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Comment by berntb | Hacker News Reader

I used to hate JIRA. At the present work, it surprises me that I quite like it.

I have thought about this (is my algorithm for liking/hating stuff deficient?), but am not certain if it is because I use a later version of JIRA, or if it is me. Am I less sensitive to bad web UIs?

It is easy to communicate with users and other developers. It keeps the discussion on the tasks in a nice place. It is easy to add queries to other people to call them in to touch a task.

My main theory is that the use case is different; I have more to do with users for the present tasks and the more complex features are less overkill. And I see less of the horrors (more experienced admins).

(Jokes about that this just shows my mental deterioration with advanced age will not be appreciated. :-) )

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I've heard that Jira is such a Swiss Army knife that your experience with it is extremely influenced by how it is configured. If it was poorly thought out and configured then you will hate it.

That's my take as well: the good/bad thing about systems like Jira is that they're so customizable and will thus increasingly mirror your underlying organizational culture. In a well-run organization that's great but people who work somewhere which is struggling might actually find an odd advantage to something like GitHub Issues in the sense that the lack of customization prevents the otherwise inevitable accretion of complexity.

the otherwise inevitable accretion of complexity.

Oh wow, that's fantastic - can I license that? :)

Feel free!

> your experience with it is extremely influenced by how it is configured

When I hear something like that about a product, my first instinct is to run away. I already know plenty of programming languages, I do not need a Turing complete interpreter with an arcane language added to it.

I'd say that's probably a fair assessment. I'd also wager that on-premise vs. cloud hosted (given that two of the points of the original story talked about speed). Though you could group that into configuration.

OK, I'll buy that... it is not me, it is the administrator(s).

Maybe you been stuck in it so long that now you like it lol

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_syndrome

Isn't there another name for this syndrome that would fit better with this particular situation?

Stockholm Syndrome?

I believe there is, but this was the closest I could find :(

How about <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome>?

That's the one!

>> I used to hate JIRA. At the present work, it surprises me that I quite like it.

I've used it at several places and had the same experience. The one caveat I have is that all of those teams were using the full Atlassian suite which was actually really nice.

And we were using EVERYTHING:

JIRA

Bitbucket

Fisheye

Sourcetree

Bamboo

Hipchat

The integration with all of these made those teams really efficient at what we did. Not sure if this had anything to do with how much easier or better JIRA worked, but I never had an issue with it.

Add Confluence to that list. Some integrations with JIRA are very nice, such as having a table of issues and their statuses on a wiki page is the cat's meow.

I have a meh-hate relationship with Confluence markdown, wishing for straight mediawiki. Another issue is that many of the plugins that would improve your life, such as "plain html please", have to be purchased and are expensive.

It supports Markdown? I don't see any way to escape the WYSIWYG editor.

On a Mac press ⌘-SHIFT D or select 'Insert more content' and 'Markup'.

Is there a way to edit a whole page that way?

edit: looks like that's just a way to insert a single bit of content, not edit existing content :/

I can't stand the sidebar.

[ toggles it

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