
Why all the Jira hate? I’ll tell you why - gitgud
https://www.andykelk.net/agile/why-all-the-jira-hate-ill-tell-you-why
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silvestrov
My 2 big problems:

a) It . is . so . incredible . very . slow, it . takes . 7 . seconds . to .
load . a . page . when . hosted . on . atlassian.

b) Search is bad. It might be possible to find issues I have commented on 1-2
years ago and I have commented on and which contains some text, but the
interface and results are no where near as good as a simple text search in
Mail.app. This makes Jira a black hole where everything disappears into and is
never heard from again.

~~~
tom_mellior
Besides the above, my main issues with Jira:

1\. When I just open the main page, it opens to whatever my last search was,
which is almost always what I'm least interested in. Open issues assigned to
me would be more useful, for example.

2\. When I open an epic, there is no simple way (that I'm aware of) to hide
the many associated issues that are closed already so I can focus on the
outstanding ones.

3\. Its visual editor is buggy, marking individual inline words as monospaced
often fails.

There's probably more. I guess some of these issues could be workes around or
configured if I became a power user, but it really doesn't make me want to.

On the plus side, the integration with the other slow and tedious Atlassian
tools works OK and does give a generally quite useful set of tools.

~~~
lordalch
The last-search thing is configurable, depending on your version of Jira. You
can have it open to a specific RapidView, or your user-configurable Dashboard
page, where you can add a Widget for a a specific JQL like "Assigned to me AND
NOT issuestatus = Resolved"

Not that this exonerates JIRA of being clunky, but hopefully you can improve
your experience.

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rando444
I don't follow any of his arguments.

The author suggests that Jira is partially to blame for people who don't fully
understand Agile software development. I would argue it's not the software
that's the problem.

Bad practice in workflows? If you have a bad workflow, the software is not the
issue.. and the author's argument that making workflows is 'difficult', just
doesn't hold water with me.

His final argument to steer clear of Jira because physical paper is 'better'
isn't even an argument against Jira, it's an argument against all
organizational software.

I never knew there was jira hate before this posting, and only leaves me
wondering 'Why all the Jira hate?'

~~~
tapanjk
Github/Gitlab (gh/gl) for source control is [almost] universal in enterprises,
but it is quite confusing to me why these enterprises end up _not_ using gh/gl
issues for task management and tracking. Both of these now have well
implemented project boards and these are way faster and more usable than
traditional alternatives including Jira. For a developer, it is way easier and
more effective to spend time creating and updating issues in gh/gl than using
an entirely different solution. Open source projects have already demonstrated
the effectiveness of gh/gl issues, but enterprises continue to rely on
"enterprisey" solutions. I think this is mainly because the choice of project
management tool is in the hands of developers in case of open source, but
mostly with project/product managers in case of enterprises. As long as this
remains the case, developers employed with enterprises will continue to have
to live with tools that provide sub-optimal user experience.

Edit:

There is a good reason for project/product managers to prefer Jira and similar
products. They want to be able to create dashboards with some very complex
queries for reporting, and also features such as moving an Issue from one
project to another, etc. In short, it provides management features that PMs
rely on for reporting progress up the management chain.

~~~
weitzj
I would say that in the enterprise you would have for example a global
strategy of the company for the next years. This would somehow map to your
department and then somehow to your team. This means not everything needs to
be sourcecode but probably Epics derives stories and derived tasks which might
span across the company.

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weitzj
Physical boards have a nice feel to it but you can only put so much on it.

On JIRA, Trello or whatnot you have the chance to provide some more context
using extensive descriptions, pictures, references, urls.

I guess if you have a team which is not distributed, and everybody is on the
team 100% of their time and you manage that your holidays overlap a lot, it
might be feasible to have a physical board. Otherwise I see all this
communication overhead to explain to everybody what the thing on the board
means in detail.

~~~
mytailorisrich
> _On JIRA, Trello or whatnot you have the chance to provide some more context
> using extensive descriptions, pictures, references, urls._

All of those should not be on a board. That's the problem with Jira and
friends, which is widespread in software tools: feature bloat.

The limitations of a physical card or a physical board are a feature. The
point of a physical board is for everyone to get a summary at a glance.
Detailed descriptions, etc. should be in documentation.

~~~
clintonb
I believe the commenter is referring to the ability to add URLs and images to
individual stories and tasks. If I’m doing frontend, I need mocks for major
UI/UX changes.

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clintonb
This post is from 2015, and hasn’t aged well. The author doesn’t provide much
evidence for why he hates Jira. People assuming Jira makes the team agile is a
problem with those people, not the tool.

The default workflow is “good enough”. The times when folks have screwed up
workflows were more a result of an overly-complicated workflow than the tool
itself.

The recommendation to use a physical board doesn’t work for remote teams. My
team of four is currently distributed in four separate locations. Paper won’t
cut it.

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wtdata
Most of the complains seem to be from people preferring a physical medium for
their Kanban board.

Well, I agree with them, but I work with a team from all around the world and
we only get physically together every 3 months.

Although I am still not sold into all this Agile/Scrum philosophy, the fact
remains that it made our remote work as a team actually manageable when before
(using email/slack) it was simply not.

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necovek
I was hoping for something more substantive as well.

To me, Jira is a jack of all trades, which means that it will usually be set
up bad.

I did laugh out loud at "jiras": haven't heard that before, but I can easily
imagine it taking hold :)

------
iLemming
My suggestion:

\- use Clubhouse.io.

\- If you have no choice but to use Jira - use go-jira (Jira CLI tool).

You are a programmer, dealing with Jira is only a part of your job. Reduce the
frustration, don't let it become your [main] job.

