Ask HN: Why do you dislike Jira? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do you dislike Jira?

5 pointsseancoleman10 comments

Jira seems to be a polarizing application. Some people love and swear by it, yet it seems most people (developers?) hate it. What are some reasons you think Jira is bad? What do you use as a project management / agile tool instead of Jira (or wish you used)? If you like Jira, I'm also curious of those reasons.

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Jira can do everything but it can't do everything well. As soon as you step off the beaten path with it, and there are many ways of doing that, it becomes a nightmare to use. Managers mess around with workflows and custom fields that infuriate all the developers. Migrating and integrating items doesn't work because of the aforementioned modifications.

The UI can become frustrating because there are many ways to see the same data presented in a subtly different way so navigating to that view again is difficult. And the new single page application can be infuriating because you can't go back to filtered views and pages can take ages just to load the main UI elements.

I love Jira, but it's easy to abuse because of its flexibility. I'd be hesitant to inherit a heavily customizes Jira configuration.

Sometimes tools need to be more opinionated to minimize the risk of user error, and Jira seems to fall into that category.

Buggy outdated UI, does things differently from the rest of the applications I use and enjoy on a regular basis (for example it's own special text input markup), the tendency of organizations to add way too many custom fields and tags so that doing anything requires entering data into a massive form

The UI has been refreshed twice in recent years, including a few weeks ago. When was your most recent experience with the latest hosted Jira?

I haven't to be honest, the couple of companies I have been with that used it have used outdated self hosted versions. Maybe the licensing scheme should encourage organizations to upgrade rather that stay on an old version.

I always tell people that Jira used to be terrible and has been drastically improved (in terms of usability, stability, and features) in the last 5 years.

It's still not perfect at all and is too flexible to be a safe choice for all orgs.

I've noticed the UI to be a bit schizophrenic. The list view has one way of displaying a ticket, but a ticket's details has another way of displaying the ticket. It's slowly becoming standardised, but I always have to hunt around to find the fields I'm looking for (often having to go into the details view).

You can customize that. It's genuinely crazy how deeply you can customize Jira (to the point where it's probably a bad thing)

you will run in to issues when not exactly doing the default way. you will find open feature request tickets about it from many years ago.

also multiple, equally bad text editors with no way to even paste a nested list from confluence correctly.

Fer werk, Jira is best. It's got horrendous plugins, like an app store for cracvk addicts. It's use of the DB, is on par with kindergarteners. But it's awesome top down, bottom up, both in and side ways. It's only a tool, no different than the bone from 2001 - A Space Odessey. You can pretty much do anything with it, and it's about as elastic as an app can get. Maybe vim, or maybe notepad, or maybe MS Project, or maybe an Oracle DB, or maybe' Jesus. But one thing that does stand out is developers don't want to be held on by the crutches of anything that takes away from the developer flow, where 80% is sifting through hn, and the other 20% programming. Anything thrown into that equation just messes up the balance, tools will always be hated. But tools used will always be loved. You value your time, use a moleskin, skip a page, draw 7 lines, and each day write down what you have to do for work, for yourself, and for others, move things down everyday that you dont finish, make themactionable. Remember that first page we skipped, create an index, it's the most important page of your life. So make sure to keep it handy, Jira was loosely trying to solve this problem for everyone, it's become a monster -phun intended. Raptor Jesus! Arghhh-

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