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Comment by oxymoran | Hacker News Reader

Enterprise software is not going to ever be fixed until people start to realize that the people that actually do the work need to be heavily involved in the design process and the developers need to be embedded in the actual underlying job more thoroughly. The idea that some developers and process people can make high quality insurance claims software for instance, without actually knowing who’s to handle an insurance claim is preposterous to me.

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Couldn't agree more.

I have to use JIRA at work, and it's absolutely awful. Every action takes up to a couple seconds to execute, many tasks have no way to be automated or done in batches, and some seemingly simple actions require jumping through several unintuitive menus to complete.

To me it's clear that the people making this software almost certainly can't be the ones using it, and the people generally choosing and paying for it probably are also not the ones using it heavily day to day. Otherwise there's no way this level of performance would be tolerated.

Absolutely. JIRA has one of the worst UX I have ever seen. Creating a ticket itself is so painful that it's easy to be lazy to not do it.

Definitely going the GitHub route next time time I'm moved onto a new project. The past two have used Jira and Trello and both are just a continuous source of frustration for me.

Curious what you don’t like about Trello. I rather enjoy it. It’s the only “proj mgmt” software I keep coming back to for the last decade.

So I think Trello is great for some things and on a smaller board with a handful of tickets it's one of the better tools around.

There are several 'weak' bits of the UI though, like not being able to open a ticket in its own window, having a clunky search and an excessive amount of horizontal scrolling on larger boards.

I've got to say that this is a problem with relying on the UI itself. When working with a development team I always provide as many options as possible to automate that worklflow.

This might take the form of integrating bitbucket with Jira such that you can assign a commit to a ticket or advance or close a ticket.

A few years ago I was looking at the jira API and managed to dig into the documentation. The result was a small gist which contains some of the harder to figure out actions. Including creating a new ticket.

https://gist.github.com/TheMightyLlama/9427202

It can be easy to create tickets in Jira using company-managed projects. The problem is the people who set up Jira see all of these knobs and buttons and feel like they need to use them. Creating tickets in my department require two things: ticket type, summary. We use procedures, not software to enforce the rules.

Once I finish our migration to Jira, other departments will have different screens that require a few more fields like description. My goal is to keep these to an absolute minimum.

Configuring this stuff is a massive pain in the ass but the day to day use is manageable by creating custom boards and saved searches. A some training and documenting for my team takes care of the rest.

For my coworkers, it’s no more painful than the workarounds needed to make a “simpler” system work. GitLab and Github do fuck-all to support our workflow. Jira allows me to tailor it so both my team and management can understand what’s happening.

Ugh, Jira is just the worst. I’ve used a lot of software but Jira’s slowness and lag made it the one I dreaded most. Every - single - thing - needed - three - to - twenty - seconds.

One of my friends works at Atlassian (not on JIRA). Apparently they do use JIRA there. Presumably things which are not performance are prioritised higher.

I guess they might also be running it on private servers, and cheap out on their hosted version for customers

Agree completely. When you prioritize the requirements of infinite shareholder growth over people who actually make the product and do the processes, you’re not optimizing for the best product or processes.

European countries are at least familiar with the idea of codetermination - having workers vote for board representation. Sweden, the Netherlands, and Germany practice some form of this to different degrees. In the US (and especially in the tech world) we are allergic to the idea that anyone besides the bagholder should have a role in decisionmaking.

Making a new system recently I did exactly this. I basically joined the group as a low-level doc-pushing twerp and worked through everyone's jobs. Then we started sketching out the system, having seen the pinch points and dead ends. Unfortunately, leadership later threw out all our design decisions, because they had a "Perfect Product Architecture" they were trying to enforce at the time.

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