[Aurornis]

> I never saw any developer who was happy about Jira.

We did a clean Jira setup from scratch as set up by developers for developers. It was fine.

It wasn’t until the company hired full time TPMs who made it unnecessarily complicated with an endless list of plugins and processes that it got to be miserable.

The real killer was the way they wanted us to use it: They declared that only TPMs could move tickets, and only in meetings. So instead of us moving our own work along we had to queue it up and wait for an hour long meeting where we waited our turn to tell the TPM which tickets needed to be moved, then sparred with him in debate for 5 minutes as he tried to debate the done-ness with us through a game of 20 questions.

Repeat those meetings 3X a week and I developed a visceral objection to Jira. Only later did I realize that what I hated most was actually the pomp and ceremony that came with Jira-toting TPMs.

Jira itself wasn’t too bad when we used it efficiently on our own. The modern versions are much faster than the sluggish experience of the days of old

[MenhirMike]

It is one of the great tragedies that the Agile Manifesto - which is literally four sentences that fit on a cocktail napkin - got turned into thousands of pages of "standardized Agile", with the biggest abomination in the world being SAFe. I swear, SAFe was a prank, and when people took it seriously they decided to cash in on it.

That said, a good TPM is often worth more than a good engineer. Herding all the cats across multiple teams, projects, competing priorities, keeping track of stuff, holding and being held accountable. And part of a good TPM is to find the right way to work. Maybe it's Kanban. Maybe it's Scrum. Maybe it's Waterfall. Maybe it's a mixture of different methodologies, like waterboarding.

That was the whole point of "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools", finding the right way to work for your team. Jira has to deal with the fact that it's meant to be a tool that fits into any company, so it's generic/customizable, and I've seen too many teams go crazy on the customization, trying to model out a massively complicated process when the team really just needs Kanban with a few extra fields.

I don't hate Jira - I don't like it very much, but I acknowledge that a lot of Jira's issues boil down to mediocre PMs being in charge of it.

Having worked with a good TPM that can really make things happen was eye-opening - tools like Jira can work beautifully if they are setup properly.

[tanseydavid]

>> Maybe it's a mixture of different methodologies, like waterboarding.

I'm going to be thinking a lot about this notion. Thanks for the choice wording.

[piva00]

Jira's UX is quite bad though, even when there's not much red tape from management on how to manage your tickets.

The response time for a "Create ticket" flow gets in the way, I like how snappy Trello feels, I can create a ticket in seconds with just shortcuts and a few keystrokes so it's pretty effortless to split a task in multiple tickets to be worked on. The clickety-clicky nature of Jira gets in the way for that, I need to click "Create", then select the "Project", then click on the modal's text box for writing the description, it doesn't support Markdown so I need to keep in mind (increasing the cognitive load) how Jira's formatting work. Then I need to click "Create" while checking the box "Create another" so I can keep the flow of adding more tickets.

Over time this workflow is fucking terrible, sometimes I avoid splitting some larger task into multiple tickets because I can't be bothered to go through this flow yet-again.

If Jira just simplified the way to create tickets, throwing them into an "Inbox" to be sorted later it'd improve the experience a lot, the way it's designed doesn't help to be fast with it and breaks my train of thought.

My workflow right now is to open a text editor, write down all the tickets I want to create, their descriptions, etc. and later I just copy-paste into Jira's UI when I have the energy to go through the whole song and dance of creating tickets.

It's death by a thousand cuts, the ergonomics of it is pretty bad.

[alostpuppy]

I’ve come to a similar conclusion. I linen using JIRA to going to the DMV. Most seem to agree with the comparison.

Looking into moving over to GH issues or linear.

[logicchains]

>Repeat those meetings 3X a week and I developed a visceral objection to Jira. Only later did I realize that what I hated most was actually the pomp and ceremony that came with Jira-toting TPMs

Jira's like guns: it can be used for good or evil. But given how bad the worst case can be, would you really want to leave a bunch of rifles lying around your company?

[AtlasBarfed]

Guns: the only good outcome of a gun is it is never used, virtually all other uses of guns are differing flavors of tragedy

Perhaps people don't remember the days of bugzilla as a product, or various CA (computer associates) software. JIRA is bloated and probably inferior now, but it was a far superior option about 15 years ago.

[steve1977]

Yeah it was once the cool kid in town.

Just recently I read a nice quote here on HN (paraphrasing):

Either you die young as a hero or you live long enough to become the villain

[musicale]

> virtually all other uses of guns are differing flavors of tragedy

Like the Olympic biathlon.

[AtlasBarfed]

What happens more often, a biathlon, or a school shooting?

[musicale]

Women's division I'd say biathlon.

Not sure about men's though.

[calvinmorrison]

I still absolutely miss the really early iterations of JIRA. better than a bug tracking system but none of the complexity on top. we were still managing our projects as waterfall using Microsoft Project Planner but devs were doing all their work in Jira. we had complex workflows that were managed really well, approvals built in all sort of good stuff.