Jira and Confluence Suck

The meta question suggested by this article:

When a product succeeds wildly (like Jira has) its creators make a ton of money. That's good. But what should they do with the money?

Is it smart to roll the money back into the product by adding new features? We all know the advantages of that approach. But it obviously causes feature bloat and complexity bloat, especially when backward compatibility is the prime directive. That's the curse of the customer base.

For most of the last generation we've been able to ride Moore's Law and the rest of the cost curve plunge. It simply didn't matter if each feature we dreamed up took more cycles / RAM / disk / network. We could count on the resources being there. That set us free to try to do more and more complex things. But Moore's law only helps indirectly with managing complexity. For hackers it makes possible stuff like "Show Definition..." in the IDE.

This complexity bloat afflicted Microsoft Windows back in the XP / Vista days. It afflicts what I'm working on now.

What else could successful product creators do with their money?

* Obviously, return some of it to their investors.

* Invest it in new complementary products.

* Use it to finance big organization-wide pushes to refactor to improve performance.

* Reduce prices and drive more widespread adoption.

The movie industry is an interesting model. They put together a team to make a movie, then disband it. When they have a big hit the participants with residuals rake it in. They then invest in more movies (some of them are atrocious sequels, but many are good new stuff.) Imagine if they did what we hackers do now. _The Graduate_ would be on version 17, and the guy would saying "I have one word for you, son: cloud computing" instead of "I have one word for you, son: plastics." The only reason anybody would buy a ticket would be tradition.

We hackers should look at Jira carefully. Is its bloat what we're doing to OUR users?

We can certainly dish out the bloat and complexity. Can we take it? Jira makes us confront that.

Jake here, and I work on the Jira team at Atlassian.

On the topic of feature bloat, this is something that our teams take very seriously. The fine line our PMs and Engineers are always trying to walk is ensuring Jira remains the most customizable and extensible project and issue tracker on the market while also providing individual teams within Jira an experience that is simple and intuitive enough to never bog them down. In short, it's striking the perfect balance between power and simplicity, both for admins as well as teams.

Based on much of the feedback we've received, we're making good progress on this front with the next-gen project types that we launched a year ago. Next-gen projects marry the power of Jira with the simplicity of Trello. You can learn more about the next-gen experience here: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/next-gen.

If anyone on this thread has specific feedback that they would like to share with myself and some of the Jira PMs, we would sincerely welcome the opportunity to speak with you. Please shoot me an email: jake (at) atlassian.com.

For me Jira (and Confluence) suck because their are slow. This is the #1 reason, I am still looking for alternatives.

While I do not like the some of the new UI features, for me it's in general a move into the right direction. Only if things would be faster.

Most of this also applies to Redmine, which seems too eager to copy Jira.

It seems there's lack of the middle-ground apps, where you start like Basecamp or Trello, but can turn on various controls, categorizations, required fields etc. as needed.

Thankfully I don't have to work with Jira anymore. However, when I was working with it the speed was a major problem. Another major problem was clicking something that go into editing mode for a ticket item. Switching between browsers, other windows, etc and the tab that had ticket open I would blindly click into the tab and, bam, I would be editing something on a ticket. One nickpick was how it would hanlde picking names between roman and non-roman characters. We eventually started remembering people's emails instead of the "nicks" or real names that Jira haphazardly used.

Adjusting Jira to author's liking would, at least in some points, make Jira even more complicated and bloated.

I guess the more clients, the more feature requests. One will see a feature as a bloat, other will consider it a must have to do their job.

What is a good no-nonse bugtracker anyway? I have found Mantis and YouTrack, but YouTrack doesn't seem so user friendly and seems to have Agile features stapled on top. Azure Devops (formerly TFS) is more than just a bugtracker.

16 reasons why jira sucks, or how to use jira as an example of how i profoundly hate any kind of process. just let me do what the hell i want.

who needs processes anyway?