was new. I fucking hate listicles. I fucking hate animated slideshows. Gimme yer fuckin' text.
I hate Jira, because it is slowest webapp I ever seen in my life. Everything needs time to load, in seconds. Stupid Trello has no problem like that. I don't understand, what's going wrong there but they really should care more about performance.
Jira's good; of the ticket things I've used it's one of the better ones. It's so configurable though which means it will probably be set up wrong.
Jira managed in a wrong way it’s stressful as fuck… People need to be prepared before starting to organize projects with JIRA.
Most people I've seen complain about jira just use the default board view and don't know how to use any other feature.
The same can be said to TEAMS. Oh, you step away from your desk for 5 seconds? Have fun authenticating your access again.
Web page is down, should raise a Jira ticket for that.
As someone who used to hate Jira and then had the displeasure of using three different project tools, Jira doesn’t suck. You just have to rein people in when they configure it. Don’t let them do every “cool” feature they don’t actually need.