i’ve used jira for nearly a decade and seen it grow over that time. i’ve worked in orgs that embraced it, made it a central part of business process workflows, and therefore paid super close attention to making it usable for the company. i’ve worked at places where it was a simple backlog tracker.
i think jira is a best in class tool for the way it is customizable. the ui has changed over the years but not greatly. the rolling and apis have gotten much better. but the way different teams even at the same company can use the same tool is extremely impressive. i think people who say it’s over complicated and bloated are correct, but at a certain size the workaround for that is multiple competing tools. one team on trello. another on pivotal. and that’s a much worse experience.
I have been on teams where an obscene amount of time was spent discussing Jira.
Not "how should we do things?" but "how should we do things on Jira?" where it was abundantly obvious that using Jira compared to literally anything else was worse. We could have hired someone full time and paid quite well to sit on a stool and move post-its around on a wall and it would have been better, faster, and cheaper.
Jira is fine when you have whole teams of people whose entire job it is to care about things like Jira who make it good enough for the engineers to be generally disinterested, but it is toxic for small companies, especially those which contain certain personalities or just inexperience. You get sucked in to endless discussions and revisions (which generally make things worse) of your Jira process with this idea that when you make it perfect work will be so much better but the result is a Sisyphean engineering team spending ever more time rolling the Jira rock over the hill.
There are a lot of cases where one guy with a pad of paper or some sticky notes on a wall (or literally nothing) are much better than Jira, but Jira is one of those cargo cult things people do because they are supposed to and it doesn't seem to add value unless you ignore any customization and just leave it or you have massive resources to put to developing and maintaining the process.
> We could have hired someone full time and paid quite well to sit on a stool and move post-its around on a wall and it would have been better, faster, and cheaper.
There is no audit log for postit’s. If that is your main use case, use Trello.
On the other hand, hiring a jira expert to configure that monster is great. She should also push back on locking things down to much: Do you really want only managers to reassign tasks...?
When do you need an audit log and what do you need it for?
I certainly have answers as to why you would, I'm not questioning the validity of needing one, I just don't think that very many people who use Jira are optimizing for what they want and need. You aren't in the business of having a detailed record of the engineering work you did, you aren't in the business of making burndown charts, organizing process, etc.
Those things are supposed to work to your benefit, you're not supposed to be working for them.
i think jira is a best in class tool for the way it is customizable. the ui has changed over the years but not greatly. the rolling and apis have gotten much better. but the way different teams even at the same company can use the same tool is extremely impressive. i think people who say it’s over complicated and bloated are correct, but at a certain size the workaround for that is multiple competing tools. one team on trello. another on pivotal. and that’s a much worse experience.