Comment by pianoben | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pianoben | Hacker News Reader

I recognize that this is a marketing blog, but it blames Jira for what are really culture problems and/or bad management practices.

This is an emblematic quote:

    Take subtasks, for example. The invention of Jira subtasks is an affront to dev teams. Clearly someone who has never spoken to an engineer on a dev team created it. It’s the least dev-friendly way possible to get insight into what’s happening with a Jira story.

Behind the bombast, the author assumes that the purpose of subtasks is to provide micro-level insight on progress to PMs. I agree that this would be a misuse of subtasks. Speaking as an engineer, I _love_ subtasks because they help me keep track of my various efforts towards whatever feature the ticket is tracking. Also, I'm the one who defines them!

Jira isn't anyone's favorite software, but it is so configurable that it ends up being an embodiment of your dev process. If you hate it, chances are it's because you hate how you're managed.

This.

Jira is a framework for building something which approximates your actual processes.

> Justin said “I wish Atlassian would sit down with real-world developers and design this product the way we need it to work.”

The way 'you' need it to work. The process 'you' use. I suppose it's possible to build a business on creating a completely bespoke ticketing system for each company which uses one. Over time, that business might gravitate towards building a general toolkit which can be configured for each use case...

Oh look! Jira!

I'd bet that everyone's got their own distinct idea of where subtasks, ticket relations, etc actually fit in their workflow.

The article clearly exists to sell LinearB's product, which will of course work great for people who have the specific problems LinearB are solving with their product.

The rest of us will configure Jira within epsilon of 'works', then spend an afternoon reading about APIs and bash out our own automation service to update X different management tools appropriately for our workflows, and then go down the pub to bitch about management.

I'm not sure why nobody provides a task tracking tool that has tasks organized hierarchically (with chord/circular dependency. This is the real world, regardless of the argument about subjective processes. If you can't see where in your workflow, that 1 task (even from another team's workflow) is impacting multiple other workflows at-a-glance, the tool is too primitive. Subtasks don't cut it.

JIRA is the most popular of all tools on the market, which are glorified gantt points across disparate fragmented views. This is an element of modern tech that makes large organizations hilariously inefficient.

Jira has many project types and products, and the one most commonly used is actually called Jira SOFTWARE. It literally has software in the name. If you're building a product for software companies, you can think about how to do it better specifically for engineers

My problem with subtasks in Jira, is that they're a constantly leaky abstraction. While an epic and task are different on multiple levels, but what makes something a subtask vs a task? This seems like a trivial question, and it's frustrating because it should be, but because Jira has encoded subtasks as a very-similar-but-also-very-different object than tasks, and some actions can only be done against tasks and others only subtasks.

I learned the other day that estimates/story points entered into subtasks do not rollup to parents unless specifically configured. Seems like initial thinking from Atlassian was that subtasks don’t affect scope. https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Core-questions/Subta...

As a PM, I have no interest in sub tasks. I’ve got enough to do to track at an Epic and Feature/story level. If a dev team wants to use sub tasks to track their process, go for it. If not, I don’t care.

Yes.

I've used Jira for years and never understood the hate.

The only times I have had real problems have been with particular idiosyncratic configurations or conventions that someone at my end has put in.

Me either, its easy to search through and find 10+ year old tickets with comments and code reviews/TDDs to add context to old code.

I feel like the classic UI was a massive pain for configuring workflows, fields and other tasks which also fuelled a lot of the hate. But in the new version at least it's much better IMO.

Have you tried the alternatives like YouTrack?

The Jira UX is amongst the worst in the business.

And yet... there it is, on every workplace with an useless operations team.

I'm not saying Jira is great. I'm just surprised that people, particularly ICs, hate it.

Jira subtasks are weird, we stopped using them and started linking issues instead. The main problem: we still don't know what exactly subtasks are. They look like half-baked feature.

P.S. Look at this discussion for example https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-4446 , subtasks concept is hard.

I have to agree. Sounds like more of a management issue than a Jira problem.

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