[MBCook]

I’ve used it at multiple companies. I have nothing against it.

But the experience of using it is 100% in the administrator’s control. It works quite well in the default form, but it’s HEAVILY customizable. And that seems to be where most problems come from.

Trying to cram workflows where they don’t fit. Adding tons of extra required fields. Making special rules about how you have to use it.

I’ve certainly seen it go from good to annoying from new people deciding to “fix” some process by adding to it. Including the day you couldn’t create tickets because our admin added a required field that was hidden so you couldn’t fill it out.

[johnwalkr]

It can be good if configured well, but it’s almost impossible to configure well. I don’t even know how to describe it, it’s so difficult to change settings to make things better and not worse. One can make different issue types, and each issue type has fields and workflows, and you can make different screens to deal with all of those things. It’s just so easy to add complexity and so difficult to remove it. Addons often add all these things, and trying 3 addons for 1 hour just to compare them can really mess things up if you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s even quite difficult if not impossible to do this in a completely isolated test environment. And of course you’ve often got people adding complexity on purpose.

Once complexity is added, it’s basically impossible to to reduce it, even by starting a new project with new screens, etc. Because at minimum your issue types will all be infected with complexity. The most competent managers I have seen try JIRA for 2-3 weeks max and then switch to a spreadsheet.