[briandear]

I hate bitbucket. $12 or so per month for private repos is an extremely small price to pay for an infinitely better UX, better integrations and just all all around better experience. For a tool I use multiple times per hour, "free" doesn't matter much to me. Github isn't perfect, but it's damned close.

As far as Jira -- the tool itself isn't bad per se, but the way PMs turn it into their own little power-trip kingdom irritates me. There's so much focus on 'control' that I feel like a victim every time I use it. For example, if I want to move a card from In Progress to the Backlog, Jira has an option to restrict the non-anointed from moving cards. So I have to get 'permission' from someone with the right privileges to move a card. Jira is a micro-manager's wet dream.

Trello was the anti-Jira and that's what made it great.

[latj]

"As far as Jira -- the tool itself isn't bad per se, but the way PMs turn it into their own little power-trip kingdom irritates me."

Yeah, this is a pretty common sentiment. Jira is not a great tool, but the things devs really resent is being micromanaged and tracked in such a way that they are turned into a commodity. At the end of the day, if that really bothers you, there are plenty of ways to work free of this feeling- find a company that fits you better or a better manager within your company or strike out on your own. A better ticketing system wont make you happy.

[jschwartzi]

Furthermore, if the PM didn't have JIRA they would find some other way to micromanage your hours. The team I'm on uses a spreadsheet with a hokey gantt chart to pretend like we're meeting our deadlines rather than filling in timesheets in our JIRA system. Micromanagers are going to micromanage no matter what tool they do it in.

[jimbokun]

Ah, another reason I like JIRA more than people on here criticizing it.

Most things in our JIRA deployment are configured to just allow anyone to change anything, with only a few exceptions.

Locking things down like that is the project manager's way of making sure people are constantly blocked and work isn't getting done. Not sure why some project manager's try so hard to create this state of affairs.

[gregmac]

JIRA is _____ [1] because it has a ton of customization options, allowing it to be setup with a simple or complex workflow with user/group/value-based validation rules (among other things).

These can be ignored, used to enforce very simple house-keeping things like filling out a "fix version" or "deploy date" when closing an issue as "fixed", or to exactly codify all the rules in a complex development process based on a bunch of flowcharts someone with "project manager" in their credentials spent two weeks painstakingly creating.

[1] What word you choose here will probably depend on if a PM or developers have admin access in JIRA.

[himlion]

That depends how you set it up though. In our team at a big telco everybody has normal usage rights. In my experience it never gets abused and doesn't give people this powerless feeling.