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by hddherman
2138 days ago
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The JS-heavy web interface of Jira can be infuriatingly slow, so perhaps the frustrations start from there. Jira, the project management tool, can actually be great, if you configure it properly. The issue lifecycles, what fields are visible, how the board is showing things etc. can be designed to be as simple or as complex as you want it to be. In addition to that, the integration with Bitbucket and Confluence is also fantastic for referencing issues and features across the code and documentation. Misuse of a tool does not make it a bad tool. Disclaimer: have worked on developing a Jira plugin, so my understanding of Jira might be a bit more advanced than that of a novice user (but not by much). |
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This gets into the heart of what I consider to be the biggest issue with Jira, especially compared to nearly every other option, and was disappointed this article wasn't about: Jira is almost a poster child for the "inner-platform effect" [1]. Jira isn't so much an "issue tracker" as it is an "issue tracker development environment", with an ugly PM-focused configuration DSL GUI instead of a more useful to developers script language.
Presumably most of Jira's other technical faults derive from there. It's incredibly slow to use, which is about what you would expect of any program suffering from the inner-platform effect. It presumably has to check layers and layers of "configuration data" to do even the simplest tasks. It's easy to assume the databaase backing Jira isn't well normalized or index-optimized, because you can't build "configurable" normalization. (You might get away with profile-based dynamic indexes, but even then that will only get you so far, especially if your tables are key/value soup where traditional relational DBs fall down at indexing.)
Which gets back to the process failures that the article does talk about because it's easy to suffer from something like the inner-platform effect when your target audience (PMs) don't know what they want until they see it (if they ever figure it out), in part because of the impedance mismatch in the decision<=>development status flow between PMs and devs. So I would say the "inner-platform effect" is both a symptom, a cause, and an exacerbater of those process issues.
(Though I suppose it would be tough for an article directly pitching a Jira add-on to be too critical of Jira's underlying technical problems.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect