Worked at AAA game developer. They had shit ton of custom workflows build on top of JIRA.
Imagine you want to add a weapon to the game. With one click you could generate 100s of tasks for all the related stuff. It touches pretty much all the game. This is very very incomplete list for what Jira created tasks:
- concept, 2d, 3d art
- sounds, and there's quite a bit of them: just gun sound, reloads, impact on different surfaces etc
- animations - this is a large one
- writing: for example, background info on the weapon
- gameplay design: how the gun fits into the game
- world design: where the gun can be found, who (some fraction?) uses it
- quest design: maybe the gun is a reward in some quest, or is used in a particular way
- balance
- obviously, programming for all the above
- and even more obviously, testing all of the parts.
And that's one workflow. You had those for many parts of the game.
I wouldn't say I 'love' it, but at the same time I don't really get all the hate. I've recently moved from a large'ish (50+) dev shop to a much smaller team of 3. JIRA was and is used at both places. It continues to serve both orgs equally well.
Perhaps what people hate are all the ceremonies and bureaucracy that arise around JIRA in dysfunctional organisations, and not the product itself? The red tape and bullshit was just starting to take over at the old place (part of the reason I jumped ship), which made 'standups' that should have taken 5-10 minutes a 90-minute soul-destroying odyssey. But that's not JIRA's fault either.
Indeed. Blaming Jira because it's missing this or that feature, or because the managed version is being slow is fine. Blaming it because it's an implementation of the twisted processes of your organization it is not (and that's what most people usually do, even if unknowingly)
Sure. Get out of HN bubble, go attend almost any Atlassian event -- their main user conference has thousands of users attending -- and you will easily run into people who love Jira and/or Confluence.
if you have a complex workflow that is supported by Jira, then you could use a simple too by switching to a simple workflow.
Keeping the complex workflow but using a dumber tool (E.g. having to track it via post-its, emails, chat, six different spreadsheets on different SharePoint servers plus sign off in two different custom in-jhouse webapps, would be worse in every aspect).
So when people say they hate Jira, they really hate the combination of Jira + the workflow under it.
I'd happily live without complex processes. But IF I have to use a complex process, I do love having one tool to handle it with, instead of eight. I did this switch FROM the 8 different spreadsheets and webapps, into the Jira/Azure DevOps/Whatever, several times. And I loved it every time because it's a less bad solution. It's not a good solution (that would be reducing complexity in the process). But for sufficiently complex organizations and tasks, some times you need a complex process and a complex tool to maintain it. And I guess in that situation no one will love the tool even though it's the least bad one.
