Also, please consider finding a native english copywriter to take a run at your writing. It's readable, but not fluent, and overly filled with jargon.
If you just want an issue tracker, there are many options. Bugzilla, Mantis, GitHub, GitLab, Gitea,... Some of them customizable via plugins. Heck, you can even do it with Excel, I don't recommend it, but it gets the work done at many places. I mean, it is just a shared TODO list.
But then you want people to get notified by email, and the boss want a colorful dashboard with progress graphs, and QA wants a documented process, and developers want to attach tickets to their commits, project managers want time estimates, customers want to report bugs, sales want to send invoices, etc... That's how you get monsters like Jira, because the organization itself is a monster.
Also, I hated Jira before learning a lot of its features and how to use them, getting frustrated that everything is not just a setting, but something meta where you need to adjust a “scheme” and understand how it works with the other data objects in the system. Eventually I learned it, just in time for Atlassian to put a lot of effort into a candy-coated, “simplified” set of defaults that hides 99% of the system’s power and abilities.
The main thing I actually don’t like about Jira is that: its insistence on setting up all new projects with infantile, Trello-like schemes, which then encourage sloppy setup when you start customizing unless you’re very seasoned with Jira. I think they should consider training an AI to “do what I mean” and help users to build out their setups —because transitioning from the “out of box experience” which I call “Expensive Trello” into a sophisticated workflow which actually models the business processes correctly and protects you against breaking your agreements, while making it easy to understand what to do next, is very difficult. In all but the biggest orgs, i don’t think it ever really happens.
But the company where I work at right now has a really well set-up JIRA board where most things that I need to do are easy to so and there are clearly defined workflows. Compared to the morasses of legacy code I have to wrestle with, I find JIRA now to be one of the least troubling aspects of my work day.
I'm sure it was super painful for the people who had to actually set up the current flows, but I guess that once you customise JIRA to your needs, it can work really well. The issue probably is that many companies don't want to bother setting up good, streamlined processes, or just don't know how.
Now, Confluence on the other hand... I have no excuses for it. I can't understand how a documentation tool can have a search feature that is unable to find what you're looking for basically every single time.
I would love to see Jira state somehow derived from the state of the codebase. Tickets get marked complete when they are actually complete in the code, with tests and documentation and everything, because the ticket state is derived from the code state.
As someone who had to admin an on-prem installation of various Atlassian products, upgrades were always a nightmare: you could try multiple dry-runs to make sure data tables were updated, and plug-in upgrades were good, but invariably there would still be a good chance that something would still go wrong when you tried it with production.
The workflow we settled on was basically leave the old version alone, rsync over all the data to a completely new app and DB servers, and do the upgrades on the new systems. Any attempt at in-place upgrades was just asking for trouble.
Anyone who was prime on the software was very happy when The New Guy on the team arrived due to personnel churn and they got handed the baton for dealing with it.
but it's easier (and probably healthier) for jira to soak up that hatred. jira's good at that.
The result is that for some of the companies I've worked for, each team's tickets have different but very similar "workflows" using custom state labels. In some projects when I go to close a ticket, it offers me approximately 30 different semantics which which to close the ticket. These include things like both "Done", and "Completed". What the fuck is the difference between "Done" and "Completed"? I do not know or care whether it is Jira that has populated this dropdown with such embarrassingly unintelligent crap or my company: if the latter then Jira should have neither encouraged nor even made it possible.
Jira itself is fine. It is very powerful, and with that power, it can be setup "wrong". That all stems from opinionation. On itself it's an empty box, right?
As the saying goes, Jira is fine, the only problem is that it is Turing-complete.
Another example: tasks can't be part of more than one project. Have a task that affects multiple projects? Tough. Pick one.
The backlog doesn't update immediately when you edit tasks on it. You have to refresh.
But a big part of the problem with Jira is that it is highly configurable and you always end up with project managers massively overcomplicating things. You get dozens of issue types, dozens of statuses, weird automation rules etc.
It's not awful, it's just surprisingly bad at its core task.
But it's an opinionated tool. Almost every person I have ever worked with has never read the docs, so they just sort of suffer and complain and never learn that they're using it wrong. I'm the guy on every job that has to teach the team how to use Confluence and Jira correctly. My biggest challenge in making Jira work well is convincing coworkers to stop using it wrong. (They'd rather come on HN and complain about it than read the docs or take a Udemy course)
All this is compounded by people who don't even know how to do Scrum or Kanban or even basic project management, so their complaints are also often just people who don't know how to work. Which, again, is most people I have worked with.
My problem is that it’s expensive. $100/year/user for cloud and minimum $40k for “data center” hosting.
Also, it’s java based so updated are kind of a pain with ears and jars and wars and manually application. And there have been a few zero days and data loss.
At this price, I want something else. I don’t think issue tracking is a “big deal” but Jira is making it a big deal because of its price and security.
I’m trying to get by with gitlab and GitHub issues.
But I still was not too happy with it back when I used it - main reasons being extremely slow load times (we had the cloud version, not self-hosted) - and lots of annoying inconsistencies, like "create issue" using a completely different editor than "edit issue", etc.
I for one feel like I grew up those people and we should share our wedding and other milestone photos and announcements on that chain.
BUT it is absolutely possible to configure Jira to be horrible to use. Add lot’s of extra fields, force complex workflows etc.
Within 3 seconds of reading the GitHub page I was sold. It’s already on my todo list for next week.
I think when I die in ~50 years that HN will still be filled with stories ragging on Jira, or whatever it is that eventually replaces it. It's like the pastime that will never end.
To be clear, I think it's great to see open source projects like this, and I think increasing competition is a really wonderful thing. I also totally agree that Jira has lots of room for improvement, with performance probably being the most common gripe. But I always smirk a little to myself when I hear complaints that are solely from a particular point of view (usually an individual developer). Project management tools have an extremely difficult task of needing to fulfill a gargantuan range of requirements for many varied stakeholders (frontline devs, dev managers, product managers, business leads and execs, sometimes end users depending on ticketing functionality, etc.)
Some simple pieces of evidence:
1. For one, just look at the varied list of comments already coming in on this story "does it support multiple issue types or tiered issues?", "Does Plane offer all the pro features for free because we can't afford to pay anything for it?", "Does it support Google login or other identity providers?", "It needs a walkthrough video that must be short, I'm not going to look at a long video", "Is Ctrk+K a good shortcut?", "Can't add an issue on iPad", "Can it autodelete issues after 30 days of no changes?"... Point being, for any project management tool, you're going to basically get feature requests as varied as the number of comments, and I think I see this more frequently with project management tools than almost any other type of software.
2. Think about the legions of Jira competitors that have popped up: Asana, Basecamp, Monday.com, Linear, Rally, YouTrack, ClickUp, Trello (obv. under Atlassian now, but can't count the number of times I've heard "We loved Trello because it was simple and easy to get started, but we eventually outgrew it and needed additional features."), etc. etc. I have yet to ever hear one of those competitors being universally loved. On the contrary, I've seen cases where a competitor is touted as "the next big thing", and then when it gets more popular people talk about how much they hate it (Asana comes to mind in that regard).
In general, I don't think the problem is the tool, I think that most people just don't like to do ticket management, so it's all a case of looking for the "least bad" tool out there.
This is Nitin from Plane. Your;s is an interesting take on project management tools. Quite understandably, no one can go out and try to solve everyone's problem. However, at Plane our methodology is "Tasks meet Methods", and we will try our best to do everything fitting in to this methodology.
We would love to see you try out Plane and share your valuable suggestions. Plane is new but its evolving quite fast.
It's... free? Isn't that a pretty big difference? https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing
Plus, even if the software itself is free, you still have to host it somewhere.
Another feature Plane probably has: not being horribly laggy. You could make a ticket in Jira with a bunch of links or whatever the hell it is that makes Jira load so slowly, and make an identical ticket in Plane, and compare the loading times. From my Jira experiences it shouldn't be hard to be 10x faster.
https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/news/252515706...
As a development tool for stories / tasks and bug tracking I don't enjoy it.
The fact that it’s basically the same thing is probably a positive for a lot of people shopping for alternatives.
That’s the value prop
- It's not Jira
The first problem is that everyone, even in the same team or org, needs something different from it. Sometimes it is even single individuals needing one particular thing one time, and the same day for another workflow or view another thing. It is when Jira caters to the wrong use case for you right now where the a lot of frustration arises.
In a similar vein, it wants to cater devs, coaches, POs, business people, customers and all of them over various orgs with drastically different workflows. Serving everyone equally must lead to a mediocre experience. You will always miss something, while there is so much stuff you don't need or want and you have to work around.
Arguably, this has become better a lot in the last 10 years, but you will always long for "something better".
But the most painful issue is that in some orgs Jira is the workflow, instead of supporting it and staying in the background. At some point people are only sending around ticket links, commenting on tickets, requesting people monitoring their queues. This creates overhead, redirection and Jira becomes a distraction you need to handle.
As a result Jira becomes a proxy for all the things going wrong with your daily work and a problem of its own.
I don't want the perfect tool, just one that isn't horrendous.
There is a lot of fault on the companies who are implementing bad configurations and multiple setups for different teams definitely adds to the complexity. To have a 'lite/light' stripped down version which is purely functional and not bloated with drag and drop events etc would be a really nice to have.
We went with Asana. I miss the ability to create epics and do proper sprints, but at least the things load when you click on them.
Before the new UI came around in ~2017 it performed pretty well and if you were judicious with customization it was easy to use. Everyone knows Jira so it was easy to get new people started with it. Then the redesign came out.
I opted in for a bit when it was in Alpha but bailed because I had trouble getting my job done in trivial ways. I'm normally pretty accepting and friendly to new UIs, even if its rough at first. I generally accept that I won't like most at first because it disrupts my workflow in the short term. Usually once I relearn the project its for the best. Not with this one. It's just so damn slow. It's terrible.
I'm not in a position where I pick our project management/documentation tooling anymore, but if I was I don't know what I'd pick. It used to be that I wouldn't think twice, now Jira isn't seriously in the running anymore. I think notion has beaten out confluence even if I'm still not in love with it.
There must be some sort of misconfiguration going on here, as I never have this experience in Jira Cloud. Your opinion is a common one so I'm not discounting it, but with "New Jira" as I call it (the Team-based projects), this never happens to me.
But in general, I agree that Atlassian should primarily focus on performance fixes, it is by far the most common complaint.
Atlassian changed their strategic focus from on-premise to cloud, and they are making lots of improvements, including performance.
Also they seem to be immune to feedback, which they wanted to collect in Confluence, using some popups.
Australian here, I can provide some clarity on that. Australians in general are fairly lazy; we like to do the bare minimum necessary to get the job done so we can knock off work and grab a beer at 4pm. Atlassian is an Australian company, and has generally inherited such an approach, so there's little tolerance for putting extra effort into things like adding the finishing touches to markdown parsing or improving performance (or even preventing it from regressing).
Its too flexible, if you allow people do what they want they'll have no structure at all, and you end up with disasters like a bunch custom "priority" field which are the exact same as the regular priority field except it just has different variations on "low", "medium", "high".
For my team I use basically none of Jiras features. I have a simple kanban board with 7 steps, and encourage my team to use it as a ships log. No story points or sprints or any of that stuff, the only hard requirement is that in order to close a ticket you have to write a paragraph about what was changed or attach an email to the Jira where you did the same but with a client.
Could JIRA be faster, easier, etc...? Sure. But, I have tried many products to run agile/scrum teams and haven't found anything that gives the flexibility and options that JIRA has.
The "better Jira" that I dream of is simply Jira but faster and with a better UI, I don't have issues with the underlying process
- the keyboard hotkeys aren't customisable, and often fire when I'm using alt+numbers to switch tabs, so when I come back to the Jira tab it's on some report page I don't care about
- sometimes the content won't render when switching pages, requiring a full refresh. It's difficult to tell whether it's just being slow to load, or it's gotten itself stuck. Sometimes I sit there for a few seconds like an idiot until I remember to hit refresh
- there's pretty poor support for ticket templates as far as I can tell. My company's method uses a confluence page with a table with the templates, then uses the bulk "create Jira ticket" option. But this edits the wiki page for some reason, which you need to revert. They're probably expecting you to duplicate a whole template page before generating, but the editing part could be an option in the generator wizard. With this method there's no way to go back and amend the auto-generated tickets' titles and descriptions etc. You're stuck with manually editing all of them along with the template. Surely templates are a common enough use case that warrant a dedicated workflow?
Big yes to this. One of the things I noticed at a client that was using it, and growing, was that multiple people not directly involved in development had a lot of visibility in to developer-focused boards. Those folks were using numbers and info we were recording, taking them largely out of context, and making strategic decisions from those.
One of my big bug bears is 'story points'. In general, I don't like them - the effort involved in accurately getting them "right" usually takes longer than just doing some of the work (not always, but a non-trivial number greater than 0).
Over time, our 'story points' and 'velocity' numbers came to mean a lot of different things to a lot of other people. We had 5 different parties who would routinely check those numbers, and often interject their own questions, call for more meetings, etc. And 99% of it was just... useless. After more talking, I'm realizing that parties A, B, C, D and E all are using the same number (story points in this case) for different purposes, sometimes vastly different.
To counter some people getting upset at seeing certain numbers go up or down too much (or too fast or too slow), sometimes numbers would be changed midway through a sprint. And, sometimes things would be added or removed from tickets mid sprint. These may be unavoidable in some cases - I get it - but the changes weren't at all related to helping the front-line workers get work done. The changes were done to make someone's sprint report numbers acceptable to someone else who asked for these reports. Neither of these parties were ever in meetings with any of us.
In the spirit of cooperation, I suggested we add some more custom fields to track the actual numbers they wanted to track (one of the things Jira does well is letting you add more data collection points). Rather than overload and use one piece of data for multiple purposes (which not everyone was aware of), why not just capture more data, to get more accurate/complete data? "Too confusing. That's too much work for you all". What they meant was "I don't know how to make new reports with this info, and I couldn't compare current data historically against old data, so we'll just keep doing this half-assed thing".
And It became that willingly, because Atlassian understood that their customer wasn't devs or PMs, but managers and corporate procurement people. They fully deserves to be on the hook for their product.
But having a jquery frontend experience with a single-threaded backend system doesn't do it any favours ;)
By the creators of Penpot, free plan is basically only missing premium support. Not sure about the login though...there seem to be some plugins for it, not sure how that works with the hosted version?
FYI, Atlassian has a non-profits license. While the cloud version only has a discount so you still have to pay per user, the on-prem version is free. Best part about running on-prem under this license is that a lot of on-prem extensions have opted in to atlassian marketplace licensing and offer free plans for non-profits. While this would be expensive to do in the cloud, because the plugins run on your server, it’s basically free for everyone involved. The downside is you still have to manage and renew licenses, and don’t expect too much support given the free price.
> Atlassian also offers free Data Center (self-managed) licenses for registered charitable non-profit organizations that are non-government, non-academic, non-commercial in nature, non-political, and have no religious affiliation.
More at https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/purchase-licensing#trial... under the faq question about non-profit pricing…
The per-project wiki feature is useful for documentation.
[2] https://docs.tuleap.org/administration-guide/users-managemen...
Edit: in the spirit of the thread, also try Plane.
Zammad + Taiga.io|Redmine + Growi|Xwiki + Rocket.chat
If JIRA is the "most hated" brand and at the same time a very popular issue tracker, then "Alternative to JIRA" sounds like, "here's an alternative to the product you so hate" isn't it ? I mean why would I look for an alternative if I didn't hate the thing I am working with or thought it was not good enough?
These types of shortcut key overrides are why I've got them disabled in my browser by default.
Those don't market themselves as similar to Jira, but that's not exactly a feature, so what are the differences in practice?
I think labelling would get us out of the woods. Schema would be preferable, but there’s no reason why labeling won’t work.
I plan to give it a go at our consultancy next week, thanks
Conversations about why it's bad for developers or product managers or attempts to show them how to get the same value in another way often fall on deaf ears (or don't happen at all) because it's the only way that they know how to work.
One of the key indicators that this is happening is when people start saying things like "this can't do Agile because it doesn't have PET_FEATURE"
Jira isn't just software, it's a way of working that's become the de facto standard, and it's hard to get out of that box for a lot of people.
Indeed it is a shame that they still a thing.
Edit: looks like you do [1]! Perfect! I'll sign up shortly and give it a spin.
[1] https://plane.so
FWIW, Python servers like this are just a wrapper around `gunicorn` or some other performant low level tool. For some teams, it's easier to define a schema in Python for a couple years now due to some very innovative libraries with easy-to-use decorators.
I have no personal experience with using it in production or for an extended amount of time however.
Forever, are you sure about that?
https://github.com/makeplane/plane/tree/develop/apps/app/com...
I'm planning to set up a Plane instance for my friend group as soon as it supports OpenID Connect (SAML would work as well, but I imagine OIDC is coming first, since it's a lot more sane). We have some small projects we maintain, and we desperately need a nice issue tracking tool like this.
Ten+ years later I had to use Jira in another company and now it's all like expanding panels, sidebars, constantly navigating to different views. I couldnt get a simple straightforward list of issues, or I could only see things assigned to me as opposed to see the progress of the team in a straightforward table...
No, you're not "agile" just because you have scrum sprints in Jira.
Mmh.
I like that it's opensource, that way product owners can become even more inventive with great ways of making a process cumbersome
If the org has a very strict form-filling culture, your Jira tickets will be full of fields to fill for no reason. If no one is valuing documentation, the documents will be outdated or spread randomly. Personally, with the right culture I do not see the problem with Jira, and with the wrong culture Jira can be slog.
*edit: For me, backlog views are not enough to structure tickets in a meaningful way. Does Plane have a view to fluidly manage all open tickets?
