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Comment by Laaw | Hacker News Reader

Not a huge fan of Confluence (just give me Markup, dammit), but Jira is simply the best at what it does.

Pretty much all developers I know can't stand Jira. Management loves it though.

Yup, JIRA is a power-manager's wet dream. Whatever way one can think of for adding "things" to a task (and how to classify them, and how to keep track of them...), Atlassian has probably thought of it. For a developer who just wants to keep the tool at a distance and only log into it to move their shit across the scrum board and promptly log back out, they better hope their scrum overlords have looked upon them kindly.

Almost every time my company gets called in to do JIRA consulting the situation is this: Devs bring JIRA in.. JIRA gets popular.. things get out of control.

It is almost NEVER brought in by management.

In my opinion it's a range of management requests that give rise to the workflow, and devs hate managing workflows with email, notes ("When you are done implementing move the issue to the X column and send a message to the testers group that..."). So then devs bring in JIRA to do some automation. Now the tester person gets an email when the issue is moved to the testing phase. But once everything is in place, management will see the benefits, and the workflow will "evolve", especially if the teams grow. It's pretty natural.

I used to be a dev who brought in JIRA because I like it out-of-the-box and it can grow with a team. But I always tell my manager to NOT TOUCH THE WORKFLOWS and to just let things grow organically as the needs of the team grow (or don't). And every time the moment they click around and see the workflow editor we ended up with some big, bloated, convoluted mess. I've been burned too many times, I no longer recommend JIRA to anyone.

The trick is that Jira should be "owned" by the dev teams, not by management. Management shouldn't even have a login, except perhaps to submit bugs.

The only exception is if Jira is used for project management type stuff - those projects can and should be isolated from dev projects.

Jira is a super flexible tool.

Sounds like all the developers you know hate how their bosses use tools. I happen to love how my team uses Jira.

I love Jira. You just have to have it set up for the people using it every day (developers)

As a dev, Jira is the best of a bad lot.

I'm one of these. PivotalTracker is the only thing I don't hate.

I hate Jira completely. It is terrible. Best system I've seen is Pivotal Tracker.

I used to be a Pivotal guy before looking into JIRA again recently. They've made a lot of changes to their platform that really make it a pleasure to use, at least for my needs (development work with small teams). There is a bit of setup work but once you do that, it's smooth sailing.

Pivotal Tracker is deliberately minimalist. I didn't really get it until I started working at Pivotal Labs.

I started using FOSS Phabricator on a medium-sized team (~20) for private central git hosting, code review, issue tracking, project management, etc. We absolutely love it and I wonder how it compares to Confluence/JIRA.

Jira 3 was an okay issue tracker. Jira 4 is a SLOOOW issue and a terrible agile planning tool.

Much happier with Trello and a zero bug policy.

> zero bug policy.

Oh, why hadn't I thought of that...

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