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Comment by jmathes | Hacker News Reader

I strongly dislike Jira. Everything about it is unwieldy. It's like a car with a top speed of 30mph, with a lever for each and every moving part of the car. Too many pieces of it are customizable, and all of the things which can be customized must be customized for anything to work. The amount of effort it takes to use Jira is almost enough to write your own issue tracker.

Also, a fresh JIRA install with no issues, projects, or anything has a memory footprint of over 0.6GB.

I don't know why people use it, but people do. My guess is that all the effort it requires provides a simulacrum of control and productivity.

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You can take Jira from "www.atlassian.com" to a fully running instance with a baseline Software Development Issue tracking Project in 15 minutes.

I will give you this - _should you chose to_ fully mastering it's screens, issue types, screen schemes, issue type screen schemes will take the better part of few hours to completely map in your head. Jira gives you amazing flexibility to do almost anything you want on the issue type level, but with that flexibility, comes an very complex model.

When I first encountered it, I was exasperated that I had to take those couple hours to draw the hierarchy and map it out in my head - but now that I know It, I'm happy it's there.

farkas! If you read this: you can solve all the real problems I have with JIRA by making all but the most commonly-used pieces of its UI be harder to find. You can find out which pieces to hide with user testing.

Interestingly - I just had this exact same feedback at a pub in Amsterdam with one of our customers.

I agree there is improvement here. But in my years of experience with JIRA, I do find that most software development teams approach things differently, and so there is no 'one size fits all' for most dev teams.

One team wants saved filters to be front and centre, another RSS feeds. One user creates a hundred issues a day (usually QA), whilst others rarely create issues at all.

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