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Comment by denysvitali | Hacker News Reader

Every bullet point says "Missing...", but I feel like the main issue about Jira is that it has waaay to many features, and that it's super slow!

The only bullet point I do agree with, is that Jira is missing an easy (or IMHO a minimalist / simple) interface. The tool is a mess, and the people using it are probably also using it in the wrong way, making the whole situation way worse.

Don't get me wrong, I like Jira to some extent, but its performance and messy UI are really making my life harder rather than simpler.

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I think you are right: the SLOWNESS is a killer. In fact, I think it is THE show-stopper flaw.

I recently succeeded in an 18-month-long effort to coordinate moving off of JIRA at work. We moved to clubhouse.io and it's been great. We were also looking closely at GitHub Issues + something like ZenHub for the missing project-management features — and that would have been great, too.

As soon as we moved off of JIRA, the amount of communication that started happening in the most relevant place — the bug tracker thread — increased by like... I don't know, something like 20x or 50x.

In our years on JIRA (the hosted plan) virtually nobody every discussed the details of the bugs on JIRA. We filed tickets there, and checked them off when done, and used it to review what had gotten done after each iteration — but nobody used it day-to-day. If discussion was to happen about a bug, it happened on Slack (which is horrible for ever finding it again, but it is fast).

The reason, I believe, is simply that JIRA is waaaayyy tooooo slow. Nobody wanted to use it day-to-day. You made a list of stories at the beginning of the iteration, and you checked it again at at the end of the iteration, to mark the ones you did done. I did this too.

Now, all the discussions directly about the bugs/features in the tracker happen directly on the tracker. Which, I recalled, was how it used to be several years ago before we moved to JIRA (from GitHub issues).

There is a lot of other stuff that is clunky about JIRA but I think we could have probably dealt with it, if it wasn't so slow that every interaction — even simple things like "find and open the bug I was working on most recently" or "see what is assigned to me this iteration" — felt like rm -rf node_modules && npm install and you somehow find yourself checking twitter before it even opens...

Speed matters!

I once had a user show me his CPU spike by 50% by merely scrolling up and down a JIRA page. It was stunning.

> I think you are right: the SLOWNESS is a killer. In fact, I think it is THE show-stopper flaw.

I think there are multiple clones of JIRA that literally just focus on the performance part. I think at this point it's unrealistic to expect major performance improvements in a timely fashion with JIRA.

The interface used to be simpler and less in the way of getting things done. Then they added personas, UX and tried to "help" the user. You now need more clicks to accomplish the same stuff while information is more hidden than before also.

There's no way to cater every possible workflow without feature bloat. However, the space is ripe for simpler, more accessible solutions that supports work across multiple projects.

It's not for engineers. Or anyone in particular. They're building to check off boxes in order to sell top down to C-level execs that never touch the stuff.

Atlassian products are all like this, and each one is a horrible trash fire.

Confluence is the worst wiki product I've ever used. Gross syntax, slow, clunky plugin system, awkward permissions. Install MediaWiki and be done with it.

Bitbucket is slow and feels like it's from the 90s. It doesn't seem to do multithreading well - sometimes force pushed branch rebases pick up a new, unrelated author. A bug that hasn't been fixed in years, and only one of many. How many times will merging not actually work?

Jira is a special kind of hell. It's like every team needs their own embedded Atlassian solutions engineer to get it into a usable state. Not an EM or PM, but a specially dedicated role just to deal with Jira nonsense. Why even bother?

Atlassian is like Salesforce for business process, but if it were written by all-remote temp contractors churning through Jira tickets themselves.

Agree with this. My hypothesis is that they’re just ridiculously slow at adopting newer UX principles. The product was successful initially (good for them) and it was just never made much better.

The horrible response times and user hostile UI is shocking, especially if you look at their competitors. It gets in your way all the fucking time. But because they’re embedded in enterprises they don’t need to change much. It’s a big mess.

> Confluence is the worst wiki product I've ever used.

BUT... the direct integration with the ticket system - highlight a list, and make linked tickets (which keep the status info 'live' in the confluence doc) is pretty powerful, and allows a lot of people to keep their business docs, and get status updates without ever having to learn other parts of the system.

A former PM prioritized issues in the backlog by making a ticket and giving it a name like "Groom these next" or "Prioritized for January release", placing it in the backlog, then placing the tickets to be prioritized above it

They also hid bugs from being counted in reports by marking them as stories but that's another conversation

So much project management is about gaming internal politics and managing information flow between lower and higher parts of the hierarchy.

These tools market themselves as creating transparency but they are in practice often used to hide or excuse things.

I suppose that is why they all take the tragic path from being heralded as new and fresh in the beginning to absolutely being hated in the end.

Goes for methodologies as well (I remember the agile manifesto ... look at where we are now).

If you want something that is simple use kanban-board like trello, github, an excel spreadsheet or whatever.

The complexity comes from the demand of Jira's paying professional customers.

Eventually Jira will grow too complex and bane the way for simpler tools probably of a different paradigm. Much like how Jira replaced things like HP Quality Center or the tools of Rational Unified Process.

> Every bullet point says "Missing...", but I feel like the main issue about Jira is that it has waaay to many

It says "missing" but it mostly talks about those existing features lacking any polish.

> and that it's super slow!

It is and it really sucks or to quote Firefox "A web page is slowing down your browser, what do you want to do, wait or stop it".

It's funny because I have never seen the mentioned Firefox error on any Jira instance. The problem is mostly server-side: it's slow as hell! I'm personally using go-jira [0], but even that is slow: the problem as I said is not (only) the frontend, but the backend.

[0]: https://github.com/go-jira/jira

Definitely. JIRA often feels like it's running an eletron app inside of my browser and inside of the server.

I was feeling the same way. Maybe we can get a Steve Jobs of agile development and create the "Iphone of Software Development Management Software". What I (drunkenly) mean is that the customer might not always know best when it comes to UX, especially when your early adopters/feedback providers are human management nerds.

Have you tried Linear[0]? It's a well-designed, streamlined tool similar to JIRA.

[0]: https://linear.app/

Sniff around a bit and you will find that what is even worse is why it is slow. Even the most simple operations call out to multiple sites. Quitting Jira requires more than three dozen sites to respond in order to actually work. Jira is an example of just how much the modern APIs are fun yay methodology sucks in actual practice.

For most it seems "missing easy user interface" meaning there is an interface. And what they're wanting to do is part of a complex system therefore it's easy to understand why an easy interface isn't there, it's not a simple thing in the first place.

If you want to try something in this space that's really snappy and responsive, checkout out Kitemaker (YC W21) [0]. I'm a founder and happy to chat with anyone that has any feedback/feature requests: hi@kitemaker.co

0: https://kitemaker.co

I was looking at the homepage reading text that explained the Picture Gallery ("when users can reuse images... more likely to...") and then the whole page refreshed with a completely different design. I was on the page for probably about 30 to 60 seconds.

Firefox 84 on Kubuntu Linux, no relevant addons.

Hi! That’s just a video playing on a loop taking you through the various screens. The “image gallery” is just showing our work item screen and then it jumps to some other screens. Thanks for the feedback though! It may be that this isn’t clear enough

Some constructive advice, your homepage is messy, the ratios and spacing are really off and makes it hard to digest and focus on your features. This will directly impact your actual product. Please don't be insulted , I've spend 20 years in design/branding and want you to succeed but this homepage isn't doing it, you need a brand book with some strict guidelines.

Not insulted at all! Very useful feedback.

I see, thanks. I scroll with the keyboard, not the mouse, so I did not notice that the next screenful was entirely a video.

why oh why does it have to be this sloooow ?

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