
Ask HN: Does anyone else find Jira's interface frustrating? - repostack
Our company is making a push to use Jira for tracking all of our engineering efforts (bug fixes, features, epics, ...). I&#x27;m all for consolidation but I find myself having to click through multiple dialogs to do simple things (like opening a ticket, and starting progress). Because of this, and other quirks with the UI, I often track all my work in Trello and copy over my progress in batches to Jira.<p>I&#x27;m thinking about building a simple web client around Jira&#x27;s API. I imagine other people&#x27;s workflows are fairly different, so what I might build someone else might hate. Given that, would anyone else be interested in something like this? Or should I bother someone with Admin access to see if we can tweak the interface, if it&#x27;s even possible?
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smoyer
The best way to use Jira (or any business software) is to adapt your processes
to use it the way the company that developed it intended. Too many times, we
buy a product and start customizing it before we start using it. The key is
that, theoretically, the producing company researched best-practices in their
field and tried to deliver a product that would meet those needs without
modification.

I've been involved with two Jira installations that started with heavy
customization. One was rolled back to the default Jira after 18 months and the
other ultimately resulted in Jira being replaced by something else (which is
now failing because they started that project with customization too).

Use the product for a year or two, learn its workflow and only then tweak the
customization to suit your organization. And then do even that slowly. You'll
thank me!

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repostack
That sounds like the smartest play. I suppose I just want to build something
and this seemed pretty cool and possibly useful. I'll invest more time in Jira
and try to follow its philosophy. If it's still not working for me in a few
months time I'll see what tweaks can be made. Thanks.

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r3l0z
Most of our departments use service desk that are extremely simplified "create
ticket" interfaces. You can then just edit it if you need to add more detail.
We also wrote command line tools in Python that use the API. I didn't like
JIRA at first for some of the same reasons but now that I have my own
dashboards/filters set up it is quite nice.
[https://developer.atlassian.com/jiradev/jira-apis/jira-
rest-...](https://developer.atlassian.com/jiradev/jira-apis/jira-rest-
apis/jira-rest-api-tutorials/jira-rest-api-example-create-issue)

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davelnewton
It's a bit clunky in places, but can be customized within JIRA itself.

Not sure what process you're using to create a ticket; I just hit 'C' and
enter in the ticket details. JIRA has an agile view as well that allows DnD
ticket status operations.

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repostack
It's probably just how we have it configured. Right now when a new ticket is
opened it's in the pending state. The DnD interface doesn't work until you
open the ticket.

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davelnewton
That's in your board's workflow configuration.

