[tyfon]

At first I thought the ticket was going to be "stop using JIRA/Confluence".

There is so much time wasted on this system where I work it's amazing. Some people sit all day updating JIRA with all kind of crap instead of actually doing their job.

At this point I'm starting to get the same feeling towards it as towards SAP.

[rootusrootus]

The most irritating thing I run into with JIRA is that every time our ALM team rolls out a new point release, things subtly change; behavior is a little different, controls moved around, etc. Normally I'm not one to get all bent out of shape when someone moves the cheese, but dang, every. single. release. things just move around for no apparent reason and I have to relearn how to do the exact same task.

Confluence is also evil. Not because it's Atlassian, but because wikis have many downsides to go along with the upsides. Everyone can create their own pages, so ... they do. And they don't keep maintaining it. So the amount of "documentation" we have is ever increasing and out of date. And like you say, a few people seem to do nothing but confluence work all day long.

[jonathonf]

> So the amount of "documentation" we have is ever increasing and out of date

Has anyone found a _good_ way to maintain documentation?

[toomuchtodo]

Hire people to work on documentation.

[bdcravens]

I think Jira's knobs and settings can get in the way, but I've found it to be fairly effective when used in a focused way (and recent updates seem to have optimized for that)

[tetha]

Our JIRA is kinda our external memory and our input for external teams.

For team members, it's easier and more effective to bob a post-it onto the right white board and explain it during standup. Hosted JIRA is just infuriatingly slow for that workflow, tbh.

For everyone else, yeah. Put in a JIRA ticket, one of us will put in clarifications there. If it's something weird, we'll document steps there and convert them into a runbook later. It's good enough for that.

[foobarian]

I find that it's very effective at providing a "collective memory". People come and go, but as long as they document what they did in a ticket that information is easy to search and can save a lot of effort.

And by "document" I don't even mean a fancy design doc and pages of spec. Just a few sentences on why something was done, or a couple of copy-pasted command lines used for testing or reproducing a bug can be a big help.

[taeric]

Like any tool for managing the health of something, it all depends on the quality of the data in the system.

What I have not seen, is evidence that it helps improve the data. So, if you have someone that is good at keeping the data healthy, they can make the tool look amazing. The tool doesn't really help people get there, though.

I don't think there is a universal answer here, yet. :(

I would love to be proven wrong.