My opinion based on feature and screenshots is that the UX is as shitty as Jira.
The nightmare with Jira is this product manager obsession with kaban boards that become overwhelmed once your project become serious.
You can use Jira just fine without Kanban boards. That's really the beauty and the curse of Jira, it can be pretty much anything you want it to. To truly compete with Jira you need a level of flexibility that almost guarantees that your product will suck to.
If you run Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket, the level of integration you can achieve is pretty unmatched. The cost: You need to buy the data center edition, on-prem is required to get any sensible level of performance, and you need Atlassian experts on staff.
Even in list view, it goes very fast to so overwhelmed that it is unusable.
There are then usually 2 cases:
- teams have strategy like closing every issues that can't be worked on immediately. So clean board but rotten software with lots of issues buried and regularly rediscovered.
- team just letting issues list grow unmanageably and will only look at the most recent things or what arrived in the parking.
In the few different companies of different sizes that I worked, I never saw a Jira that did not become a hot mess until people start new projects or new boards when they can't bear anymore.
I find it also extremely difficult to find anything. Like you know that an issue exist but search will not help you find it easily.
Very often I have to go to Gmail to search in notifications to find back the link to an issue.
Snark all you want, but that's this person's experience and it's worth considering why that is the case. I'd wager they've been a victim of productivity theatre, with management saying "we need to be agile! make it so everyone -- your job depends on it!". Then, they may even hire an experienced agile manager but (for whatever reason) give them no chance to spend time and effort properly training everyone involved in how to work differently and to use the tools effectively, and how to communicate the "burn-down rate" to the users every time-period so that their expectations may be set correctly. Combine this with the attitude of many "I'll raise it as a ticket, then I'll have something official with which to chase the developers", and it's perhaps easier to see how things can become chaotic.
Perhaps you've been fortunate enough to be employed where these things are managed better than my hypothetical scenario above, but my experience that is the exception, not the rule, so it's not surprising that people can become fatigued.
My comment actually came from a place of empathy. With this comment though, I will be openly snarky when I say that you've now contributed to the art piece.
Alright, I am not denying you might be right, but it sounds like an old man yelling at cloud.
If not Kanban, what else would you propose as the 'better' solution
Honestly, the best experience I had so far was with Redmine.
It can look a little bit rough, and sure there could be lot of improvement.
But it favored efficiency against eye candy design.
It is very easy to have things organized the old way. Having projects, recursive sub-projects.
You can look at your issues at the sub sub project level or at a more global level.
You can easily have list with all the variable that matters. That you can order easily how you need:
Who's the rapporter? Who's the dev? Who's assigned to? What is the state? When was the issue discovered? In which version? Fixed with which milestone?
It is very slick, I did not feel a latency like in Jira, the screen is not filled with useless crux, only what matters fills the screen.
In a few clicks I was always able to find what I was looking for, set and identify all the affected versions and which one got the fixes.
If you run Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket, the level of integration you can achieve is pretty unmatched. The cost: You need to buy the data center edition, on-prem is required to get any sensible level of performance, and you need Atlassian experts on staff.