10 ms·

I Fucking Hate Jira (2022)

280 points by seabearDEV 3y ago

dang 3y ago
I fucking hate Jira - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31813957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31813957 - June 2022 (526 comments)
morkalork 3y ago
Confluence is where documentation goes to die.
- ben7799 3y ago
  That's cause it's write-only. It's like: cat $DOCS > /dev/null rm $DOCS
- fuzzy2 3y ago
  Where would it need to be not to die? Also, what kind of documentation? Technical? Or business?
  - wwilim 3y ago
    In the repo with the code, linked to from a sensible wiki that serves only as an index
    - morkalork 3y ago
      In the repo with the code. Seeing commits where both the code and doc change together is a sight to behold.
    - ta1243 3y ago
      That's how our conflusence is used. Some departments do stupid things like duplicating information. We use confluence to describe the requirements, the concepts, then point to the right locations. Take IPs, some departments have pages and pages with the same IP, subnet, etc in
    - expazl 3y ago
      You can do that in confluence.
    - fuzzy2 3y ago
      Okay, but again, which documentation is that? Technical or business? Because I do not see business documentation evolving with code. And depending on what the code does, business documentation could be much more important than technical documentation.
- Washuu 3y ago
  Confluence search is terrible and never finds what I want even if I type in the exact title.
  - gyudin 3y ago
    They gave a try fixing it a while ago before giving up completely
- slingnow 3y ago
  What do you use for documentation? My experience with Confluence has been similarly bad.
  - tomohawk 3y ago
    markdown, in the repo with the code.
    - throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
      Terrible experience for anyone who isn't already a contributor to that repo. Docs exist for people other than those that wrote them. The people that wrote them don't need to know the information, they already knew it.
- dingnuts 3y ago
  It's the worst documentation tool, except all the others. Seriously though, what is better?
  - sa46 3y ago
    I’ve been pretty happy with Slab. Straightforward shared wiki with a good editor, governance, and integrations. https://slab.com/ https://slab.com/ I tried using README files in the repo but there’s far too much friction to get most folks to bother. Google Docs tend to disappear content due to a lack of structure.
    - nomel 3y ago
      > I tried using README files in the repo but there’s far too much friction I have confluence links in my Readme, which seems to be a pretty good balance, since it's physically impossible for people to use a search bar in a wiki.
    - morkalork 3y ago
      Speaking of Google docs, I just now had the joy of talking to a co-worker while trying to figure out the source of truth for something and we spent 10 minutes thinking we were looking at the same doc when in fact we were not! The owner had made and shared multiple slightly different copies.
    - paiute 3y ago
      At my current job, i need to make a jira ticket, a branch, do a live review… all to change a minor thing in a README
      - neilkk 3y ago
        That sounds bad, but sometimes it makes sense to optimise the process for midsize changes. The vast majority of useful work is done in midsize changes. Lots of people like to generate a flurry of tiny commits but it's not necessarily the most productive way to work, even without much overhead per change. You can always bundle tiny changes together until it's worth it for you and other people like the reviewer to do the parts that don't scale downwards.
- circusfly 3y ago
  I much prefer Confluence to something like myriad Word and Excel sheets of uncanny versions floating around mostly unknown Sharepoint locations.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    At least you can search more or less properly in network folders. At my old work I usually left a search going from the root network folder over the weekend, scanning for some keywords, when I needed a doc none knew where it was or if it existed at all. There was a parallel documentation system from IBM that didn't work, where the canonical docs should be. But you more or less had to know the document ID to query it. So most documents were also in the network folders spread out between hundred project folders and meeting folders.
- ClimaxGravely 3y ago
  I loathe confluence, tried to get a markdown plugin around 2016 and IIRC the charge was 5$ per person at the company per month. For what it's worth it's a lot better than it was in 2016 but I'm still not a fan.
- amai 3y ago
  Random word documents in MS share point are the industry standard. Compared to that Confluence is a good tool with a great search.
peter_l_downs 3y ago
Agreed. Other than Linear, are there any task trackers that people enjoy using?
- Octoth0rpe 3y ago
  I liked pivotal tracker (https://www.pivotaltracker.com https://www.pivotaltracker.com) quite a bit when I used it at my last job, but that was 7ish years ago. Presumably it hasn't gotten worse. At the time I strongly suspected that it wouldn't scale past 30ish devs. That's more than enough for many people though, and that's assuming no improvements. I particularly liked that there are very nice cli tools for it: https://www.pivotaltracker.com/integrations/command-line https://www.pivotaltracker.com/integrations/command-line
  - stickfigure 3y ago
    Can confirm that Pivotal Tracker has gotten better since then, not worse. But it's strongly opinionated and if you aren't using something very much like the Pivotal process, it might not work for you. Personally I love it. FYI a dozen people would be a huge team at Pivotal. 30 folks working in a single backlog is unheard of. But I hear Pivotal became a different place after Rob left, so I don't know what it's like now.
    - quesera 3y ago
      Interesting -- I've been using Pivotal Tracker continuously for at least seven years, and I don't perceive much change in that period. I think this is a good thing! For me, the most impressive thing is that Tracker manages to be simple enough but not simplistic. I've used a lot of tracker products, and I don't consider Pivotal Tracker to be particularly opinionated. That might just mean it works the way I prefer of course! But we do not do dogmatic methodologies, and Tracker is flexible enough to add zero friction to our process.
      - latchkey 3y ago
        The way that you use PT is opinionated, not that the product itself is necessarily opinionated. What I learned from working at Pivotal (with @stickfigure actually) is that there is the way that Pivotal uses it and the way everyone else uses it.
BanazirGalbasi 3y ago
I Fucking Hate This Website Design. I get their points, but the way everything is presented is awful. I assume that these are comments on an article or responses in a conversation, but I can't see who is responding to what. Clicking "Next" to see each individual comment is also tedious, and it means I'm going to stop reading after 4 or 5 pages. I'd rather read a single page that I can scroll through rather than an "interactive" site like this.
- ghostbrainalpha 3y ago
  I don't understand why someone would make this?
- biddit 3y ago
  Pretty grumpy take... I read dozens of them and I found the presentation to be a fun approach. The creativity is welcome IMHO. It was immediately clear to me that these were comments scraped from various sources on the internet. Who they're replying to doesn't matter much. If you've worked with JIRA extensively, you've already heard many of these criticisms.
jmclnx 3y ago
Speaking to the choir :)
schappim 3y ago
Several of the complaints mentioned are over a decade old. For instance, I searched for "I **ing hate JIRA too, the interface is clunky and slow and makes me angry.," and found it was from this comment from Feb 2014 [1]. It is perhaps a bit disingenuous to not to include dates. 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1z07fi/my_company_wants_jira_i_dont/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1z07fi/my_company...
- prmoustache 3y ago
  It hasn't really changed in my experience. Some people complain that I don't update my stories but more often than not I just wait so much for stuff to open on Jira that end up doing something else while it is loading the page and forget about it.
- justinsaccount 3y ago
  I fucking hate JIRA, the interface is clunky and slow and makes me angry. - Me, 2024.
  - schappim 3y ago
    Haha, love it... I'm so glad that I don't work for an organisation that requires me to use tools that get my blood this boiling!
- jameskilton 3y ago
  Crap, clunky interface is ingrained in their culture. There was a release mid last year that changed the comments loading to be paginated to speed up ticket page load times. They loaded the oldest comments first... and you had to click "Load the next 10" REPEATEDLY until you got to the newest comments. I have since left that company and don't have to deal with Jira anymore so I'm not sure if it got "fixed" at all since then. It was the one of the most baffling, user hostile decision I have seen made to a product, and I'm sure someone got a commendation for "speeding up the ticket load page by X%".
he0001 3y ago
Jira tries to solve everyone’s problem. It tries to incorporate everyone’s idea of how and what’s needed to be tracked. I can just say from my own experience that the one that created the workflow and what fields that they absolutely must have to do some sort of follow up, have never worked as a developer or anything near a software project, and yet enforces all this garbage for their illusion of control. And yet they have none. Just because they are higher up in the hierarchy than the people that works with the actual product. And then there is all these managers that think that everything should be a ticket and all changes can absolutely map to a ticket. Or that everything is actually done by the guy on the ticket. I bet when I die and go to hell, my punishment will be to fill out Jira tickets and push them through the workflow. Edit: formatting and spelling
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Lots of things can be a ticket, though.
- dingnuts 3y ago
  > that the one that created the workflow and what fields that they absolutely must have to do some sort of follow up, have never worked as a developer This is all configurable by the JIRA admin at your org. You're not complaining about JIRA, you're complaining about someone at your company who set up the workflows. I figured this out after bitching endlessly about JIRA at company 1 only to move to company 2 and discover everything I had hated about the process was set up by my previous boss... I thought it was JIRA, but it was the org..
- submain 3y ago
  I share the sentiment and frustration of having to fill useless boxes. However, as a manager, things go south very quick if you're not tracking what's being changed and by whom. You won't know what's included in your release, nor if it was tested properly. You won't know who to reach for fixes after testing or even what to tell clients when they ask if a feature/fix was shipped. I hate overly complicated processes, but tracking things is essential.
  - deleted 3y ago
bschne 3y ago
I always wonder how much of this sort of thing is disdain for the specific tool vs. disdain for what working in a mid-to-large org. is like and the overhead it usually brings with it.
- datadrivenangel 3y ago
  The specific tool is often bad, working in mid-to-large orgs is often bad, and the two combined can be catastrophically bad. Poorly configured Jira on top of a poorly run large organization and you end up with an orwellian system that does nothing but punish people and squander productivity and human life.
- itronitron 3y ago
  Jira + Scrum is a soul crushing nightmare, Jira + Kanban is fine.
  - ch4s3 3y ago
    Until someone comes along and tries to put some scrum into your kanban.
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      Ahh, someone woke up and chose violence today.
      - ch4s3 3y ago
        hilariously someone hated my joke enough to downvote it, but I think there's a kernel of truth.
  - teeray 3y ago
    "but once we can get our estimates right, then think of all that we can do with these burndown charts!"
    - 3y ago
Beijinger 3y ago
Never heard about it. You mean this product? https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/ https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/ While I have not heard about Jira, Atlassian rings a bell. Not sure why.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
  Savor it while it lasts.
  - mablopoule 3y ago
    Reminded me of that tech-oriented colleague who never heard of an NFT last year. It figured out it was best for him to continue that way.
- systems 3y ago
  i wonder how common this is, and why havent you heard of it, specially that you know about this site hacker news this is almost on the same level as someone saying he never heard of subversion
  - Beijinger 3y ago
    Not sure why. But feel free to recommend a better tool, since I will need something like this soon. How about this? https://www.openproject.org/ https://www.openproject.org/
    - nix0n 3y ago
      As a developer, OpenProject is fine. Search is pretty good, so I assume the reporting is okay, but I've never tried it. We used to get occasional slowdowns, but someone threw more HW at it, and speed is good now. I've never used Jira, so I can't compare directly.
  - bscphil 3y ago
    People working on open source "hackery" stuff are probably much more likely to be familiar with Github / Gitlab issues, or Bugzilla. I can only think of one open source project that uses Jira; it's my only encounter with the program, and it's without question the single worst experience I've ever had reporting a bug to a project from a technical point of view. I'm not so sure about the subversion comparison. Maybe it's out of date - someone who got started programming in the last ~10 years has probably only ever used Git, whereas plenty of organizations use Jira, as far as I know.
wcoenen 3y ago
There is much worse out there. We were forced to use Rally[1] for a few years, and I'm absolutely thrilled that we're going back to Jira. [1] https://www.broadcom.com/products/software/value-stream-management/rally https://www.broadcom.com/products/software/value-stream-mana...
- glxxyz 3y ago
  I was at a company where we were forced to migrate from a simple lightweight internal tool to Rally, against my advice. It was much worse, and we migrated back within a year. Waste of everyone's time, and our issues got completely mangled and all the formatting looked like total garbage.
- tiltowait 3y ago
  We're forced to use Rally. I look at Jira with envy and longing.
iamacyborg 3y ago
I quite like Jira, it does the job I need it to.
andrewheekin 3y ago
Inscribing "Jira is the worst project management tool, except for all the others" on my epitaph
dopamean 3y ago
Maybe I'm lucky but I have yet to work in a place where any of the organizational or project management problems could be blamed on JIRA. Not even as like a top 5 reason. I don't love many of the tools I use day-to-day but JIRA is the only one that I consistently hear and read so much vitriol about. I think there's something else people are so angry about and JIRA is getting an outsized share of the attention.
- alistairSH 3y ago
  My "issue" with Jira is that it's a large, amorphous piece of enterprise software. So, there's a million ways to do things. And a million plug-ins to extend functionality. So, when I try to do something new (to me), and I search the web, the hits are frequently outdated or related to a plug-in that I might not have access to. Makes it really difficult to do anything that isn't part of my company's baseline.
kledru 3y ago
When it comes to JIRA, I agree, but I find Conflunce to be pretty good tool. Unfortunately, most of the people using it are not very good at writing documents or organizing knowledge in general :)
more_corn 3y ago
The thing I fucking hate about jira is that it’s a gateway drug for confluence. Jira doesn’t actually bother me. Confluence is a tool of satan.
stillbourne 3y ago
Jira is one of those tools where infinite configurability leads to infinite complexity.
annoyingnoob 3y ago
We are going to need a story for that. Be sure to set a good estimate of your effort in the form of story points. Use the Fibonacci sequence to pick the difficulty level for your story points. Your manager will then arrange your stories in priority order, Stories must be worked in priority order. At review time the number of stories and the number of points per story counts. Hurry up now.
- blueskythinking 3y ago
  Story points represent complexity, not difficulty. We also aim for a certain amount of story points per sprint. After 13 we leave the Fibonacci sequence and just double them. The entire team must vote on story points simultaneously to avoid affecting each other’s opinions, then must discuss the votes until we agree on a number. Stories that have sat too long in the backlog need re-pointing. Voting is now done with post-its in Miro, just to be modern. Things are sometimes stories, sometimes epics, and sometimes tasks or sub tasks. No one knows why, nor have they found a good way to integrate them all into The Workflow.
  - circusfly 3y ago
    At some places, any story higher than 5 gets split, an Epic is created and the 2 (or more) new stories are added to the new epic. I really don't get the online disdain for JIRA unless it's Microsoft employee astroturfers, almost as bad as Jetbrains and Red Hat astroturfers.
    - blueskythinking 3y ago
      Ah, that explains why I keep being asked to split a complex feature into pointless pieces that don’t stand alone. No wonder we need so many team hours in sprint planning, to keep track of them all.
      - circusfly 3y ago
        No system is perfect for sure. It's a rule of thumb. If it doesn't fit then stick with the really large story that simply cannot be broken down into manageable chunks but it should be a super rare corner case that some piece of work is so huge yet atomically consistent that there is absolutely no human way to break it down, at all, in any way shape or form.
hkchad 3y ago
The issue w/ jira is usually the people running it. Jira will let you customize just about every aspect of it, this typically leads to a garbage experience.
- web3-is-a-scam 3y ago
  The only thing worse than Jira managed by an obsessed micromanaging manager/Jira admin is when they leave and you’re left with their godforsaken configuration that everyone hates and nobody can change.
- tomohawk 3y ago
  But this is exactly the problem with Jira. It enables overachieving in doing tickets, which should never be a goal, to the detriment of things that are actual goals.
kstrauser 3y ago
I wrote “Jira Is a Code Smell”: https://honeypot.net/post/jira-is-a-code-smell/ https://honeypot.net/post/jira-is-a-code-smell/ Short version: Jira, in a vacuum, is neither great nor awful. It just is. But it has a complication that makes managers I want to work for dislike it, while strongly appealing to managers I don’t want to work for. That’s not universally true, I’m sure. However, it’s been my experience.
- kagevf 3y ago
  > But it has a complication that makes managers I want to work for dislike it, while strongly appealing to managers I don’t want to work for. I think that could also be described as Jira gives people who don't really have anything to do, something to do, but for those who are blessed with an abundance of work, Jira can be unnecessary overhead.
- Supermancho 3y ago
  My primary problem with JIRA, is that there is very little support for dependency trees. I have tickets X and Y linked to A,B,C,D and nothing but an ad-hoc way of determining how they are related. A visualization and tool to assign places in a tree, are part of what keeps JIRA from being excellent...ok that AND the horrid UX.
  - n4r9 3y ago
    If Jira could take a dependency tree and estimates against each item and build out a timeline and display it like a Gant chart, that would be incredible. Even better, factor in employee working hours per week and bank holidays. Even better, dynamically update the timelines based on estimate updates, delays in external dependencies, or sick days. But actually my biggest grievance is the terrible search function. You can search for the literal title of an issue and it won't come up in the results.
    - neilkk 3y ago
      Didn't our whole software industry come to a consensus to stop doing things like this because the results were fundamentally inaccurate and the invariable outcomes were stakeholders feeling hard done by and/or ICs being victimised by middle managers?
simmanian 3y ago
People who complain about Jira from a user perspective should try managing an instance - hundreds of people filing tickets to change specific configurations for their project and the right knobs and levers are so difficult to find that you end up filing tickets to engage Atlassian support so they can tell you where those settings are.
siggalucci 3y ago
You and me both. I compare it to laundry though, I hate doing it but it’s necessary.
greencore 3y ago
You don't hate Jira, you hate capitalism
- mablopoule 3y ago
  No. Working on an efficient and product-oriented company can be a joy, and 100% capitalist. Working projects that are just politically driven, or where process took over common sense, that's depressing, capitalism or not.
mvdtnz 3y ago
> If we don’t kill the staff at Atlassian, they’re gonna kill us. What the fuck is this? I don't care how much you dislike a software package, this is not ok to say. Regards, an ex-Atlassian staff member.
- circusfly 3y ago
  Agreed, doesn't seem like mods should even allow the link to be posted on a respectable site like HN.
mrbombastic 3y ago
I really don’t understand the disdain for jira, it is not great but mostly fine. Basically every other tool I have used has been worse. Heard good things about Linear but have a hard time believing that the effort to switch from jira to linear would be worth it for an org.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
throwanem 3y ago
Jira's much more a toolbox than a tool. If you have someone with the knowledge to use what's in the toolbox and the scope to build flows that support how work is done in your org, you'll love Jira, because it'll work far better for you than anything else could. If you don't have someone like that, or if you're small enough not to want or need that yet, then you'll fucking hate Jira.
- rib3ye 3y ago
  From the content of the post, it sounds Jira got used as an excuse to not interface directly with Eng. Stupid move, for any org. I have tried all the Jira clones, and Jira is the only thing that doesn't try to turn PMing into a video game for lazy micromanagers... if you don't let it become that.
tomohawk 3y ago
Jira and the company's other offerings are designed to be sold, not used.
tootie 3y ago
I got two slides in before I disagreed with everything. JIRA does not emphasize how over why. It literally just has a text box for a description. What you write is up to you. JIRA does not discourage in-person conversation. JIRA is there to document conversations and it's incredibly good at it. Any PM tool that doesn't allow threaded comments is dead to me. I've never spent more than like an hour training anyone on JIRA and have used it successfully for many, many years.
globular-toast 3y ago
The worst thing is you just can't get rid of it. You might try suggesting a simpler tool like Gitlab, but because Jira does absolutely fucking everything there will be one thing someone just can't live without and makes the alternative unviable. Of course if the simpler tool was used from the start nobody would miss that feature. I personally just my own backlog/todo system (both for work and non-work stuff) and consider Jira usage a necessary evil part of the job. Hopefully I'll someday work somewhere uninfected.
Xiol32 3y ago
Could be worse, you could be using Azure Devops.
ndjshe3838 3y ago
How do you avoid that problem where you have 30 random fields that are only relevant to other teams/projects It gets ridiculously bloated
scott_w 3y ago
I don’t hate Jira but I can see why people do. I’ve seen some pretty rubbish looking configurations (and done one or two myself!) so it’s definitely a giant foot gun. That said, when it’s bad it’s because the company is trying to be too clever with it. If it’s used how Atlassian recommends, it works fine. If not, you have a lot of pain. I can’t blame Atlassian too much for their customers, either. The customer is always right.
djha-skin 3y ago
I am more interested in the CSS/JS they're using to do the highlighting and the underlining. Does anyone know the library or what's going on?
- strunz 3y ago
  A quick look through the source brought me to https://roughnotation.com/ https://roughnotation.com/
profmonocle 3y ago
I used Jira at my old job and didn't care for it. At my new job I have to use Procore half the time. I can't tell you how much I miss Jira.
lolpanda 3y ago
I've used many tasking tools in my previous startups, Asana, Phabricator, Jira, Shortcuts... I think I liked Phabricator because it's flexible and not scrum like when you manage projects. I can see why people hate Jira. Jira is the only tool I know that has proper permission and visibility controls.
et1337 3y ago
The problem with JIRA and its ilk is that they try to do bug tracking, planning, and historical data all in the same tool, when those are really separate problems. Have a bug? JIRA makes perfect sense, you have a ticket with comments, it keeps track of how long it's been around, it can automatically move the bug through a process, etc. All these tools started out as "bug trackers" after all. Trying to plan future work? What I usually want is some kind of lightweight graph tool to figure out task A unblocks task B, etc. This graph changes a lot over time, with tasks merging and splitting apart. I've wasted a lot of time trying to enter all this in tickets. Want to know about work that's already completed? I would never look at JIRA. Look at your Git forge. Pull requests should have proper descriptions. The Git history will always be more accurate and detailed than a bunch of JIRA cards. So basically, use JIRA for bug tracking, Git/Github/Gitlab for historical tracking, and I'm not sure what to use for planning. Honestly I've been reaching for Excalidraw recently.
- nomel 3y ago
  JIRA includes integration for Github Enterprise. If a commit message or branch references an issue number, it will automatically be included in that JIRA issue.
jensenbox 3y ago
Never going back - Linear is my new god: https://linear.app/ https://linear.app/
roskoez 3y ago
Still beats Trello though. (No really, Trello is just Jira with cuter, slower menus)
HenryBemis 3y ago
Confluence + JIRA have made my life sooooooooo easy.. It's a pain in the ... to control/maintain the dictionary/keywords. So if the admins are doing a good job, it's a bliss. On top of that, I can create a quick form in Confluence (with some intelligence/dependencies) and enabling/disabling/showing/hiding other options, sections, questions, etc. No complains from either products here. Are they perfect? No. What is?
rozenmd 3y ago
I love to use Jira as an example of why focusing on the buyer is important (since these days, users don't choose to buy Jira as much as say, Linear). Of course the idea is to make a good product that folks like to use, but it's surprising that you can succeed by knowing what buyers want.
inferense 3y ago
Here's a simple way to avoid it, and have your personal knowledge base integrated https://acreom.com/bye-jira https://acreom.com/bye-jira
circusfly 3y ago
I guess I'm unique, I like JIRA.
akudha 3y ago
Most people shit on Jira, I guess it deserves it. But what is the alternative? I tried a bunch of tools couple of years ago. They were all as bad as Jira or worse. I dunno if the situation has changed since then, but I would bet it hasn’t changed much
harry8 3y ago
The people who make the purchase decision to pay Atlassian are a tiny fraction of those using the tool. The rest have no say in the choice that results in sales dollars. Atlassian can treat this majority with contempt because their only option is to bitch &/or quit which is a very limited amount of power. So Atlassian does treat the overwhelming majority of its users with total contempt and this is financially rational. Right up until Atlassian and Jira become synonyms for everything bad amongst the overwhelming majority of people who have encountered it. About when "Jira-free workplace" goes on job ads. Which has got to be a pretty good strategy by now. Anyone seen it yet?
giovanni_or2 3y ago
Based
glial 3y ago
I thought I hated JIRA until I moved to other companies that don't use it. One company allowed each team to manage tasks however they liked - and therefore each team had a different method. Other companies tried to force Trello or Asana into software engineering workflows. I now think of JIRA wistfully.
neaumusic 3y ago
I worked at Smartsheet for a while, and it can compete with Jira for most cases (we used Smartsheet rather than Jira internally)
noddingham 3y ago
Jira needs an admin to help manage the configuration. It's like a Swiss army knife and the reason many teams hate it is because they don't have an admin helping them get what they need out of it and keep the rest of the tool out of the way. The flexibility is both a blessing and curse. If you don't like Jira it's likely your configuration is shit, or your process is shit, or both.
- sodapopcan 3y ago
  This, yes, but it's also sllllllow. I'm assuming this is due to the high configurability (all those options must be a pain to cache) but that is just a guess. In any event, I moved to a company that used Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse) and it was crazy fast! Like, every action was sub 100ms. While it worked very similarly to how my previous company had configured Jira, I found myself missing some stuff, mostly Jira's backlog. My current company uses Zoho and its "Projects" module is a similar but different pain from Jira. It also suffers from being way too configurable.
bern4444 3y ago
Eh - I like Jira or rather I don't dislike it. My team has done a lot of work to lean into the tool IE well defined issues, epics, tickets, t shirt sizing for pointing via 1, 3, 5, etc. There is lots that can be improved for sure. With this system, my team, in addition to any one else at the company, is able to click into our JIRA board and get a very high level to a very low level understanding of what we are working on. This allows for very clear reporting structures and ensures our goals are on track with those of the company's. This also makes outcomes more measureable which is exceptionally helpful for reviews. At the end of the year or halfway through I can go in and say: I worked on these 4 epics that are part of these two Issues which serve company goals A, B, and C. I completed x% of the tickets for each of these epics, led this entire other epic which was completed on time etc etc. Where we run into issues is when there is a ticket that has to move between boards. The ideal situation is we just move the ticket from board to board as needed but based on the user they may or may not have permissions and have to open a new ticket linking it to the previous one. Not ideal but that's up to us to resolve to make sure the right people have the right permissions. We ignore all the analytics IE burn down and friends. Those are useless.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
We don't hate JIRA. We hate what JIRA admins do with it (former JIRA admin, here). It's entirely possible to write a simple, elegant, issue tracker in JIRA. I have yet to see one. I am ashamed to say that I never made one.
otterley 3y ago
So.... what's better than JIRA? (Serious answers only, please.)
- taocoyote 3y ago
  In my personal experience, Excel. JIRA is a tool, it doesn't do the work for you. If someone knows how to organize, plan and track a project really well, the tool used doesn't matter as much.
- dlandis 3y ago
  GitHub issues and projects
throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
The only valid reasons to hate Jira or Confluence are when you work for a company that has no governance structure for them. You do have to use the tools correctly for them to not suck. This is true of all tools. When you learn how they are supposed to be used, and use them that way, they work really well. Sadly I have only met three people in my entire career who did so. Their job titles were scrum master, release manager, and project manager. They had to learn how to use the tools because that was their job. And so they did. They could do literally anything we asked them to. They showed us all kinds of amazing things we didn't know we could do. All because they took a few hours of training and read the docs. That's when I learned that my own parroting of "I hate Jira" was just my own ignorance showing, and I grew up a bit. I really like Confluence now; I didn't even realize it was a Wiki before.
robofanatic 3y ago
Its not as bad as SharePoint
vinaypai 3y ago
In my experience, Jira isn't great out of the box but it's pretty good if you take a few hours to understand how to configure workflows, field configurations, forms, and boards. For example, at my last company I had the development project configured with about a dozen different ticket states, but you created a ticket with a simple form with the title as the only mandatory field but there were optional fields for details and screenshots. Developers could move a ticket into "in progress" or "can't reproduce". The latter transition showed a form with a mandatory explanation field, and it would automatically get assigned back to the person who created the ticket. On completing the ticket, the developer has to put in a pull request and can only moves it to the Code Review state and had to pick a different developer to assign it to. It sounds a bit tedious when you describe it but in practice everyone worked off a board with three or four columns appropriate to their role. They move tickets to the right to advance them or to the left to reject them. There were also automated transitions triggered by things like CI tests, deployment etc.
beryilma 3y ago
The tool (Jira) is not the problem. The "tools" (aka PM and process people) are the problem. In my experience, the people who are given the responsibility and power to build "systems" and processes are usually least qualified to build the said system as they usually have no experience in and understanding of what it will mean to be working under the system. This is akin to the customer vs. user dichotomy in software development, where things are build for the customer with often detrimental consequences for the actual user. In considering tools and processes, I believe in discussing each individual decision and process step to death by considering secondary and even tertiary consequences. Yet people making such decisions are not in a position to evaluate such consequences since they have no such understanding, capability, or desire. This would make decision making slow when enforcing tools to an entire development organization. But, decision making should be slow and deliberate. Otherwise, as I have seen in my own company, we would be jumping from tool to tool per the latest fashion of the day. I've also seen this with the mess of WebEx, Zoom, Teams way of having online meetings, where tools keep changing for the sake of some perceived benefits with no real clear improvements.
neilv 3y ago
Jira has some merits, but its most common uses are for companies in which the priority is to look busy (e.g., growth startups, inefficient established companies). For early startups that can't rely upon VC-growth appearances and shotgun-approach hiring alone, I propose a complete selection of tools, including a substitute for Jira: 1. Get GitLab. Maybe hosted initially, but eventually self-hosted if you stay in business long enough. (a) Do code in GitLab Git. Eventually including mirroring and auditing third-party dependencies (but your first few months of prototyping you'll probably be playing third-party package system roulette, and maybe even piping curl into bash from random offshore file-sharing sites run from countries without extradition treaties). (b) Do project management and issue-tracking in GitLab Issues, with the Boards and the structured tags, for something Kanban-ish. (And someday someone will make great integrated Gantt.) (c) Do engineering docs in Markdown files in (GitLab) Git when you want the docs versioned alongside the code. Whether it's embedded API docs/comments, or standalone Markdown documents. (d) Do all remaining internal documentation in the crappy-looking GitLab Wiki. Emphasize low-friction, teach people how wikis are supposed to be used, and make this this canonical go-to from which all other information can be found (including those engineering docs that are in with the code). Even notes on nearby restaurants and nostalgia can go into the wiki -- you're an early startup, enjoy the efficiency and flatness and coolness while you can. Discourage anything that looks like siloing, fiefdom, staleness, BS, etc. It goes into the wiki unless it should be branched&versioned with code. 2. Tell everyone: Everything Goes Into GitLab. 3. Unfortunately, you also need videoconf and text chat. Useful non-ephemeral data from these gets captured in GitLab, probably into the Wiki. (For example. wiki page "2024-02-14 Cat Affordances Meeting", which started in advance of the meeting with an "Agenda" section. Then, during the meeting, was put up on the screen and had a "Notes" section quickly appended. Saved, done, linkable, findable, unpolished, sufficient.) 4. Don't add more docs&comms tools/SaaSes until someone can say why it can't just go into GitLab. Don't even spend time looking into this unless you're actually feeling pain from "Everything goes into GitLab". 5. If someone ignores the rules and starts putting company data into some random other SaaS (like "digital consumer natives" tend to do), have a thoughtful talk with them about Everything Goes Into GitLab and how they feel about that. While in parallel another employee deletes the SaaS account with extreme prejudice, blocks the SaaS in the company firewall, and posts a picture of the SaaS's head on a stake in the startup's kitchenette as a warning to other SaaSes. 6. If the startup is successful, there will be plenty of time for some Vice President of Procurement, who has little idea how people work, much less how they could be working effectively, to be wined&dined by an enterprise sales representatives, and to buy loads of enterprise licenses of Ass-sauna, Jeers-a, Effluence, BS Screams, etc. Only then will you realize how good you had it before, with your early startup, and you didn't appreciate it nearly enough. You will suffer until a vesting milestone, consult with your tax accountant, and then make your escape. To do your own early startup, where the first thing you do will be to proclaim: Everything Goes Into GitLab
deleted 3y ago
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jongjong 3y ago
I feel like Jira is OK but definitely I prefer Trello. I also prefer the kind of project development approach which is suitable for Trello. The unfortunate reality though is that almost everything we consume nowadays is pushed onto us without our consent.
mathiasrw 3y ago
Sounds like the real complaint here is not about Jira but about people using Jira wrong, because they dont understand how you facilitate a productive environment for the lifecycle of the delivery across product, design, QA and developers of different stacks.
freitzkriesler2 3y ago
I like jira, when it is used exactly the way atlassian wants you to use it. If you try and do anything outside of that use case, its limitations become glaringly obvious. And companies very often use it in a way that it is not supposed to be used which then requires expensive cloud add one which bloat the monthly cost.
ClimaxGravely 3y ago
Within the last 2 weeks Jira has begun to do some constant refresh cycle that is killing me (this is on chrome which I've been updating regularly hoping it gets fixed). The worst part is while I'm typing in one field it will seemingly randomly refocus me to a different field and start inputting text there. Only about ~5-10% of the company seems to be affected though so it's not being actively looked at. Now I just write all my jira stuff in a external text editor and paste it in.
SeanKilleen 3y ago
Jira is a perfect example of how culture influences tools. I've seen and been a part of environments where I agreed with this sentiment, and also where I felt the opposite. The difference between those places: whether a culture empowers its teams to think on their own and succeed. In the places where I've hated Jira, it's been locked into overly complicated workflows that didn't match what I needed; into the inability to create new views that provided insight into the work; into many tedious required fields even though we didn't use that data in our work stream at all. I've been locked into "one-size-fits-all" workflow approach. Turns out: that's pretty much all configurable! Jira doesn't mandate the use of a one-size-fits all approach. Shitty company culture mandates that. In my current position, I have admin rights to Jira and also a mandate to keep teams empowered and processes simple. Guess what -- Jira is pretty awesome here (I use it to develop, too.) In roughly a day or so, I created an entire automated hiring process via a Jira board [1] that got us phenomenal feedback from candidates. I actively ask teams what parts of the process are annoying, and then automate them or fix them, because I am empowered to care about developer experience. Once you're a part of a generative culture that truly cares about empowerment and enablement, you start to see how much of your disdain for tooling was actually a disdain for a culture that prevented even very useful tools from having a positive impact. [1] https://seankilleen.com/2024/01/how-i-created-an-automated-and-humane-hiring-process-using-jira/ https://seankilleen.com/2024/01/how-i-created-an-automated-a...
amai 3y ago
Try Microsoft Planner instead and you will love Jira.
commondream 3y ago
I love Jira because it’s a clear signal that a team doesn’t care much about their tools and that I shouldn’t join them.
bitwize 3y ago
Name a better agile project management tool that is centrally managed, supports multiple projects and workflow types, and delivers sweet, sweet dashboards to upper managers. JIRA isn't for you, it's for your boss's boss's boss.
bitcharmer 3y ago
It's fascinating seeing 95% of comments here unloading on Jira for the completely wrong reasons. It's the configuration and how it's being used that makes the whole experience bad for many people. You can misuse any tool but that doesn't mean the tool itself is shite, you're just using it incorrectly. If you limit Jira to just an issue tracker with Kanban it's actually pretty good.
novoreorx 3y ago
Jira is the political tool that fulfills the need for maintaining office hierarchy.
snapplebobapple 3y ago
I didn't think jira was that bad. I did think the access control/authentication that it atlassian puts on top of it is total dogshit though. one unrelated part of our org got their instance setup with saml integration to our azure tenant and it locked us out of our unrelated instance (signed up for with our work emails) for a month while 30+ interactions with their support team got us nowhere.
dave1999x 3y ago
What are they hating Jira compared to. Jira is fine. Admittedly, I've seen some installations that are slow AF but that isn't the problem. Current worse; TargetProcess with a 9 month development process.

280 points by seabearDEV 3y ago

dang 3y ago

I fucking hate Jira - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31813957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31813957 - June 2022 (526 comments)

morkalork 3y ago

Confluence is where documentation goes to die.

ben7799 3y ago
That's cause it's write-only. It's like: cat $DOCS > /dev/null rm $DOCS
fuzzy2 3y ago
Where would it need to be not to die? Also, what kind of documentation? Technical? Or business?
- wwilim 3y ago
  In the repo with the code, linked to from a sensible wiki that serves only as an index
  - morkalork 3y ago
    In the repo with the code. Seeing commits where both the code and doc change together is a sight to behold.
  - ta1243 3y ago
    That's how our conflusence is used. Some departments do stupid things like duplicating information. We use confluence to describe the requirements, the concepts, then point to the right locations. Take IPs, some departments have pages and pages with the same IP, subnet, etc in
  - expazl 3y ago
    You can do that in confluence.
  - fuzzy2 3y ago
    Okay, but again, which documentation is that? Technical or business? Because I do not see business documentation evolving with code. And depending on what the code does, business documentation could be much more important than technical documentation.
Washuu 3y ago
Confluence search is terrible and never finds what I want even if I type in the exact title.
- gyudin 3y ago
  They gave a try fixing it a while ago before giving up completely
slingnow 3y ago
What do you use for documentation? My experience with Confluence has been similarly bad.
- tomohawk 3y ago
  markdown, in the repo with the code.
  - throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
    Terrible experience for anyone who isn't already a contributor to that repo. Docs exist for people other than those that wrote them. The people that wrote them don't need to know the information, they already knew it.
dingnuts 3y ago
It's the worst documentation tool, except all the others. Seriously though, what is better?
- sa46 3y ago
  I’ve been pretty happy with Slab. Straightforward shared wiki with a good editor, governance, and integrations. https://slab.com/ https://slab.com/ I tried using README files in the repo but there’s far too much friction to get most folks to bother. Google Docs tend to disappear content due to a lack of structure.
  - nomel 3y ago
    > I tried using README files in the repo but there’s far too much friction I have confluence links in my Readme, which seems to be a pretty good balance, since it's physically impossible for people to use a search bar in a wiki.
  - morkalork 3y ago
    Speaking of Google docs, I just now had the joy of talking to a co-worker while trying to figure out the source of truth for something and we spent 10 minutes thinking we were looking at the same doc when in fact we were not! The owner had made and shared multiple slightly different copies.
  - paiute 3y ago
    At my current job, i need to make a jira ticket, a branch, do a live review… all to change a minor thing in a README
    - neilkk 3y ago
      That sounds bad, but sometimes it makes sense to optimise the process for midsize changes. The vast majority of useful work is done in midsize changes. Lots of people like to generate a flurry of tiny commits but it's not necessarily the most productive way to work, even without much overhead per change. You can always bundle tiny changes together until it's worth it for you and other people like the reviewer to do the parts that don't scale downwards.
circusfly 3y ago
I much prefer Confluence to something like myriad Word and Excel sheets of uncanny versions floating around mostly unknown Sharepoint locations.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  At least you can search more or less properly in network folders. At my old work I usually left a search going from the root network folder over the weekend, scanning for some keywords, when I needed a doc none knew where it was or if it existed at all. There was a parallel documentation system from IBM that didn't work, where the canonical docs should be. But you more or less had to know the document ID to query it. So most documents were also in the network folders spread out between hundred project folders and meeting folders.
ClimaxGravely 3y ago
I loathe confluence, tried to get a markdown plugin around 2016 and IIRC the charge was 5$ per person at the company per month. For what it's worth it's a lot better than it was in 2016 but I'm still not a fan.
amai 3y ago
Random word documents in MS share point are the industry standard. Compared to that Confluence is a good tool with a great search.

peter_l_downs 3y ago

Agreed. Other than Linear, are there any task trackers that people enjoy using?

Octoth0rpe 3y ago
I liked pivotal tracker (https://www.pivotaltracker.com https://www.pivotaltracker.com) quite a bit when I used it at my last job, but that was 7ish years ago. Presumably it hasn't gotten worse. At the time I strongly suspected that it wouldn't scale past 30ish devs. That's more than enough for many people though, and that's assuming no improvements. I particularly liked that there are very nice cli tools for it: https://www.pivotaltracker.com/integrations/command-line https://www.pivotaltracker.com/integrations/command-line
- stickfigure 3y ago
  Can confirm that Pivotal Tracker has gotten better since then, not worse. But it's strongly opinionated and if you aren't using something very much like the Pivotal process, it might not work for you. Personally I love it. FYI a dozen people would be a huge team at Pivotal. 30 folks working in a single backlog is unheard of. But I hear Pivotal became a different place after Rob left, so I don't know what it's like now.
  - quesera 3y ago
    Interesting -- I've been using Pivotal Tracker continuously for at least seven years, and I don't perceive much change in that period. I think this is a good thing! For me, the most impressive thing is that Tracker manages to be simple enough but not simplistic. I've used a lot of tracker products, and I don't consider Pivotal Tracker to be particularly opinionated. That might just mean it works the way I prefer of course! But we do not do dogmatic methodologies, and Tracker is flexible enough to add zero friction to our process.
    - latchkey 3y ago
      The way that you use PT is opinionated, not that the product itself is necessarily opinionated. What I learned from working at Pivotal (with @stickfigure actually) is that there is the way that Pivotal uses it and the way everyone else uses it.

BanazirGalbasi 3y ago

I Fucking Hate This Website Design. I get their points, but the way everything is presented is awful. I assume that these are comments on an article or responses in a conversation, but I can't see who is responding to what. Clicking "Next" to see each individual comment is also tedious, and it means I'm going to stop reading after 4 or 5 pages. I'd rather read a single page that I can scroll through rather than an "interactive" site like this.

ghostbrainalpha 3y ago
I don't understand why someone would make this?
biddit 3y ago
Pretty grumpy take... I read dozens of them and I found the presentation to be a fun approach. The creativity is welcome IMHO. It was immediately clear to me that these were comments scraped from various sources on the internet. Who they're replying to doesn't matter much. If you've worked with JIRA extensively, you've already heard many of these criticisms.

jmclnx 3y ago

Speaking to the choir :)

schappim 3y ago

Several of the complaints mentioned are over a decade old. For instance, I searched for "I **ing hate JIRA too, the interface is clunky and slow and makes me angry.," and found it was from this comment from Feb 2014 [1]. It is perhaps a bit disingenuous to not to include dates. 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1z07fi/my_company_wants_jira_i_dont/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1z07fi/my_company...

prmoustache 3y ago
It hasn't really changed in my experience. Some people complain that I don't update my stories but more often than not I just wait so much for stuff to open on Jira that end up doing something else while it is loading the page and forget about it.
justinsaccount 3y ago
I fucking hate JIRA, the interface is clunky and slow and makes me angry. - Me, 2024.
- schappim 3y ago
  Haha, love it... I'm so glad that I don't work for an organisation that requires me to use tools that get my blood this boiling!
jameskilton 3y ago
Crap, clunky interface is ingrained in their culture. There was a release mid last year that changed the comments loading to be paginated to speed up ticket page load times. They loaded the oldest comments first... and you had to click "Load the next 10" REPEATEDLY until you got to the newest comments. I have since left that company and don't have to deal with Jira anymore so I'm not sure if it got "fixed" at all since then. It was the one of the most baffling, user hostile decision I have seen made to a product, and I'm sure someone got a commendation for "speeding up the ticket load page by X%".

he0001 3y ago

Jira tries to solve everyone’s problem. It tries to incorporate everyone’s idea of how and what’s needed to be tracked. I can just say from my own experience that the one that created the workflow and what fields that they absolutely must have to do some sort of follow up, have never worked as a developer or anything near a software project, and yet enforces all this garbage for their illusion of control. And yet they have none. Just because they are higher up in the hierarchy than the people that works with the actual product. And then there is all these managers that think that everything should be a ticket and all changes can absolutely map to a ticket. Or that everything is actually done by the guy on the ticket. I bet when I die and go to hell, my punishment will be to fill out Jira tickets and push them through the workflow. Edit: formatting and spelling

robertlagrant 3y ago
Lots of things can be a ticket, though.
dingnuts 3y ago
> that the one that created the workflow and what fields that they absolutely must have to do some sort of follow up, have never worked as a developer This is all configurable by the JIRA admin at your org. You're not complaining about JIRA, you're complaining about someone at your company who set up the workflows. I figured this out after bitching endlessly about JIRA at company 1 only to move to company 2 and discover everything I had hated about the process was set up by my previous boss... I thought it was JIRA, but it was the org..
submain 3y ago
I share the sentiment and frustration of having to fill useless boxes. However, as a manager, things go south very quick if you're not tracking what's being changed and by whom. You won't know what's included in your release, nor if it was tested properly. You won't know who to reach for fixes after testing or even what to tell clients when they ask if a feature/fix was shipped. I hate overly complicated processes, but tracking things is essential.
- deleted 3y ago

bschne 3y ago

I always wonder how much of this sort of thing is disdain for the specific tool vs. disdain for what working in a mid-to-large org. is like and the overhead it usually brings with it.

datadrivenangel 3y ago
The specific tool is often bad, working in mid-to-large orgs is often bad, and the two combined can be catastrophically bad. Poorly configured Jira on top of a poorly run large organization and you end up with an orwellian system that does nothing but punish people and squander productivity and human life.
itronitron 3y ago
Jira + Scrum is a soul crushing nightmare, Jira + Kanban is fine.
- ch4s3 3y ago
  Until someone comes along and tries to put some scrum into your kanban.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    Ahh, someone woke up and chose violence today.
    - ch4s3 3y ago
      hilariously someone hated my joke enough to downvote it, but I think there's a kernel of truth.
- teeray 3y ago
  "but once we can get our estimates right, then think of all that we can do with these burndown charts!"
  - 3y ago

Beijinger 3y ago

Never heard about it. You mean this product? https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/ https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/ While I have not heard about Jira, Atlassian rings a bell. Not sure why.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
Savor it while it lasts.
- mablopoule 3y ago
  Reminded me of that tech-oriented colleague who never heard of an NFT last year. It figured out it was best for him to continue that way.
systems 3y ago
i wonder how common this is, and why havent you heard of it, specially that you know about this site hacker news this is almost on the same level as someone saying he never heard of subversion
- Beijinger 3y ago
  Not sure why. But feel free to recommend a better tool, since I will need something like this soon. How about this? https://www.openproject.org/ https://www.openproject.org/
  - nix0n 3y ago
    As a developer, OpenProject is fine. Search is pretty good, so I assume the reporting is okay, but I've never tried it. We used to get occasional slowdowns, but someone threw more HW at it, and speed is good now. I've never used Jira, so I can't compare directly.
- bscphil 3y ago
  People working on open source "hackery" stuff are probably much more likely to be familiar with Github / Gitlab issues, or Bugzilla. I can only think of one open source project that uses Jira; it's my only encounter with the program, and it's without question the single worst experience I've ever had reporting a bug to a project from a technical point of view. I'm not so sure about the subversion comparison. Maybe it's out of date - someone who got started programming in the last ~10 years has probably only ever used Git, whereas plenty of organizations use Jira, as far as I know.

wcoenen 3y ago

There is much worse out there. We were forced to use Rally[1] for a few years, and I'm absolutely thrilled that we're going back to Jira. [1] https://www.broadcom.com/products/software/value-stream-management/rally https://www.broadcom.com/products/software/value-stream-mana...

glxxyz 3y ago
I was at a company where we were forced to migrate from a simple lightweight internal tool to Rally, against my advice. It was much worse, and we migrated back within a year. Waste of everyone's time, and our issues got completely mangled and all the formatting looked like total garbage.
tiltowait 3y ago
We're forced to use Rally. I look at Jira with envy and longing.

iamacyborg 3y ago

I quite like Jira, it does the job I need it to.

andrewheekin 3y ago

Inscribing "Jira is the worst project management tool, except for all the others" on my epitaph

dopamean 3y ago

Maybe I'm lucky but I have yet to work in a place where any of the organizational or project management problems could be blamed on JIRA. Not even as like a top 5 reason. I don't love many of the tools I use day-to-day but JIRA is the only one that I consistently hear and read so much vitriol about. I think there's something else people are so angry about and JIRA is getting an outsized share of the attention.

alistairSH 3y ago
My "issue" with Jira is that it's a large, amorphous piece of enterprise software. So, there's a million ways to do things. And a million plug-ins to extend functionality. So, when I try to do something new (to me), and I search the web, the hits are frequently outdated or related to a plug-in that I might not have access to. Makes it really difficult to do anything that isn't part of my company's baseline.

kledru 3y ago

When it comes to JIRA, I agree, but I find Conflunce to be pretty good tool. Unfortunately, most of the people using it are not very good at writing documents or organizing knowledge in general :)

more_corn 3y ago

The thing I fucking hate about jira is that it’s a gateway drug for confluence. Jira doesn’t actually bother me. Confluence is a tool of satan.

stillbourne 3y ago

Jira is one of those tools where infinite configurability leads to infinite complexity.

annoyingnoob 3y ago

We are going to need a story for that. Be sure to set a good estimate of your effort in the form of story points. Use the Fibonacci sequence to pick the difficulty level for your story points. Your manager will then arrange your stories in priority order, Stories must be worked in priority order. At review time the number of stories and the number of points per story counts. Hurry up now.

blueskythinking 3y ago
Story points represent complexity, not difficulty. We also aim for a certain amount of story points per sprint. After 13 we leave the Fibonacci sequence and just double them. The entire team must vote on story points simultaneously to avoid affecting each other’s opinions, then must discuss the votes until we agree on a number. Stories that have sat too long in the backlog need re-pointing. Voting is now done with post-its in Miro, just to be modern. Things are sometimes stories, sometimes epics, and sometimes tasks or sub tasks. No one knows why, nor have they found a good way to integrate them all into The Workflow.
- circusfly 3y ago
  At some places, any story higher than 5 gets split, an Epic is created and the 2 (or more) new stories are added to the new epic. I really don't get the online disdain for JIRA unless it's Microsoft employee astroturfers, almost as bad as Jetbrains and Red Hat astroturfers.
  - blueskythinking 3y ago
    Ah, that explains why I keep being asked to split a complex feature into pointless pieces that don’t stand alone. No wonder we need so many team hours in sprint planning, to keep track of them all.
    - circusfly 3y ago
      No system is perfect for sure. It's a rule of thumb. If it doesn't fit then stick with the really large story that simply cannot be broken down into manageable chunks but it should be a super rare corner case that some piece of work is so huge yet atomically consistent that there is absolutely no human way to break it down, at all, in any way shape or form.

hkchad 3y ago

The issue w/ jira is usually the people running it. Jira will let you customize just about every aspect of it, this typically leads to a garbage experience.

web3-is-a-scam 3y ago
The only thing worse than Jira managed by an obsessed micromanaging manager/Jira admin is when they leave and you’re left with their godforsaken configuration that everyone hates and nobody can change.
tomohawk 3y ago
But this is exactly the problem with Jira. It enables overachieving in doing tickets, which should never be a goal, to the detriment of things that are actual goals.

kstrauser 3y ago

I wrote “Jira Is a Code Smell”: https://honeypot.net/post/jira-is-a-code-smell/ https://honeypot.net/post/jira-is-a-code-smell/ Short version: Jira, in a vacuum, is neither great nor awful. It just is. But it has a complication that makes managers I want to work for dislike it, while strongly appealing to managers I don’t want to work for. That’s not universally true, I’m sure. However, it’s been my experience.

kagevf 3y ago
> But it has a complication that makes managers I want to work for dislike it, while strongly appealing to managers I don’t want to work for. I think that could also be described as Jira gives people who don't really have anything to do, something to do, but for those who are blessed with an abundance of work, Jira can be unnecessary overhead.
Supermancho 3y ago
My primary problem with JIRA, is that there is very little support for dependency trees. I have tickets X and Y linked to A,B,C,D and nothing but an ad-hoc way of determining how they are related. A visualization and tool to assign places in a tree, are part of what keeps JIRA from being excellent...ok that AND the horrid UX.
- n4r9 3y ago
  If Jira could take a dependency tree and estimates against each item and build out a timeline and display it like a Gant chart, that would be incredible. Even better, factor in employee working hours per week and bank holidays. Even better, dynamically update the timelines based on estimate updates, delays in external dependencies, or sick days. But actually my biggest grievance is the terrible search function. You can search for the literal title of an issue and it won't come up in the results.
  - neilkk 3y ago
    Didn't our whole software industry come to a consensus to stop doing things like this because the results were fundamentally inaccurate and the invariable outcomes were stakeholders feeling hard done by and/or ICs being victimised by middle managers?

simmanian 3y ago

People who complain about Jira from a user perspective should try managing an instance - hundreds of people filing tickets to change specific configurations for their project and the right knobs and levers are so difficult to find that you end up filing tickets to engage Atlassian support so they can tell you where those settings are.

siggalucci 3y ago

You and me both. I compare it to laundry though, I hate doing it but it’s necessary.

greencore 3y ago

You don't hate Jira, you hate capitalism

mablopoule 3y ago
No. Working on an efficient and product-oriented company can be a joy, and 100% capitalist. Working projects that are just politically driven, or where process took over common sense, that's depressing, capitalism or not.

mvdtnz 3y ago

> If we don’t kill the staff at Atlassian, they’re gonna kill us. What the fuck is this? I don't care how much you dislike a software package, this is not ok to say. Regards, an ex-Atlassian staff member.

circusfly 3y ago
Agreed, doesn't seem like mods should even allow the link to be posted on a respectable site like HN.

mrbombastic 3y ago

I really don’t understand the disdain for jira, it is not great but mostly fine. Basically every other tool I have used has been worse. Heard good things about Linear but have a hard time believing that the effort to switch from jira to linear would be worth it for an org.

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throwanem 3y ago

Jira's much more a toolbox than a tool. If you have someone with the knowledge to use what's in the toolbox and the scope to build flows that support how work is done in your org, you'll love Jira, because it'll work far better for you than anything else could. If you don't have someone like that, or if you're small enough not to want or need that yet, then you'll fucking hate Jira.

rib3ye 3y ago
From the content of the post, it sounds Jira got used as an excuse to not interface directly with Eng. Stupid move, for any org. I have tried all the Jira clones, and Jira is the only thing that doesn't try to turn PMing into a video game for lazy micromanagers... if you don't let it become that.

tomohawk 3y ago

Jira and the company's other offerings are designed to be sold, not used.

tootie 3y ago

I got two slides in before I disagreed with everything. JIRA does not emphasize how over why. It literally just has a text box for a description. What you write is up to you. JIRA does not discourage in-person conversation. JIRA is there to document conversations and it's incredibly good at it. Any PM tool that doesn't allow threaded comments is dead to me. I've never spent more than like an hour training anyone on JIRA and have used it successfully for many, many years.

globular-toast 3y ago

The worst thing is you just can't get rid of it. You might try suggesting a simpler tool like Gitlab, but because Jira does absolutely fucking everything there will be one thing someone just can't live without and makes the alternative unviable. Of course if the simpler tool was used from the start nobody would miss that feature. I personally just my own backlog/todo system (both for work and non-work stuff) and consider Jira usage a necessary evil part of the job. Hopefully I'll someday work somewhere uninfected.

Xiol32 3y ago

Could be worse, you could be using Azure Devops.

ndjshe3838 3y ago

How do you avoid that problem where you have 30 random fields that are only relevant to other teams/projects It gets ridiculously bloated

scott_w 3y ago

I don’t hate Jira but I can see why people do. I’ve seen some pretty rubbish looking configurations (and done one or two myself!) so it’s definitely a giant foot gun. That said, when it’s bad it’s because the company is trying to be too clever with it. If it’s used how Atlassian recommends, it works fine. If not, you have a lot of pain. I can’t blame Atlassian too much for their customers, either. The customer is always right.

djha-skin 3y ago

I am more interested in the CSS/JS they're using to do the highlighting and the underlining. Does anyone know the library or what's going on?

strunz 3y ago
A quick look through the source brought me to https://roughnotation.com/ https://roughnotation.com/

profmonocle 3y ago

I used Jira at my old job and didn't care for it. At my new job I have to use Procore half the time. I can't tell you how much I miss Jira.

lolpanda 3y ago

I've used many tasking tools in my previous startups, Asana, Phabricator, Jira, Shortcuts... I think I liked Phabricator because it's flexible and not scrum like when you manage projects. I can see why people hate Jira. Jira is the only tool I know that has proper permission and visibility controls.

et1337 3y ago

The problem with JIRA and its ilk is that they try to do bug tracking, planning, and historical data all in the same tool, when those are really separate problems. Have a bug? JIRA makes perfect sense, you have a ticket with comments, it keeps track of how long it's been around, it can automatically move the bug through a process, etc. All these tools started out as "bug trackers" after all. Trying to plan future work? What I usually want is some kind of lightweight graph tool to figure out task A unblocks task B, etc. This graph changes a lot over time, with tasks merging and splitting apart. I've wasted a lot of time trying to enter all this in tickets. Want to know about work that's already completed? I would never look at JIRA. Look at your Git forge. Pull requests should have proper descriptions. The Git history will always be more accurate and detailed than a bunch of JIRA cards. So basically, use JIRA for bug tracking, Git/Github/Gitlab for historical tracking, and I'm not sure what to use for planning. Honestly I've been reaching for Excalidraw recently.

nomel 3y ago
JIRA includes integration for Github Enterprise. If a commit message or branch references an issue number, it will automatically be included in that JIRA issue.

jensenbox 3y ago

Never going back - Linear is my new god: https://linear.app/ https://linear.app/

roskoez 3y ago

Still beats Trello though. (No really, Trello is just Jira with cuter, slower menus)

HenryBemis 3y ago

Confluence + JIRA have made my life sooooooooo easy.. It's a pain in the ... to control/maintain the dictionary/keywords. So if the admins are doing a good job, it's a bliss. On top of that, I can create a quick form in Confluence (with some intelligence/dependencies) and enabling/disabling/showing/hiding other options, sections, questions, etc. No complains from either products here. Are they perfect? No. What is?

rozenmd 3y ago

I love to use Jira as an example of why focusing on the buyer is important (since these days, users don't choose to buy Jira as much as say, Linear). Of course the idea is to make a good product that folks like to use, but it's surprising that you can succeed by knowing what buyers want.

inferense 3y ago

Here's a simple way to avoid it, and have your personal knowledge base integrated https://acreom.com/bye-jira https://acreom.com/bye-jira

circusfly 3y ago

I guess I'm unique, I like JIRA.

akudha 3y ago

Most people shit on Jira, I guess it deserves it. But what is the alternative? I tried a bunch of tools couple of years ago. They were all as bad as Jira or worse. I dunno if the situation has changed since then, but I would bet it hasn’t changed much

harry8 3y ago

The people who make the purchase decision to pay Atlassian are a tiny fraction of those using the tool. The rest have no say in the choice that results in sales dollars. Atlassian can treat this majority with contempt because their only option is to bitch &/or quit which is a very limited amount of power. So Atlassian does treat the overwhelming majority of its users with total contempt and this is financially rational. Right up until Atlassian and Jira become synonyms for everything bad amongst the overwhelming majority of people who have encountered it. About when "Jira-free workplace" goes on job ads. Which has got to be a pretty good strategy by now. Anyone seen it yet?

giovanni_or2 3y ago

Based

glial 3y ago

I thought I hated JIRA until I moved to other companies that don't use it. One company allowed each team to manage tasks however they liked - and therefore each team had a different method. Other companies tried to force Trello or Asana into software engineering workflows. I now think of JIRA wistfully.

neaumusic 3y ago

I worked at Smartsheet for a while, and it can compete with Jira for most cases (we used Smartsheet rather than Jira internally)

noddingham 3y ago

Jira needs an admin to help manage the configuration. It's like a Swiss army knife and the reason many teams hate it is because they don't have an admin helping them get what they need out of it and keep the rest of the tool out of the way. The flexibility is both a blessing and curse. If you don't like Jira it's likely your configuration is shit, or your process is shit, or both.

sodapopcan 3y ago
This, yes, but it's also sllllllow. I'm assuming this is due to the high configurability (all those options must be a pain to cache) but that is just a guess. In any event, I moved to a company that used Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse) and it was crazy fast! Like, every action was sub 100ms. While it worked very similarly to how my previous company had configured Jira, I found myself missing some stuff, mostly Jira's backlog. My current company uses Zoho and its "Projects" module is a similar but different pain from Jira. It also suffers from being way too configurable.

bern4444 3y ago

Eh - I like Jira or rather I don't dislike it. My team has done a lot of work to lean into the tool IE well defined issues, epics, tickets, t shirt sizing for pointing via 1, 3, 5, etc. There is lots that can be improved for sure. With this system, my team, in addition to any one else at the company, is able to click into our JIRA board and get a very high level to a very low level understanding of what we are working on. This allows for very clear reporting structures and ensures our goals are on track with those of the company's. This also makes outcomes more measureable which is exceptionally helpful for reviews. At the end of the year or halfway through I can go in and say: I worked on these 4 epics that are part of these two Issues which serve company goals A, B, and C. I completed x% of the tickets for each of these epics, led this entire other epic which was completed on time etc etc. Where we run into issues is when there is a ticket that has to move between boards. The ideal situation is we just move the ticket from board to board as needed but based on the user they may or may not have permissions and have to open a new ticket linking it to the previous one. Not ideal but that's up to us to resolve to make sure the right people have the right permissions. We ignore all the analytics IE burn down and friends. Those are useless.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

We don't hate JIRA. We hate what JIRA admins do with it (former JIRA admin, here). It's entirely possible to write a simple, elegant, issue tracker in JIRA. I have yet to see one. I am ashamed to say that I never made one.

otterley 3y ago

So.... what's better than JIRA? (Serious answers only, please.)

taocoyote 3y ago
In my personal experience, Excel. JIRA is a tool, it doesn't do the work for you. If someone knows how to organize, plan and track a project really well, the tool used doesn't matter as much.
dlandis 3y ago
GitHub issues and projects

throwawaaarrgh 3y ago

The only valid reasons to hate Jira or Confluence are when you work for a company that has no governance structure for them. You do have to use the tools correctly for them to not suck. This is true of all tools. When you learn how they are supposed to be used, and use them that way, they work really well. Sadly I have only met three people in my entire career who did so. Their job titles were scrum master, release manager, and project manager. They had to learn how to use the tools because that was their job. And so they did. They could do literally anything we asked them to. They showed us all kinds of amazing things we didn't know we could do. All because they took a few hours of training and read the docs. That's when I learned that my own parroting of "I hate Jira" was just my own ignorance showing, and I grew up a bit. I really like Confluence now; I didn't even realize it was a Wiki before.

robofanatic 3y ago

Its not as bad as SharePoint

vinaypai 3y ago

In my experience, Jira isn't great out of the box but it's pretty good if you take a few hours to understand how to configure workflows, field configurations, forms, and boards. For example, at my last company I had the development project configured with about a dozen different ticket states, but you created a ticket with a simple form with the title as the only mandatory field but there were optional fields for details and screenshots. Developers could move a ticket into "in progress" or "can't reproduce". The latter transition showed a form with a mandatory explanation field, and it would automatically get assigned back to the person who created the ticket. On completing the ticket, the developer has to put in a pull request and can only moves it to the Code Review state and had to pick a different developer to assign it to. It sounds a bit tedious when you describe it but in practice everyone worked off a board with three or four columns appropriate to their role. They move tickets to the right to advance them or to the left to reject them. There were also automated transitions triggered by things like CI tests, deployment etc.

beryilma 3y ago

The tool (Jira) is not the problem. The "tools" (aka PM and process people) are the problem. In my experience, the people who are given the responsibility and power to build "systems" and processes are usually least qualified to build the said system as they usually have no experience in and understanding of what it will mean to be working under the system. This is akin to the customer vs. user dichotomy in software development, where things are build for the customer with often detrimental consequences for the actual user. In considering tools and processes, I believe in discussing each individual decision and process step to death by considering secondary and even tertiary consequences. Yet people making such decisions are not in a position to evaluate such consequences since they have no such understanding, capability, or desire. This would make decision making slow when enforcing tools to an entire development organization. But, decision making should be slow and deliberate. Otherwise, as I have seen in my own company, we would be jumping from tool to tool per the latest fashion of the day. I've also seen this with the mess of WebEx, Zoom, Teams way of having online meetings, where tools keep changing for the sake of some perceived benefits with no real clear improvements.

neilv 3y ago

Jira has some merits, but its most common uses are for companies in which the priority is to look busy (e.g., growth startups, inefficient established companies). For early startups that can't rely upon VC-growth appearances and shotgun-approach hiring alone, I propose a complete selection of tools, including a substitute for Jira: 1. Get GitLab. Maybe hosted initially, but eventually self-hosted if you stay in business long enough. (a) Do code in GitLab Git. Eventually including mirroring and auditing third-party dependencies (but your first few months of prototyping you'll probably be playing third-party package system roulette, and maybe even piping curl into bash from random offshore file-sharing sites run from countries without extradition treaties). (b) Do project management and issue-tracking in GitLab Issues, with the Boards and the structured tags, for something Kanban-ish. (And someday someone will make great integrated Gantt.) (c) Do engineering docs in Markdown files in (GitLab) Git when you want the docs versioned alongside the code. Whether it's embedded API docs/comments, or standalone Markdown documents. (d) Do all remaining internal documentation in the crappy-looking GitLab Wiki. Emphasize low-friction, teach people how wikis are supposed to be used, and make this this canonical go-to from which all other information can be found (including those engineering docs that are in with the code). Even notes on nearby restaurants and nostalgia can go into the wiki -- you're an early startup, enjoy the efficiency and flatness and coolness while you can. Discourage anything that looks like siloing, fiefdom, staleness, BS, etc. It goes into the wiki unless it should be branched&versioned with code. 2. Tell everyone: Everything Goes Into GitLab. 3. Unfortunately, you also need videoconf and text chat. Useful non-ephemeral data from these gets captured in GitLab, probably into the Wiki. (For example. wiki page "2024-02-14 Cat Affordances Meeting", which started in advance of the meeting with an "Agenda" section. Then, during the meeting, was put up on the screen and had a "Notes" section quickly appended. Saved, done, linkable, findable, unpolished, sufficient.) 4. Don't add more docs&comms tools/SaaSes until someone can say why it can't just go into GitLab. Don't even spend time looking into this unless you're actually feeling pain from "Everything goes into GitLab". 5. If someone ignores the rules and starts putting company data into some random other SaaS (like "digital consumer natives" tend to do), have a thoughtful talk with them about Everything Goes Into GitLab and how they feel about that. While in parallel another employee deletes the SaaS account with extreme prejudice, blocks the SaaS in the company firewall, and posts a picture of the SaaS's head on a stake in the startup's kitchenette as a warning to other SaaSes. 6. If the startup is successful, there will be plenty of time for some Vice President of Procurement, who has little idea how people work, much less how they could be working effectively, to be wined&dined by an enterprise sales representatives, and to buy loads of enterprise licenses of Ass-sauna, Jeers-a, Effluence, BS Screams, etc. Only then will you realize how good you had it before, with your early startup, and you didn't appreciate it nearly enough. You will suffer until a vesting milestone, consult with your tax accountant, and then make your escape. To do your own early startup, where the first thing you do will be to proclaim: Everything Goes Into GitLab

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jongjong 3y ago

I feel like Jira is OK but definitely I prefer Trello. I also prefer the kind of project development approach which is suitable for Trello. The unfortunate reality though is that almost everything we consume nowadays is pushed onto us without our consent.

mathiasrw 3y ago

Sounds like the real complaint here is not about Jira but about people using Jira wrong, because they dont understand how you facilitate a productive environment for the lifecycle of the delivery across product, design, QA and developers of different stacks.

freitzkriesler2 3y ago

I like jira, when it is used exactly the way atlassian wants you to use it. If you try and do anything outside of that use case, its limitations become glaringly obvious. And companies very often use it in a way that it is not supposed to be used which then requires expensive cloud add one which bloat the monthly cost.

ClimaxGravely 3y ago

Within the last 2 weeks Jira has begun to do some constant refresh cycle that is killing me (this is on chrome which I've been updating regularly hoping it gets fixed). The worst part is while I'm typing in one field it will seemingly randomly refocus me to a different field and start inputting text there. Only about ~5-10% of the company seems to be affected though so it's not being actively looked at. Now I just write all my jira stuff in a external text editor and paste it in.

SeanKilleen 3y ago

Jira is a perfect example of how culture influences tools. I've seen and been a part of environments where I agreed with this sentiment, and also where I felt the opposite. The difference between those places: whether a culture empowers its teams to think on their own and succeed. In the places where I've hated Jira, it's been locked into overly complicated workflows that didn't match what I needed; into the inability to create new views that provided insight into the work; into many tedious required fields even though we didn't use that data in our work stream at all. I've been locked into "one-size-fits-all" workflow approach. Turns out: that's pretty much all configurable! Jira doesn't mandate the use of a one-size-fits all approach. Shitty company culture mandates that. In my current position, I have admin rights to Jira and also a mandate to keep teams empowered and processes simple. Guess what -- Jira is pretty awesome here (I use it to develop, too.) In roughly a day or so, I created an entire automated hiring process via a Jira board [1] that got us phenomenal feedback from candidates. I actively ask teams what parts of the process are annoying, and then automate them or fix them, because I am empowered to care about developer experience. Once you're a part of a generative culture that truly cares about empowerment and enablement, you start to see how much of your disdain for tooling was actually a disdain for a culture that prevented even very useful tools from having a positive impact. [1] https://seankilleen.com/2024/01/how-i-created-an-automated-and-humane-hiring-process-using-jira/ https://seankilleen.com/2024/01/how-i-created-an-automated-a...

amai 3y ago

Try Microsoft Planner instead and you will love Jira.

commondream 3y ago

I love Jira because it’s a clear signal that a team doesn’t care much about their tools and that I shouldn’t join them.

bitwize 3y ago

Name a better agile project management tool that is centrally managed, supports multiple projects and workflow types, and delivers sweet, sweet dashboards to upper managers. JIRA isn't for you, it's for your boss's boss's boss.

bitcharmer 3y ago

It's fascinating seeing 95% of comments here unloading on Jira for the completely wrong reasons. It's the configuration and how it's being used that makes the whole experience bad for many people. You can misuse any tool but that doesn't mean the tool itself is shite, you're just using it incorrectly. If you limit Jira to just an issue tracker with Kanban it's actually pretty good.

novoreorx 3y ago

Jira is the political tool that fulfills the need for maintaining office hierarchy.

snapplebobapple 3y ago

I didn't think jira was that bad. I did think the access control/authentication that it atlassian puts on top of it is total dogshit though. one unrelated part of our org got their instance setup with saml integration to our azure tenant and it locked us out of our unrelated instance (signed up for with our work emails) for a month while 30+ interactions with their support team got us nowhere.

dave1999x 3y ago

What are they hating Jira compared to. Jira is fine. Admittedly, I've seen some installations that are slow AF but that isn't the problem. Current worse; TargetProcess with a 9 month development process.