Jira: Razor Blades? | Hacker News Reader

Jira: Razor Blades?

ronjeffries.com

23 pointsingve24 comments

I wish those kinds of posts would explain what they suggest instead of JIRA. Because this makes meaning very different.

Get rid of JIRA, do not have any tracker at all, communicate things verbally only? I have seen this work very badly... things dropped on the floor, forgotten features for release. And it makes inter-team collaboration much harder: if you have a request for other team, you have to either attend their meetings, or ping them in person with "how is the progress" questions... which makes it easier to just ignore other team and do the thing yourself.

Get rid of JIRA, replace with other "Agile-oriented" ticketing system? I haven't seen those in action, but that would be an interesting blog post to read.

Get rid of JIRA, replace with other simple ticketing system like TRAC, Trello, or Github Issues? Meh.. You can duplicate parts of JIRA out of anything -- even in github issues, you can make a label for "sprint" and define "epics" using tickets which reference each other. Or you can prohibit regular people from creating tickets.

Get rid of JIRA, replace with ad-hoc things like email inbox, google doc, or a wiki page? I think this works when there are only a few people, but once you have more than half a dozen you really need a good discipline to avoid making a huge mess.

Get rid of default JIRA setup that some Agile coaches talk about? That would make much more sense to me. Wouldn't make a very catchy blog post title though.

Get rid of scrum and jira - sprints only work when you’ve got deadlines.

Scrum I don't care about, but you need to keep a list of bugs somewhere. And a list of requests too, if you have multiple teams. What are you going to use for those?

Redmine works just fine.

I'm confused by your comment, jira doesn't force sprints or scrum on it's users. Could you explain?

Kia ora, if you dont need sprints then just use github projects.

Sprints solve a huge problem for my team: arbitrary, made up deadlines.

We run sprints, measure velocity and use that to plan work.

I'm not entirely sure about that. Sometimes recording all the excrutiating detail and meaningless busy work requests kills a project. You are better off using forgetfulness as a filter. If something is really important, it will come back up anyway. If it's useless work to make Jimbo from HR feel like he is contributing, it's a total waste of everybodies time including Jimbos.

The project manager should be doing this stuff, not some micro detailed wall of unimportant Jira jobs.

Excellently written. As I have said before on this site, Jira is the wet dream of mediocre middle-level managers who feel the need to micro-manage by ticket, rather than lead by example.

Jeffries makes the point that the symptom of this malaise is that the primary system of measurement is "what's in Jira" rather than what the product is becoming.

A great example I see towards this is Jira's strict hierarchy. My middle-management creates Epics and some Tasks for me (and subtasks are forbidden because apparently they are buggy). But if those are big enough to need their own work I can't divide further to keep myself organized. It assumes that whoever created the ticket knows roughly how much work it is or you need to go back and negotiate the structure, and ruin a bunch of links.

For me personally I want to track things that need to be done, not "week sized" bits of work or whatever your team is calling "agile".

> subtasks are forbidden because apparently they are buggy

heh, I've experienced exactly this. Makes a mockery of the whole setup.

Good to see our dislike of them validated, too. They don’t work well with sprints.

It's not validation, and your dislike is misplaced in the context of kevincox's comment: "But if those are big enough to need their own work I can't divide further to keep myself organized", where they are very much needed to track the work which needs to be done.

The emergent behaviour of a jira installation seems to be one which more often serves management-by-ticket, not the "task progress" aspect of a lab notebook.

GeePaw Hill's tweet is soberingly true https://twitter.com/geepawhill/status/1448667876907524108

We worked around them by basically not using epics (using them to represent an endless line of work like Frontend, or Machine learning, the like), but instead introducing a new type of issue, Sprint goal, which is created by the team leads committee and linked to actual tasks as related issues by individual developers. So we have both ‘big picture’ for current work and not interfere with developers.

The sprint goals serve to record current priorities agreed between teams and CTO, are 2 week-scoped (hopefully), and reviewed at the end of the sprint. Seems to work well for our ~50-developer department.

edit: To add, overall Jira+Confluence is more pleasant to work with than Redmine and Basecamp, though it does require a big team with a couple part-time Jira experts to make it work.

> They don’t work well with sprints

I think that was the "bug" in my context.

now I'm confused as all hell, and I apologise for any offense caused.

Takes like 4 screens to reparent a task. What a load of garbage. Makes me wanna quit after years of work, just because we switched to Jira.

I usually have a few decoy jira tickets to keep management happy and then do my own task tracking for myself using tools that don't suck.

Does it really matter if it is a Task or Subtask? I think that kind of focus on the words is why people start hating Jira instead of trying to fix what matters.

JIRA is a bug tracker -- it has "summary", "description", "assignee", "status", and "a bunch of fields only management cares about". So deal with it as you'd deal with any other buggy software. If subtasks cannot be used, make a bunch of new tasks and set it as a blocker of the "final" task. If setting blockers is buggy, start putting comments in the title ("Big task [1/3]: Refactor foo", "Big task [2/3]: Add bar to foo").

Now, perhaps the real problem is then you are not allowed to add/change the tickets at all, only middle management can? It is a huge problem indeed, and I fully agree that this can ruin your life. But this is not JIRA's problem -- your management could do the same thing even you have switched to sticky notes attached to your wall.

Jira itself isn't the problem.. it's a decent bug tracker + with a whole lot of 'agile/scrum/sprint' tracking/planning features on top. That somehow attracts a whole lot of 'process' focused middle managers who can absolutely kill any project... They want to 'use' jira - not focus on getting the product built. It doesn't help that most alternatives aren't enterprise-y enough

I've seen enough efficient but somewhat chaotic projects move to jira, followed shortly by a bevy of managers who're brought in to manage jira, followed by the usual agile theatre & process overheads that's been a 'kiss of death

You can argue that this isn't jira's fault.. but IMO, simpler tools require more work and act as a filter for the agile process minded types

PS: I've also had extremely good experience on teams where Jira was used.. and it's always been because the 'agile process' guy was capable.. however, those have been few and far between

I am always surprised when I read about the hate that some HN readers have for JIRA. I have used JIRA at work for many years now and yes it is not “perfect” (show me anything that is?) but it is AFAIK better than any alternative. If you truly believe JIRA is that bad, then create something better, rescue the world from the evils of JIRA, and get rich doing it. What are you waiting for? The time you spend bitching would be better used solving the problem.

So is the primary problem JIRA or any ticketing system? My read on this is that measuring metrics from JIRA is a very slipery slope that usually leads to disaster, but I've also worked on teams where feature/stories were poorly researched and conversations about refining those features was a total cluster

Jira is indeed horrid software, but scrum is a joke too.

Linear.app is a nice JIRA replacement/add on, raycast makes both available from alfred like launcher app.

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