Hacker News Reader

Comment by felixgallo | Hacker News Reader

Jira is the worst possible choice, except for all the others.

Has anyone tried to use something like notion? Depending on your size you don't necessarily need all the stuff around it. Whats the difference between a story and an epoch? Most people don't really care. They just need something to track stuff being done, like a glorified to-do list with rich text.

Disclaimer: I work at Notion.

I think Notion works well for tasks if your organization is small, or you are happy with lightweight process. There is no way to ensure all updates to a Notion page follow a strict state machine like Jira. Notion just doesn’t have those kind of validation / restriction tools yet.

For our 100ish engineers it works well especially because planning docs flow seamlessly into project specs and then tasks… but we suffer a bit from loosely defined workflows around 2-week sprints that take more clicking than anyone wants.

Shouldn't these tools be used primarily at the team level? Large organizations don't necessarily have larger teams. I'm not sure why it should make a big difference if you have 2 or 200 teams of 5 using the tool.

it makes a difference because frequently, when you have (say) several hundred teams of 10-15 people, they need to interoperate (so that the fields used, and the meanings of the fields, are standardized and have a structured lifecycle), and also they need to be able to roll up to larger progress reports/status updates so that the org leaders can understand where everything is. If all the small teams organically choose their own fields/meaning/process (which happens, all the time, everywhere, by default), you can end up with a tower of babel problem.

Under that kind of top-down structure, each team will force their organic processes into the Procrustean bed of what the project management system expects. Aggregating that data heedless of any variation in meaning will result in garbage. Leadership can't do anything with aggregate metrics derived from day-to-day development anyway. That results in fantasy metrics like "velocity". They should be focused on conditions and outcomes.

Have you tried Linear [0]?

----

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

I was honestly really pleased when we moved to Jira at a previous job, having lived through three other worse ticket systems. It’s just more powerful, and has ways of keeping tickets from falling into a black hole. None of that is an excuse for the slow, terrible frontend for Jira, or the complete lack of discoverability in Confluence.

Yep. Jira is far from perfect, but I've not had any better luck with anything else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com