Comment by bpchaps | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bpchaps | Hacker News Reader

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How long has your company been using JIRA for?

JIRA has a tendency to.... decay. New ticket types are created with custom fields that aren't ever kept up to date. Everyone starts to choose random entries because they have no choice, and no way to add new ones. Once that starts, things fall into chaos because nobody knows the "right" way to file tickets. Tickets soon become immeasurably immeasurable. Projects become categorized incorrectly on a constant basis. The only people who know how to use JIRA effectively are the ones who know how to ignore all the noise. Once those people leave, you're left with pure, unadulterated chaos.

And then you get people who try to fix it by adding a new ticket type or project group, etc. Rinse, repeat.

If you haven't already, then you should check out JIRA's query language and its API. The query language is... special (and doesn't support wildcards, last I checked). Its API, instead of displaying field names as you see it in their interface, shows "fieldname_21234". No joke. You have to run another api request for all of the field names and associate them yourself. It's painful

To your point - sure, JIRA can be used effectively. Though, any bad tool can be used well if enforced. But that's not what most of us have seen in the wild. JIRA eventually just becomes a behemoth of a tool.

Dev here. I worked in the company that used Jira. Used it for 4 years. It was really useful.

It is anyday better than getting tasks over email.

We had very minimal customisations. A simple set of swimlanes that we update throughout the product development process.

From what you are telling it looks like your team had other problems in delivery. You tried to solve it via Jira by adding new custom fields and forcing people to update them. Solving the deeper issue would have helped there.

I have been able to track my deliverables. See how my team is performing. Plan for the next sprint. Perform retrospectives and capture action items. The tool hasn't broken while doing this. UI is decent. I really don't see a problem with the tool, it serves its goal.

> JIRA has a tendency to.... decay.

Is there any enterprise scale tool that doesn't, when it isn't managed correctly? It needs management just like any other tool that's being used on an enterprise scale. People just want to be able to set and forget, but then it doesn't adapt well to individual departments and teams. Then people either start messing with it, or if they can't, they start hating it.

The benefit of a smaller tool is then, that teams can just get their own instance and mess that up without impacting the organization.

> it doesn't adapt well to individual departments and teams

With Jira, one can create project-specific issue types, fields and workflow.

That sounds a lot like a human problem, not a tool problem.

There's a saying along the lines of, the purpose of a tool is determined by how its users use it. For instance, security dialogs are often useless because users blindly click through. Is this a human problem? Yes, absolutely. Does that mean we can blame users for not using the dialog properly? No, it doesn't. We're trying other approaches now that encourage better behaviors from users.

All that is to say, a human problem is fundamentally a tool problem.

It's an artefact of the tool having too many features.

That's a great point about Jira, about decaying and left over ticket types. But I used TFS (team foundation server) in a job, and it had some of the same problems. Someone always felt the need to edit the dang project and team paths and it was just a pain in a big company with constant churn. One level deep labels is much easier to deal with.

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