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0 pointsnecovek1y ago0 comments

I know managers love Jira — a poster child for customizability — esp product managers, but I have yet to meet a software engineer who does.

It simply slows everyone down, but when it's your only tool for tracking work, it's still better than nothing.

Now, the problem with Jira is not necessarily customizability but that it's dog slow, complex, integrations suck, and permissions system is chaotic. Still, I have yet to see fully customizable work tracking system that's better made than Jira.

But also, a fixed set of features does not force you to ascribe the same meaning to them like the authors intended: I've used "bug" tracking systems to manage large projects with great success (including big features, enhancements, but also big and small fixes).

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dangus1y ago· 2 in thread

Honestly this is a bit like saying that the dishwashers don’t like the food being served at the restaurant.

Project management software isn’t made for the benefit of engineers, that’s on purpose. The customer is the business, not the engineer who works there.

Any issues with the engineers have with workflow really aren’t the fault of the software, it’s the fault of the project managers/engineering managers’ configurations.

You can’t blame the company that makes the paint for the choice in paint color.

Personally I think the only way Jira has dropped the ball is on page load performance.

necovekOP1y ago

When I ask my Jira admins to enable a set of people to do something on a project, they struggle.

When I create a ticket and don't open it right away before the popup is gone, poof, it's gone into the depths of that project backlog.

If I want to create a multi-project board, oh, now tickets don't have the same statuses, set up a mapping first.

Or figuring out the artifical limits between epics, tickets and subtasks.

And slowness, don't get me started there.

Yes, just like you are blaming the paint shop for only having the basic colors, I too can blame the paint shop for having 1M green hues to choose from.

jboy551y ago

And yet every paint manufacturer has hundreds of swatches of various colors that their paint 'comes in', even though there is practically an infinite possibility of colors available.

I've seen many custom JIRA workflows, where you define specific states that can progress to other states. Nearly all of them, over time, were modified so that any state can move to any other state.

And if you engineers don't use the tool you provide, the data in it is useless. Engineers are typically very smart and will just twist any tool they don't like.

Declaration: In order to have accurate state between projects and bugs, everything needs to be tracked in JIRA.

Result: 70% of your Jira stories are now "This JIRA tracks an issue stored in the Github repo, see the repo for current status"

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