Comment by blowski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blowski | Hacker News Reader

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OK, so what don't I like about Jira?

1. It's extremely slow.

2. It's difficult to predict the effect of making any kind of change.

3. The permissions system is so convoluted, I can be the admin of a board, and yet not have permission to see a ticket on it.

4. It relegates the conversation to a second-class UI element, when this is the most important part of any project management system.

5. Trying to operate on a bunch of tickets all at the same time (e.g. move all tickets in this status into some other status) requires a lot of time.

6. Every Jira setup is so different, trying to compare a piece of work from one area of the organisation to a similar piece of work elsewhere is useless.

7. The UI is extremely buggy. I can add a mandatory field to a ticket, then when I try to use a shortcut to create a new ticket, it won't work because I can't fill out that mandatory field.

8. There are random side-effects when one person does something on one bit of the system, and VOILA everybody's workflow is broken, with no obvious warning that would happen.

9. The text editor is still busted and I just don't understand why. It's one of the most important parts of the UX, please please fix it. Writing any kind of nicely formatted long form posts is a lost cause.

Amusingly, it used to be great! When I first started using JIRA, it was just markdown. Then they introduced their WYSIWYG editor, but at least they still had the button to see the raw markdown and you could still edit the raw markdown (but the GUI made terrible markdown so if you wanted to use markdown you better start with that and never touch the GUI).

And then I guess at some point they just removed the markdown part?

It boggles the mind. Who made that call? What were their reasons?

markdown is too hard for product people

This is my biggest gripe.

I make an effort to write detailed comments about what I did, what I discovered etc. This is really helpful to reproduce the issues, and a few months down the line it helps to clarify exactly what happened.

JIRA text editor is FUCKED. Try adding bullet points after a code insertion. Does not work. I have to first create all the bullets, then step through them and write out whats on my mind. For more complex stuff, I just write in my code editor. How can you fuck up the most basic functionality?!

My gripe for the text editor—if you navigate away from the page, by an accidental click or keypress, all your text is lost. This kind of thing was solved 15 years ago; it's table stakes!

My favourite gripe about text editing in Jira is that the ticket body and ticket comments require subtly different formatting mark-up, and the wysiwyg widgets for formatting are also ever-so-slightly different.

This results in a fun game of me trying out single backticks, triple backticks, braces, double braces, other miscellaneous punctuation symbols, and various indents before giving up and trying the formatting toolbar, only to waste another couple of minutes clicking around to see what works.

Somehow I can never remember what worked either, so I find myself repeating this ridiculous dance on at least a weekly basis.

Although IIRC, there was a recent update that at least harmonised the code formatting syntax between editors, although I can't remember if it actually worked....

> This results in a fun game of me trying out single backticks, triple backticks, braces, double braces, other miscellaneous punctuation symbols, and various indents before giving up and trying the formatting toolbar, only to waste another couple of minutes clicking around to see what works.

I thought I was the only one who is annoyed with this. Not only that, but the editor when you first create the ticket and the one used to later edit it are different too. I can't think of any sane technical reason that might explain using more than one rich text editor.

So frustrating! Not sure if it's just in team-managed projects, but they look to have fixed this, e.g Description field maintains a draft across page-loads, until you hit save now :)

Definitely this 100% I proposed for company game night: Predict where the Jira cursor goes next in response to right arrow. There’s so many possibilities: right left up down, teleports, disappears. My favorite is when the cursor splits into two at two different seemingly unrelated locations. Two cursors?? How do you even do that in a text area?

The worst thing is that I nod along in agreement with all 9 points, and still find myself easily preferring a pragmatic well set up Jira (yes a unicorn) to juggling things around 25 trello boards or a siloed top down micromanaging corporate hellscape overconfigured Jira.

But the last time I enjoyed using Confluence was in the 1.x days with non wysiwyg wiki markup. Confluence been truly awful for a while now - eg why can't I ever find what I'm searching for?

At the very least, use the same markup language for both Confluence and Jira.

Jira/Confluence Cloud use the same markup and editor.

But neither supports a markup language AFAIK. They used to support Markdown but they dropped that long ago and never replaced it. Now the only choice is their garbage WYSIWYG editor.

Jira isn't great but the Confluence editor causes me more frustration than anything. And good luck getting anything in or out of Confluence with their document model.

Confluence is definitely their worst product. It's like they took the idea of a Wiki, but removed all it's good aspects and then combined it with a terrible CMS system. A competitor could just use an ancient WikiWikiWeb installation and be better.

In defense of complex permissions, this often ends up being necessary to avoid single points of failure. For example, if someone can turn off the setting preventing force push to the master/main branch, that person should not be able to commit code thereby requiring more than one person for a commit to be force pushed in practice. Even better would be to require a config change like that to be approved by more than one person, but that can be difficult to implement compared to adding in narrow permissions. Even if you just prevent force pushing in general, another common bypass would be disabling CI for certain commits (such as in cases where the CI infrastructure is down and the commit is necessary to fix some ongoing incident). Yes trusting developers is always going to be necessary to some degree, but that doesn't mean absolute trust is required all the time.

For your specific example of not being able to see tickets as admin, I imagine that feature was added for teams where sensitive information is stored in the ticketing system for things like user reported issues. User reported issues often has PII or other personal data and while developers need to see that information, admins often don't. When I worked at a bank, any remotely sensitive columns in the database were either inaccessible to developers by configuration or by encrypting them to and from client code when the DB didn't support column level permissions (while Sybase could manage column level permissions, Mongo and Elasticsearch didn't at the time).

That's the thing about Jira.

I don't understand why I can't see a ticket on my board because some team in another company once requested a seemingly unrelated feature. It's trying to be too many things to too many companies all at the same time, and thus ends up as an unusable mess of complex settings.

> Trying to operate on a bunch of tickets all at the same time (e.g. move all tickets in this status into some other status) requires a lot of time.

Have you used the bulk issue change tool? The UI isn't necessarily very user-friendly but I would not label it as requiring a lot of time, I actually feel it works quite well for this use case.

Awesome list and objective.

I'd like to add another point:

#. There are too many "views" or ways of visualizing the work that needs to be done, ie the plan view and the kanban view, my issues etc.

If I'm not looking at the 'right' view I'll miss something and maybe get in trouble from project management.

I still can’t figure out how to search it

This is a solved problem. The most efficient way to search Jira is to type random characters into the search bar until you find the ticket you were looking for on page 3 of the results.

Find the person in your organization who knows JIRA. After he doesn't manage to find it, open outlook and search for it in the notifications@jira folder, where you would most likely find it

I just wrote the search query to our PM, since I was unable to find anything myself... I don't understand why just couldn't use, IDK, a shared spreadsheet, even that would be more productive (from my perspective)

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