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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Github issues is good because it does not have so many features.

If they started adding features to Github issues pretty soon it would be as slow and hard to use as JIRA. It's been a big problem with issue tracking systems for a long time. Once you add enough features and form fields, then the "add ticket" page looks like the cockpit of an old Boeing 747 (not the new glass cockpit.) Then the product manager stops putting tickets in because he can't figure out how to do it, and the developers get afraid of putting time on tickets because you try to subtract an hour that you worked on it and somehow end up adding 5 hours, and the remotes complain that it takes 40 seconds to create a ticket, etc.

There are so many issue tracking systems out there because: THEY ALL SUCK!

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Really? Maybe you need a larger company to manage things like this; but at one place where we switched to Jira we wrote integration into our GUI apps for users to create tickets (and automatically log contextual info), and created very simple "create ticket" screens in Jira itself.

The best part was being able have end users open up a ticket wherever they were most comfortable and it could get routed to the appropriate department without losing any history (i.e. open a ticket because of an error message in an app, but get routed to hardware to replace a video card or driver). We went from having 5 separate ticketing systems (a few home built) to Jira.

It always felt like you could abstract the complexity if you needed, but the power was there if necessary. But I have no idea what was involved with setting up and managing Jira.

The last place I worked we co-opted another app and used it for issue tracking. Search and discoverability was so poor that most everyone used their email to find any tickets that weren't assigned to them.

I find it weird that companies can use GitHub exclusively for issue tracking. Not just that it's so bare bones, but many of the things that have tickets aren't for a specific software project. I guess they use different ticketing systems for different departments?

"we wrote integration into our GUI apps for users to create tickets..."

Very cool.

"There are so many issue tracking systems out there..."

Because every Dev/QA/Test team is a unique snowflake. JIRA tries to be all things to all people, to support all the mutant chaotic psychotic use cases, so it becomes nothing to everyone. Just like the enterprisey CRM, ERP, etc systems we all hate so much.

I had high hopes for FogBugz; I like that it's opinionated. But I haven't yet had the juice to procure it. (Atlassian won the marketing mindshare battle.)

Next time I'm in charge of QA, I'll be rolling my own tracker, again. To better support our workflow directly.

I've long wondered what a WYSIWYN tracker would look like. Maybe a HyperCard and wiki hybrid with a versionable schema (to reduce costs of change, because all processes evolve if permitted). Alas, I haven't had the gumption to make such an elegant beast.

> Next time I'm in charge of QA, I'll be rolling my own tracker, again. To better support our workflow directly.

What is the workflow that you use? Is it supported by JIRA today? If it is - what would need to have to happen in JIRA to be something you'd support?

We're always keen to improve.

Scott, CEO Atlassian

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