Nah, I also hate Jira. It's slow, bloated, complicated, and has 1000x features I, as a developer, don't need.
But then again, I also hate the manager that makes me use it in ways that frustrate me.
But then again, the reason my manager loves Jira and wants me to use it that way, is that they can run a bunch of automated reports like "We did X work this week, consuming Y hours (Or points or whatever) and we predict that we will be done in Z timeframe".
Buuuuuut, that's all bullshit. Garbage data in, garbage reports out. Jira gives managers the CONFIDENCE that they know what's going on, instead of just talking to developers, having conversations, etc. As it turns out, programming is hard, and doesn't have clear A->B->C predictability. So those tasks that are left? non-exhaustive. Those hours we did? Didn't take into account the thousand little things that didn't go into the backlog (And would take longer to add it than to just do the work and ignore the extra time spent on the task). That burndown chart? Completely useless.
Jira is used to skirt around the complexity of software development. It enables bad management to exist much easier, because it allows said managers to not engage with the team or product in any meaningful way, then to push up the chain "progress reports" that are meaningless, then, when deadlines are passed, managers get to blame it on the developers for not tracking enough work in Jira.
Jira enables bad management.
On the other hand, bad managers abuse every tool they are given, and bad managers existed before Jira, just instead of automated reports, they had email reports and hand tracked hours. So whatever, the tool was built to service a broken industry anyway.
JIRA is just an issue tracker. Whatever they're doing to you with it is not its fault. 🙂 You're supposed to use it to document and assign work items (stories, tasks, bugs). What has to be done, progress, duration estimates (in days!), attach whatever extra info is needed (links, files) and use the comments to keep each other in the loop and clear obstacles (blockers, dependencies etc.) It's fairly straightforward when used correctly.
You have to have some way of tracking development. If it weren't JIRA it would be something else – but JIRA is commonly used because it's flexible and can adapt to many ways of doing things and to lots of the aspects of software development.
JIRA is just an issue tracker.
Nope, I mean at it's core, yes it is, but it's used for sooooooo much more than that. It enables management from a far distance, and that disencentivices managers from doing their job.
I get the premise, that tools just exist and it's us that put our own biases in them. But that looses a lot of nuance when a tool is specifically built for a purpose, such as oversight, tracking, and data collection. These design decisions take an "issue tracker" far away from what Trello, or a whiteboard with stickies on it for that matter, does.
It is a grave mistake to think that it's just an issue tracker, and that's all it can be. I've been in this industry long enough not to fall for that con. And it is a con, when someone manipulates you using a tool that is designed to make manipulation easier (I'M not telling you to point every story even if it doesn't make sense. But you know... Jira wants it, it's just... Outa my hands...).
Nah, Jira is for managers, not developers, and is far more than a simple issue tracker.
Jira is a pain, slow, bloated, and ugly.
Trello okay is for student projects, too basic.
ClickUp was decent when I used it professionally, I still use it for personal project management.
Azure DevOps is baby's 1st JIRA, but somehow Microsoft made it worse in every way.
This blog post is just strawmanning for a tool that rightfully deserves to be criticized.
I have a love-hate relationship with Jira. Overall, I guess we are able to make good use of it in my team and it does actually help keep track my work (both for myself and my manager). Most of the complaints I might have against Jira are more about dealing with Scrum BS than Jira itself.
As for the software itself, the only thing I really dislike is text formatting. I wish Jira just used Markdown, but instead they have their own WYSIWYG editor. Which would be fine if it worked properly... Almost every time I create a ticket or comment, text formatting gets messed up after posting (especially numbers and bullet points).
The text formatting is also inconsistent with other Atlassian. Bitbucket and Confluence have some support for Markdown but they each do it differently. Using all three of these Atlassian products should feel like a unified experience, and in many ways it is, but text formatting is an inconsistent buggy mess.
Nah I hate jira because it’s so damn slow to do any action
I’m okay with tickets, it’s the price we pay, but there is a serious lack of “in and out” with jira. As a dev, I want to spend as little time as possible in a software like jira.
We used JIRA effectively at my last job, the things that made it work for us:
- stop adding shitloads of required fields. Title, description, branch, priority (defaulted), status (defaulted), type (bug/feature). We might have had some others, but that was all I remember being required.
- stop writing shitty descriptions: spend more time writing something that your co-worker can use. Respect their time enough to try to include enough detail for them to actually use the ticket. Be available to answer questions when they are assigned a ticket you wrote.
- you don’t need extremely granular statuses: the functional role of the assignee is enough to determine what “state” it’s in, trying to codify a unidirectional flow of tickets is maddening and overly complicated. Work is messy, it flows back and forth, you do not need a “rejected by qa” status. Just leave it open and reassign to the developer with a comment. Managers find out when individuals are submitting half-assed work on a regular basis, you don’t need JIRA for that (unless you need metrics to fire them… different problem).
I agree with the premise of the article, JIRA is a communication tool, not a management tool.
My team does a simple Kanban with sticky notes on a white wall, like in Silicon Valley TV show.
The other common problem is a non-Manager - a "manager" who doesn't talk to you and doesn't know much about what you're working on. They just want to check a dashboard, see all green lights, report to their managers that the light is green, and collect their pay check.
I know this person. They were a manager. They were my last manager. Thank the compiler I got moved to a different team when the org realized said manager had no idea what they were doing, shuffled some seats around and removed this manager from the company.
A bit off-topic, but why do people still insist on writing its name in all caps? That was the original name, granted, and you can still find it here and there in the tool, but it has been called "Jira" for years now.
