Jira doesn't suck. It is extremely complex, especially if there is a (misguided) desire for agile plugins and such, by Jira on its own is quite usable. You must have not used their competitors to consider it crap.
Jira's default state in many companies is more likely proof of broken processes. Something which no tool can solve.
The corollary of Jira being "extremely complex" turns out to be that most Jira instances are not set up optimally - meaning that the experience for a lot of people is "this is crap".
I'm not sure the blame for that can be placed on Atlassian thouh - the problem space they're trying to solve is large, varied, and complex (perhaps _that's_ Atlassian's fault, trying to do too much?) I've yet to come across any alternative to Jira that solves a large subset (or superset) of the problems Jira solves, that isn't equally difficult and resource intensive to set up and customise for a specific company/team. Trello's a great example of a _much_ simpler (and on the surface much less "crap") piece of software, but it falls _way_ short of doing everything a typical Jira shop needs Jira to do... A 5-10 person bike shop building custom bikes? Yeah, Trello will probably crush it. A 10-20 (or50-100) strong dev team working on multiple complex projects? Nah - Trello won't solve all your problems.
Jira can _easily_ suck (and does, way too often). But it's almost certainly a config/training problem rather than a software problem.
Many companies have JIRA set up like a clock which is too tightly wound - not enough slack in their processes and permissions and too wedded to a development or organizational ideology.
JIRA is amazing if the overriding philosophy is openness and slack in workflows.
But it's almost certainly a config/training problem rather than a software problem.
We can probably boil this analysis down a little bit, right? What's Jira's default UX for new installations/projects, does it _easily suck_ by default?
Change a few words and that becomes a defense of SAP.
The fact is, no software can make everyone happy all the time and the software will suck if it tries to do it. Yet we keep falling into the trap of thinking crap like JIRA and SAP can be customized just right.
Sure, and I'd say the same (with a little less personal experience) for SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and a whole bunch of other "enterprise platform" scale tools. There'll be heaps of poorly thought out and configured installations, and a few much less talked about companies where they got it set up properly and trained the users - who're busy raking in money executing their company business instead of killing productivity and morale fighting with their software...
> and a few much less talked about companies where they got it set up properly and trained the users - who're busy raking in money executing their company business instead of killing productivity and morale fighting with their software
I've never seen evidence that these companies exist apart from a few CTO's blabbing on about how great their latest implementation is, even though they never have to deal with the problems.
The only ones it ever works for are those with very generic problems.
I _suspect_ this is because you don't move in the same circles as the people who benefit most here.
Spend some time talking to the sales people who's haircuts look like they cost more than you make in a week, or who's suits probably cost more than your car. They're _all_ got finely tuned Salesforce (or equivalent) setups and can probably at any time tell you off the top of their head the number of leads and prospects in their pipeline, the size of their expected deals, their recent conversion rate, the estimated total value of their prospects/leads (and the precise dollar value of their commission and bonus...)
I've seen the same with large logistics operations - the ops/management people know exactly where all their assets are and the schedule of movements compared to the upcoming work requests.
You won't hear these stories at a Ruby On Rails meetup or in a weekend hackathon. It's not part of most tech/IT stories. But it's 100% happening out there.
Unfortunately, you can't. For example, let's say I want to have a different set of priorities or resolutions for a project. I have to run a whole new JIRA server.
Have to admit, I haven't used any of their competitor's software, but just because you can change every single setting, doesn't mean people will want to. I'm pretty sure no one in my company fully understands it. Settings are all over the place, and even small changes require many clicks to get to where you need.
I know it's a different product, but if you look at Zendesk, it's so simple to get setup, and there are still many integrations to achieve what you need but all at the click of a button, in a friendly interface. It just works™...
Sure. vi, grep, and bash are all great tools, and you can do amazing software dev work using them - but that doesn't mean things like IntelliJ aren't also great. My Groovy/Grails devs think I'm some sort of Wizard when I pull out grep and pipe things to awk then pipe that to a Perl one liner, but I watch them using their IDE and think "Wow, that's _so_ cool!" as well...
I'm old-school, deeply entrenched into the Unix "do one small thing well" philosophy. But there's no string of terminal command line tools that's going to do all the things Jira does for the entire group of people in a typical business that use Jira.
(I find it quite amusing when devs here discover/get-shown for the first time that SourceTree is - underneath - pretty just typing git commands into a terminal for them!)
Occams razor is slightly more sophisticated than 'complex != Good'.
Distinguish between inherent and accidental complexity. You'll see that every human endeavor has many known and unknown inherent complexities. Just ignoring those will hamper your ability to abstract and ascend.
Complex Jira setups and bad management seem to go hand in hand. A bad manager will try and fix problems by introducing more process and avoiding the real issues. It lets them feel like they are doing something useful. And Jira is more than happy to let them do that. That's not a fault of the software, though.
Well, Jira has an 80/20 problem: it tries to do the 20% that satisfies 80% of the users (cases.) so far so good, but when you trip over one of the details that make up the remaining 80% you're SOL. JIRA-1330 is my favorite :)
Jira's default state in many companies is more likely proof of broken processes. Something which no tool can solve.