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I don't have a problem with Jira directly. It's not great, but I've yet to find a project manager that's amazing so I can't say it's substantially better or worse than the alternatives. That said, I really don't want to work with a PM who loves Jira. It's so flexible and configurable that it seems to really call out to a certain type of PM who adores adding lots of process for the sake of itself. Can we make a 43 step workflow starting with "preliminarily claimed the task", "read the requirements sheet", "read the associated documentation", "opened an editor", "ran 'git pull'", "created a new branch", etc. etc. etc.? You bet we can! I've worked with PMs who really wanted that level of granular visibility into project status, even though it greatly slowed down the work of actually getting stuff done. So in my experience, you have PMs who love Jira because it gives them a level of control that I absolutely don't want to be involved with, and PMs who think Jira is "eh - it's alright". Atlassian's problem with the latter is that they're just as likely to say "eh, Pivotal is alright too". There needs to be a Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle for software development: measuring a process is guaranteed to slow it down, so there's a spectrum between "fast chaos" and "corporate paralysis" that you have to consciously select for, and you don't get to pretend that "fast and tracked to the tiniest detail" is something that's possible. (Side note: Confluence died for me the day a new version removed the option of editing page markup directly. Up until then, I had a workflow that converted Python module documentation to Confluence wiki markup and uploaded it. When that went away, I vowed never to use it again until it came back. Has it come back?) |