by svikashk on 12/31/20, 8:46 AM with 506 comments
by SideburnsOfDoom on 12/31/20, 3:38 PM
It encourages micro-management. It encourages more and more process. It is the enemy of getting better at the DORA metrics, which requires streamlining process.
tickets in JIRA are not the work itself, never was and never will be, it is a LARP of the work, but it gets taken for the central thing. This is an illusion. Fixing a bug without filing a JIRA ticket is in itself progress. Moving a JIRA card without any other change is not. Yet the second is what's visible and therefor what's rewarded.
Any problem gets solved with "more JIRA " which stops working when the remaining problems are caused by too much JIRA. And yet they keep trying, because it gives "control". JIRA is a like metastatic tumour that will grow until it kills the host.
In case the cancer metaphor didn't make it very clear, I don't like JIRA much. Yet if JIRA were to die today, the middle management who live by JIRA would replace it with something else equally bad, if not worse.
Filling in missing features won't and can't fix that.
by Lazare on 12/31/20, 5:01 PM
Atlassian seems to make a lot of money, so I guess they're optimising for something that matters to someone, but from my point of view I have a simple process for evaluating tools:
1) Can I use it at all? 2) How many of the features I want does it have?
I'm pretty sure Jira would score great on the second question, but since it hard fails the first, I'll never know. And it's been slow for so many years now, I assume they have no interest or ability to fix it. And their slow drift towards cloud installs over letting people self host isn't helping them either since, embarrassingly, their cloud instances seem to be even slower.
(Incidentally, there's a lot of competition in that space, but I've been pretty happy with Clubhouse. I wouldn't mind a few more features, but it's good enough. More importantly, the UI is clean and snappy, and that hides a multitude of sins.)
by denysvitali on 12/31/20, 8:55 AM
The only bullet point I do agree with, is that Jira is missing an easy (or IMHO a minimalist / simple) interface. The tool is a mess, and the people using it are probably also using it in the wrong way, making the whole situation way worse.
Don't get me wrong, I like Jira to some extent, but its performance and messy UI are really making my life harder rather than simpler.
by tristor on 12/31/20, 3:56 PM
I actually like JIRA and Confluence and have generally had good experiences using them in multiple companies. One of the main things I like is the integration between the two, and Confluence's concept of spaces so you can have some things publicly facing and other things private, which allows you to use Confluence documentation as user-facing docs, which references JIRA issues directly for known issues, and can write requirements/specs/PRDs in Confluence and reference them easily within a JIRA issue.
The only real problem JIRA/Confluence have is being very very slow. They've gotten marginally better over the years, but they're still terribly slow compared to competing offerings.
by dyeje on 12/31/20, 5:56 PM
Jira sucks because it is unopinionated and infinitely customizable. As a result, everybody who believes they've discovered the perfect project management setup (spoiler: they haven't) is empowered to cook up their vision via an inscrutable set of customizations. This leads to a bunch of inconsistencies between projects and endless bikeshedding. I imagine all this dynamic configuration is also the reason their cloud hosted version is so painfully slow.
by JosefAssad on 12/31/20, 10:13 AM
That's not what I'm getting from this list.
Worse, almost all of the points (all maybe? Haven't checked) declare that something is "missing".
Please god no.
Jira isn't missing more features. When you make a list like this, some product manager at Atlassian is going to turn it into a bunch of scrum epics and jira will be even worse in 12 months.
by waylandsmithers on 12/31/20, 4:38 PM
Every project I’ve ever worked on, features are finished, apps and websites are shipped, clients are happy and pay the bills, yet the burn down just goes straight to the right and never down. Sometimes right and up if people added more tickets during the sprint.
We look at it at the end of the sprint and say ah well and continue on our way.
Then sometimes a PM type decides it’s a problem but nothing ever changes it.
by silvestrov on 12/31/20, 9:36 AM
2. It is dog slow.
3. It is dog slow.
...
When my team had an important as-quickly-as-possible sprint, we dropped Jira and switched to Google Docs as it was much easier and faster than Jira.
My conclusion was that Jira doesn't do much for developers that can't be done in some Google Docs/Sheets.
by DeBraid on 12/31/20, 7:23 PM
Some utils to add to `bashrc`:
alias jo="jira open"
alias js="jira show"
jos() {
ticket="$1"
if [ $# -eq 0 ]
then
jira open
else
jira open PROJECT_NAME_HERE-"$ticket"
fi
}
jss() {
ticket="$1"
if [ $# -eq 0 ]
then
jira show
else
jira show PROJECT_NAME_HERE-"$ticket"
fi
}
jqlf() {
jql="$1"
chrome https://__PROJECT_NAME_DOMAIN_HERE__.atlassian.net/issues/?jql="$jql"
}
alias jm="jira mark"
alias jcs="jira create --project PROJECT_NAME_HERE --type 10001 --priority 3" # create story
alias jcb="jira create --project PROJECT_NAME_HERE --type 10004 --priority 3" # create bug
alias jce="jira create --project PROJECT_NAME_HERE --type 10000 --priority 3" # create epic
alias jjq="jira jql" # custom query
alias jql="jira jql" # custom query
# example:
# jjq 'project = PROJECT_NAME_HERE AND sprint = 158 AND "Epic Link" not in (PROJECT_NAME_HERE-4695, PROJECT_NAME_HERE-4373) AND status in ("Push to PROD") ORDER BY cf[10008] ASC'by CraigJPerry on 12/31/20, 10:02 AM
Let me walk that back a bit - I have no experience of the cloudy version which unanimously seems to be derided as slow. Atlassian - you might wanna fix that. Like yesterday.
But server (& datacentre) editions - best in class for my money.
In terms of features, the Rally / Agile Central (did that just re-brand again?) rollup roadmap view is the only missing feature i crave. Atlassian should just merge the portfolio product into jira.
As for everything else - speed is absolutely fine if hosted well.
I tend to council people to try to use less features not more - often jira features are used to attempt to work around challenges that are best addressed by talking to people instead.
It integrates with everything, no matter what source control, build pipeline or IDE tooling is in use, there’s integration with jira.
The REST API is absolutely usable (mostly for workflow automation and analysis purposes).
by cratermoon on 12/31/20, 7:54 PM
by iainmerrick on 12/31/20, 9:56 AM
Apart from that, I think the only item on this list that really puts its finger on a key problem is #1, inability to manage dependencies between projects. You try to work around Jira’s problems by splitting the work into separate projects, but then they’re almost completely siloed, and Jira doesn’t help you connect them up.
The other problem I have with it is that it’s too fussy about the hierarchy of issue types. You have sub-tasks, stories, epics, and initiatives. Each one has special semantics and certain supported operations. If you started defining some work at the wrong level of granularity, too bad, because switching everything to a different tier is complicated and massively slow (literally a multi-page wizard, a progress bar and a confirmation screen when making a “mass edit”, i.e. a trivial edit to two or more issues).
Hierarchical issues is a good idea, because that’s a very natural way to break down and refine work estimates, but it should just be an arbitrary tree, not a strict and limited set of tiers.
Too much complexity, not enough generality. (And not enough speed.)
by anotherevan on 12/31/20, 11:10 AM
https://twitter.com/HackerNewsOnion/status/98160924222131814...
by stephen_g on 12/31/20, 10:00 AM
The cloud versions are also far more expensive and while I’ve always liked the software in general (apart from it being dog slow), a big draw was how cost effective the server products were. So I’m about to start evaluating GitLab, YouTrack, etc. to start moving these companies off Jira, Bitbucket and Confluence in the next year or so.
by Closi on 12/31/20, 9:21 AM
> When the users need the features from Jira and request them to configure the plugins for many application scenarios, which contribute to the overall complexity of UIs.
Becomes
> When users need features from Jira they request plugins, which contributes to UI complexity.
Not a criticism - just thought this might help!
by gregmac on 12/31/20, 5:11 PM
Really? I think search is one of the most compelling features.
I find most of the time when I can't find something, it's because of different terms used, such as searching for "schedule task failing" vs the ticket saying "job run error". (Usually once I eventually find it I just edit the ticket to have the other keywords I tried)
The UI for selecting advanced search is acceptable.. it's not the easiest thing - for example searching open vs closed on GitHub is an much simpler - but it also exposes a lot more of the fields.
Personally I use the text-based JQL interface most of the time. It's very powerful, and as the name implies, anyone that knows SQL will find it familiar. A quick example, an easy way to find bugs closed in the version you're releasing but that weren't correctly tagged: `(type = bug) and (fixversion is null) and (status changed to closed after 2020-12-02)`.
And search you do is updated in the url (easy to share with others), and even better, if you paste that url into Confluence, it turns into an embedded dynamic list. This is great for release notes, or making category pages of certain types of tickets (eg: all open bugs related to feature x, or all bugs older than 6 months with more than a few comments, etc). Yeah you can build reports with this, but I find these are more accessible and used when they're organized within a logical structure in the wiki vs buried in a flat list of dozens or hundreds of other reports.
by wintorez on 12/31/20, 9:15 AM
by Philip-J-Fry on 12/31/20, 6:22 PM
by tmaier on 12/31/20, 9:33 AM
Confluence and JIRA use a different markup language for posts and none of them uses Markdown (in any flavour), which I would also use to write in-code documentation, like in a README file
by KaiserPro on 12/31/20, 4:56 PM
I have used a whole bunch of ticket/project managing tools in a number of different orgs. By far the most useful is JIRA.
taiga.io comes close, but lacks the admin interface and multi project overview that jira has.
Trello is ok, but terrible for large teams, or large projects. Subtasking is a pain and there is no real concept of a sprint. its ok for replacing notes on a board, but terrible for recording state.
Some of these criticisms are valid, but compared the competition[1], I'd choose JIRA 7 times out of 10.
[1] dont get me started on the "clever" people that decided to make their own in house solution, kneecapping the entire planning ability of a 70k person org.
by waylandsmithers on 12/31/20, 4:41 PM
by kabes on 12/31/20, 9:01 PM
by ccwilson10 on 12/31/20, 8:33 PM
by camsjams on 12/31/20, 8:26 PM
I sense a lawsuit from Atlassian poised at Zepel incoming.
by noarchy on 12/31/20, 6:28 PM
Atlassian is basically the centre of the so-called "Agile" industry these days. Jira is just a reflection of it.
by yakubin on 12/31/20, 4:52 PM
1. When editing a comment, the textarea is tiny and placed in a pop-up, instead of in the page. Can't resize that to see the comment better.
2. After disabling shortcut overrides, the shortcuts are simply disabled, along with the default browser behaviour for them.
3. Refreshing a page resets scroll-status. Seriously, webdevs, stop hijacking normal browser scroll behaviour. You always make it worse, never better.
4. If your login session times out when you're writing a comment, you can't publish it, but the error message isn't clear about the reason why. There was some button in the error message that caused you to lose the entire contents of the comment you were writing. Happened to me several times after writing comments 8+ paragraphs long. It's infuriating.
by baxtr on 12/31/20, 9:28 AM
by cowmix on 12/31/20, 5:52 PM
by arminiusreturns on 1/1/21, 2:18 PM
The other problem with Jira is the Atlassian push into confluence that tends to go with it. Confluence is so infuriating. Oh what, you want to do a simple operation like copy-paste data from one section of a table to another? Fuck you. You want built in markdown? Fuck you. You want to embed github pages? Thats a plugin and an ordeal to get approved...etc
People always talk about how it's just a wysiwg and so its for the non-techs, but the thing is it's so specific and non-standard they are still having to learn how to use it anyway. Why not just get them working on github wikis or something?
Also: ffs, stop trying to do "smart searching" for me! It's literally the most useless feature ever, and has never returned anything close to what I was looking for. Yay for having to learn JQL just to do a semi-advanced search. How many query languages do we need to know these days?
by dig1 on 12/31/20, 7:10 PM
Anyway, from personal experience of working with large, distributed teams and (later) leading team that included developers, designers (who had no idea what software development workflow is), and electrical engineers, I have to say that still there is no replacement for Jira. And I'm saying that after trying dozens of alternatives.
Now, maybe things got changed in the last five years, but something where Jira still shines IMHO:
* Self-hosted, free for small teams, you get access to *every* release they made. All these cloud-hosted solutions sound nice until they close the shop.
* Almost infinitely configurable. Going from Jira to enter-your-favorite-simple-tool feels like going from Emacs to the chalkboard. Your CEO likes workflow X, sure. Your designer wants workflow Y, no problem. Your plumber used to Z, done. Irreplaceable when you work with the teams from different fields.
* Bazillion plugins, integrations, name it. You are still missing something, go and write a plugin in any JVM language you like. It probably will work for all Jira versions with small modifications.
* Management, CEOs, even front-end desks like it. Easy to sell, no matter the price. I had a harder time selling Zimbra (which is free) to CEO than Jira, because every CEO knows about Jira :D
by CivBase on 12/31/20, 6:30 PM
I disagree. What makes JIRA a pain is that it has too much. It tries to be a solution for every possible workflow and ends up being a slow, clunky, and confusing solution for all of them.
I personally think the best thing Atlassian could do is spin of JIRA into multiple apps which all use the same core, but have different interfaces designed for different workflows. Of course, that's much easier said than done with such a ubiquitous monolith as JIRA.
by Hovertruck on 12/31/20, 4:41 PM
by LeonidBugaev on 12/31/20, 7:59 PM
by fmakunbound on 12/31/20, 6:47 PM
I'm sure it has something to do with Angular or modern JavaScript development, somehow.
I'd rather poke my eye out than navigate around in Jira.
by hakfoo on 12/31/20, 10:13 PM
I regularly come across situations of the form "we finished Task XYZ a few months ago, but I want to come back to it." Maybe the ticket has an attachment we need for long-term documentation purposes or a test detail we need the next time we review the code.
Jira search rarely finds anything useful-- the S/N ratio is terrible with non-development tasks mentioning XYZ, yet ignoring actual XYZ tasks due to poor naming and heirarchy. I usually instead look at the code itself, see in the git history "This was modified in ticket 345675" and then use that to index Jira back to the info I want. From there maybe I can walk between linked blockers and sub-tasks to get what I want.
My pre-Jira experience was on Basecamp v1/v2. I appreciated the forum-style layout, because it tends to allow for a few key things: * "Search" and "browse" are both well supported use cases * Old content remains usable and structured, rather than dropping off a cliff after the last ticket closed. * Content can be grouped as it makes sense-- say you get a customer feedback item that touches on three eventual tasks. It would have to be (possibly sliced up and) attached to all three tickets in a Jira model. * It felt "discussion-first"-- the discussion of what to do and how we want to do it is central. This tends to archive some of the subtle choices and gotchas that won't appear automatically in a ticket.
I always dreamed of a system that basically added lightweight ticket/kanban model on top of Basecamp. I can see the value of tickets as a trackable unit of work, but it feels like this would be little more than a few tiny tags decorating a readable discussion flow.
by curzondax on 12/31/20, 9:17 AM
by tomphoolery on 12/31/20, 9:02 PM
I like Jira when I don't have to use it. For example, setting up GitHub automation so that changes from Git will cause tickets in Jira to transition to the next stage. Or, automating a transition from "Pending Estimate" when a Jira user assigns story points to a ticket. The automation features in Jira are far beyond anything I've ever used before (one might even consider it an "IFTTT for project management"), and on most teams I've been on, very much under-utilized. I can even automate starting the process of development when design is finished, as when the design ticket is marked "Done", the development ticket it's linked to will change to "Pending Estimate", as it's now possible for a developer to estimate how long it will take to implement the given design.
by fullstackwife on 12/31/20, 9:36 AM
[1] https://spartez-software.com/products/whiteboards-for-jira
by nicwolff on 12/31/20, 6:15 PM
Jira could become perfect in every other way, and would still suck if they don't fix this.
by gauthamshankar on 12/31/20, 9:43 AM
by AltruisticGapHN on 12/31/20, 7:03 PM
I remember 10+ years ago jira had straightforward tables, it was much quicker to add, remove, close issues. I’d open a bookmark to a page with a simple table listing of all issues assigned to me.
I don’t know what the heck is going on, now the ui is this awful "modern clean" style with popups everywhere, sidebars, everytime i look at an issue it’s cramped in a tiny column, or i have to open in a new page. The whole ui is so slow and clunky, you have to expand/collapse content all 5he time. All in the name of what? Is scrolling down a page so difficult for a user? How does Amazon make money?
by madrox on 12/31/20, 9:55 PM
Engineers are an autonomous bunch, and the best coders among us despise doing anything that isn't actually writing code. Unfortunately, like doc writing, there is more to being a good engineer than writing code.
by ChrisMarshallNY on 12/31/20, 10:57 PM
I guarantee that it would have had most of the folks here, whimpering under their standing desks.
It was the Tenth Circle of Hell.
It gave me a sort of PTSD, so that, now I'm on my own, I try not to write anything down, and, if I do, it's usually a small list on a whiteboard.
If I never see JIRA again, I will die a happy man.
That said, it is like blaming the asphalt for the eminent domain seizures for a road. It's a symptom.
by meagher on 12/31/20, 6:18 PM
https://height.app is also quite good
by inadequatespace on 1/1/21, 9:46 AM
by ozim on 12/31/20, 6:50 PM
We all suck just accept it and try to improve yourself and others point by point in that new 2021!
by locusofself on 12/31/20, 10:12 PM
I didn't really mind using JIRA to track my daily dev work, it seemed fine to me. It was annoying that each team had different custom fields etc and seemed a bit unwieldy in that respect.
by noja on 12/31/20, 9:34 AM
by arnonejoe on 12/31/20, 6:50 PM
https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIx5iu7O...
by ctrager on 12/31/20, 9:30 PM
by TazeTSchnitzel on 12/31/20, 7:09 PM
There is no “easy” UI for this. The problem to solve is merge conflicts, and Atlassian (rightly in my view) clearly decided that real-time collaborative editing of the draft beats forcing users to do merge conflict resolution when saving changes. Wikipedia takes that latter strategy and it's a huge hassle.
by andrewl on 12/31/20, 5:20 PM
There are so many systems out there. Right now we're also evaluating YouTrack from JetBrains and OpenProject.org (which is a fork of a fork of RedMine).
We don't want to have to move again any time soon, so while we're evaluating features we're also trying to predict stability and viability. To that end, when available, I'm including in our evaluation notes 1) when the company making the system started; 2) when the system was launched; 3) how many staff the company has.
JetBrains started in 2000, YouTrack launched in 2009, and they have over 900 employees. OpenProject launched in 2012. Both seem to be stable and under active development.
ClickUp has a lot of features and looks nice (we haven't dug into it yet). But they launched in 2017, and raised Series A funding in June 2020. So they're young. That doesn't mean they're bad. It just means they're less known, and have not proved long-term viability. On the plus side, it also means they don't have the 18 years of cruft in the system that Jira (launched in 2002) seems to have.
In my experience the right project management system can really help developers, so I always want to hear everybody's experiences, good and bad.
by kull on 1/1/21, 12:53 AM
by mkl95 on 12/31/20, 9:29 AM
by jeffreyrogers on 12/31/20, 6:43 PM
by LeonidBugaev on 12/31/20, 8:02 PM
by konsole on 1/1/21, 7:25 AM
by losthobbies on 12/31/20, 8:17 PM
by mongol on 12/31/20, 10:27 AM
by globular-toast on 1/1/21, 10:17 AM
by SkyPuncher on 12/31/20, 5:31 PM
My belief from seeing many organizations struggle with Jira is they have process issues that need to be addressed outside of Jira. Jira is simply the place where their process becomes visualized and put into place - so it gets blamed for the breakdowns.
Reading through this list, I can picture exactly why this user is having these complaints. Some of these a definitely UX frustrations, but many of these seem to be fundamental process issues or contradictions. For example, the website claims "missing easy setup" - while also listing a bunch of things that demonstrate the complexity of their Jira setup.
-----
tldr: If you're having the issues the author lists, you should probably check your process. Jira is doing you the favor of highlighting where it's broken.
by kazinator on 12/31/20, 9:20 PM
Simply adding more things to Jira that are supposedly missing won't fix it.
by etimberg on 12/31/20, 9:16 PM
by Marazan on 12/31/20, 10:46 PM
by kalyantm on 1/1/21, 6:20 AM
by G4BB3R on 12/31/20, 11:05 PM
by sgt on 12/31/20, 6:36 PM
1. It is slow
by danny_taco on 12/31/20, 4:32 PM
by ngrilly on 12/31/20, 9:27 AM
by offtop5 on 12/31/20, 9:50 PM
But if you find a company where they want to create their own ticket tracker in house, run. It means they're pennywise pound foolish
by giancarlostoro on 12/31/20, 9:29 PM
by ratherbefuddled on 12/31/20, 9:45 PM
None of the missing features matter in the slightest in the face of the completely unusable performance.
by egamirorrim on 1/2/21, 9:23 PM
by k__ on 12/31/20, 4:21 PM
Same goes for Asana and Slack.
by softinio on 12/31/20, 6:10 PM
What alternatives are people using?
by bserfaty on 12/31/20, 9:35 AM
by Aeolun on 12/31/20, 4:58 PM
by justinzollars on 12/31/20, 7:07 PM
by jcahill84 on 12/31/20, 10:56 PM
by amazonfurr on 12/31/20, 10:57 AM
by alexchamberlain on 12/31/20, 9:58 PM
by franze on 12/31/20, 10:00 AM
* Google Analytics
* Google Search Console
* Jira
So basically I wait and wait and wait to manage projects to make websites fast.
by harha_ on 1/1/21, 2:54 PM
by lacoolj on 12/31/20, 9:55 PM
by maxdo on 12/31/20, 6:00 PM
by postexitus on 12/31/20, 9:38 AM
by DrBazza on 12/31/20, 7:09 PM
And it’s slow. And the UI is awful.
by jimbob45 on 12/31/20, 9:19 AM
by JackFr on 12/31/20, 11:25 PM
by JackFr on 12/31/20, 11:27 PM
by wtf_is_up on 12/31/20, 7:50 PM
by iplaman on 12/31/20, 7:42 PM
by quattrofan on 12/31/20, 9:14 AM
by lome_co on 12/31/20, 9:31 AM