
Ask HN: Why do you dislike Jira? - seancoleman
Jira seems to be a polarizing application. Some people love and swear by it, yet it seems most people (developers?) hate it. What are some reasons you think Jira is bad? What do you use as a project management &#x2F; agile tool instead of Jira (or wish you used)? If you like Jira, I&#x27;m also curious of those reasons.
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barbegal
Jira can do everything but it can't do everything well. As soon as you step
off the beaten path with it, and there are many ways of doing that, it becomes
a nightmare to use. Managers mess around with workflows and custom fields that
infuriate all the developers. Migrating and integrating items doesn't work
because of the aforementioned modifications.

The UI can become frustrating because there are many ways to see the same data
presented in a subtly different way so navigating to that view again is
difficult. And the new single page application can be infuriating because you
can't go back to filtered views and pages can take ages just to load the main
UI elements.

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smt88
I love Jira, but it's easy to abuse because of its flexibility. I'd be
hesitant to inherit a heavily customizes Jira configuration.

Sometimes tools need to be more opinionated to minimize the risk of user
error, and Jira seems to fall into that category.

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eberkund
Buggy outdated UI, does things differently from the rest of the applications I
use and enjoy on a regular basis (for example it's own special text input
markup), the tendency of organizations to add way too many custom fields and
tags so that doing anything requires entering data into a massive form

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smt88
The UI has been refreshed twice in recent years, including a few weeks ago.
When was your most recent experience with the latest hosted Jira?

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eberkund
I haven't to be honest, the couple of companies I have been with that used it
have used outdated self hosted versions. Maybe the licensing scheme should
encourage organizations to upgrade rather that stay on an old version.

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smt88
I always tell people that Jira used to be terrible and has been drastically
improved (in terms of usability, stability, and features) in the last 5 years.

It's still not perfect at all and is too flexible to be a safe choice for all
orgs.

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anotheryou
you will run in to issues when not exactly doing the default way. you will
find open feature request tickets about it from many years ago.

also multiple, equally bad text editors with no way to even paste a nested
list from confluence correctly.

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kazishariar
Fer werk, Jira is best. It's got horrendous plugins, like an app store for
cracvk addicts. It's use of the DB, is on par with kindergarteners. But it's
awesome top down, bottom up, both in and side ways. It's only a tool, no
different than the bone from 2001 - A Space Odessey. You can pretty much do
anything with it, and it's about as elastic as an app can get. Maybe vim, or
maybe notepad, or maybe MS Project, or maybe an Oracle DB, or maybe' Jesus.
But one thing that does stand out is developers don't want to be held on by
the crutches of anything that takes away from the developer flow, where 80% is
sifting through hn, and the other 20% programming. Anything thrown into that
equation just messes up the balance, tools will always be hated. But tools
used will always be loved. You value your time, use a moleskin, skip a page,
draw 7 lines, and each day write down what you have to do for work, for
yourself, and for others, move things down everyday that you dont finish, make
themactionable. Remember that first page we skipped, create an index, it's the
most important page of your life. So make sure to keep it handy, Jira was
loosely trying to solve this problem for everyone, it's become a monster -phun
intended. Raptor Jesus! Arghhh-

