Jira: Thumbs up or Thumbs down? | Hacker News Reader

Jira: Thumbs up or Thumbs down?

2 pointsjiteshdugar11 comments

What is your overall opinion about Jira?

Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down?

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Too complicated to use, especially in roles and permissions. I don’t need a Ferrari,where a bicycle will do just fine.

True. It is probably very powerful but is very complicated to use and get started.

Have you considered alternatives?

A PITA to configure.

Magnificent if configured right (hint: simplify, simplify; provide use-case-customized simplified kanban boards and issue filters to anyone who doesn't want or need the complexity).

Irreplaceable for reasonably tech-savvy project managers.

And the new UI may be more modern and mobile friendly but is harder to use on desktop than the old one.

Yes. configuration takes a lot of time and it is not easy to get started. Have you considered alternatives that are worth looking at?

Everything else I've looked at falls short in one or another crucial way. The closest has been Phabricator, which felt clunky in comparison (granted, it's been a few years now since I've used it.)

Codegiant and Scrumpy look like good alternatives atleast for me.

Down. Functional but over-engineered.

I don’t like wondering if the page will just hang or go blank when I touch one small thing.

Yes. It's become complicated due to the high number of integrations that it supports. It does make it useful, but it has been over-engineered like you said.

What alternatives have you considered? I found a couple of good ones recently Codegiant & Scrumpy, and evaluating between them currently.

The only other ones I’ve used for any serious amount of time were Bugzilla, Trac and ClearDDTS. I also dabble with GitHub Issues.

Bugzilla is another functional-but-not-ideal one. It just seemed bulky somehow; I don’t tend to want a lot.

Trac is probably my favorite but it tends to work best if you can adopt it all at once (code, wiki, etc.). At the time I was using Subversion, which it could tie into well. I don’t know if it handles “git”. It has a nice wiki format. Everything cross-links easily.

DDTS is quite old but was surprisingly robust and versatile (probably not even sold anymore though). It had a very Unix-style design with many commands, text file formats with a side database, and a web wrapper over it all that has page templates, etc. It does issue tracking and as far as I know it doesn’t integrate with anything else (no special knowledge of revision control...maybe ClearCASE?).

Terrible.

What are you using as a replacement to Jira?

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