Happy 20th birthday Jira You suck so bad
rida.dev
rida.dev
FWIW, I went ahead and removed it on the blog post pages.
When you have the size and money of Atlassian, that excuse is pathetic. Yeah we have 3000 Developers (or whatever) and we don't have the resources to do good UI design, refactoring away from poor performance etc. I always thought that these companies were the ones who invented "how to do good web apps", but it seems like function over everything and even the functionality is poorly implemented in some cases.
How can anyone think that a simple app that downloads 24MB over 900 connections is OK. What the heck?
Large companies incentivise behaviour that overall make products worse and customers angry while showing super awesome metrics internally. While I'm sure such metrics are going to be causing some of the right people to get PIP'd and managed out they also disillusion the good people that were trying to do the right thing (or actually did do the right thing) but which didn't show up as the correct number on some dashboard that was used by the CTO and HR to fire the "underperformers".
No. These companies were the first to get a critical mass in their respective markets or product categories. then they used that position to smother or buy out competitors and ensure their survival.
There is nothing mythical or extraordinary about what those companies did, just some mediocre people who were in the right place at the right time.
Since they acquired Trello I’ve watched them slowly but surely overcomplicate the interface making the product less intuitive.
Atlassian market cap: 52 billion USD
> a small fortune
> small
What.
English isn't my first language, so thanks for the hint!
As both a user and both as a Product or Project manager, it's worse in almost every metric.
Atlassians products sick but they're strides better than their competitors which says more about the industry than anything else.
That ecosystem has gotten drastically better in the past half decade.
Their Bitbucket cloud is a travesty, once a promising place, offering private repos before GitHub... But they squandered their lead by letting it languish.
It's such a fantastic lesson: it's a glorified to-do list. They got rich off a to-do list app.
Focusing on the simple things that everyone needs, rather than the complex esoteric problems that engineers enjoy, is where it's at.
I was initially trying to figure out if someone was DDoS'ing my website, but it seems as though the post just made it to HN. :P
The issue isn't Jira; it's the question: Does Jira work for you, or do you work for Jira?
Jira provides endless ways to engage in useless meta-work, it's nearly the entire purpose of the UI. Style over substance is the result. It feels intentional on Jira's part to woo their target audience - mediocre managers who struggle to produce well-written and well-designed technical content. Dress any plan up with enough fluff and it looks impressive.
You kinda need to impose process for large projects, and know where you are. The engineers are free to show a better tool for the job.
> I think Jira does a good job of making teams look much busier than they are, but in the end I see it more as a “talk more not do more” situation.
It does not make teams looks busier, it shows that teams are a lot busier in reality, which is valuable information.
> The Alternative
> Although a potential downside to Linear is that it is built explicitly for engineers, thus may not be suitable for other teams such as marketing, design, etc.
And this is why engineers will never build any viable alternative to Jira, because there is this us vs. them mentality. Issue management tools need to work for the whole organisation, that's why Jira is still the gold standard.
> If you’ve given Linear a try, but it just doesn’t work for you, some viable alternatives include GitHub Issues, Asana, ClickUp, YouTrack, Trello, Pivotal Tracker, and monday.com.
None of these are viable in larger organisations, they are fine for small projects, but you would have a lot of trouble with them in an enterprise context.
Jira's web UI can be very annoying, however an alternative to Jira would need to be at least as customisable and familiar as Jira, otherwise no large team will ever adopt it.
Something I think I could have iterated better in the blog post was that I believe Jira--even without all the bureaucratic processes it promotes--panders solely to higher-level management with zero regard for the ones interfacing with it: the engineers. That's the big issue I see.
I think Linear--by stripping away all the hullabaloo--continues to provide management good insight on team progress without abandoning the ones who actually use it on a daily basis.
I'm really hoping Linear continues to step up to the plate and manages to take on some of the features that make Jira a more attractive piece of software for a lot of people that are familiar with it veering Linear away from its great UI, speed, etc. However, I wonder how many people are actually picking Jira based on its merits rather than it just being what they're accustomed/used to, or simply not knowing there are other options out there.
I think we both agree that in the age of VSCode: it is unacceptable for 30+ billion dollar company to have such a sluggish web UI.
I'm an engineer and I actually feel that Jira fails me because it's not flexible enough, some examples include: - issues cannot have more than one assignee - projects cannot have multiple releasable items / components - poor Bitbucket integration
> However, I wonder how many people are actually picking Jira based on its merits rather than it just being what they're accustomed/used to, or simply not knowing there are other options out there.
I pick it still because most people will understand how it works and I am able to customise it the most to fit everyone's needs more than all the other tools out there.
We're currently looking into outphasing Jira and going to GitLab, but as I see, you can't nest tickets there. Can you? This is absolutely crucial to me. I'm happy for recommendations that allow ticket nesting (Epic, Issue, Subissue) and interface nicely with GitLab.
Thanks!
* Waiting for it to load.
* Trying to find issues, mostly due to the crap, unintuitive UI and the slowness of said UI.
2. Is your experience with a vanilla instance and/or a small ticket volume?
Now that I think about it, perhaps money buys performance here.
The other thing that seems to commonly happen is the customize-ability of these systems leads to major per-transaction overhead/bloat as custom business logic on its 400th revision is executing with ever more db-impacting logic.
- You can now trigger Status to Done
after merging Github pull request.
- If someone assigns you a story as
reviewer, you can trigger the Status to
In Progress (if not already).
- You can have a story automatically
reassign to the reporter once it's
marked Done.
It would be nice if we could do requirements tracing from business all the way to ITSM change request, track associated defects--some combination of semantic analysis and code grepping--and ultimately dashboard all this.
It seems like it would approach the model of a thinking organism.
Huge machines capable of doing everything.
As a result, unable to do anything particularly well.
Bloated, expensive and only still in business because decision makers know the names and the vendor lock-in is huge.
We do all of our issues in gitlab, and PM deals with jira, which is required by corp.
Kind of like in the olden days when corp required clearcase, so we did our work in git and used rsync to put stuff in clearcase once in a while.
I wrote a simple command line script that outputs my time tracking on JIRA issues because our time tracking tool (that read the data from JIRA) is even worse than JIRA itself.
Don't get me wrong, I can be as frustrated by Jira as the next person, but this is simply a rant fuelled by the writer's anger at internal processes as much as the software itself.
Additionally, the numbers on data usage and network requests do not align with what I see.
It's just a couple of fair points surrounded by populist "yucky Jira" fluff.
Yes, Jira can be pain in the ass. Because you are not able to adapt your workflow. Jira offers a thoughtful solution to manage your progress and processes.
The problen sits infront of the display.
Also other thing from this articles "I hate [tool]" is that many people just don't like their job or are burned out, the hate may be coming also from that, not only for a poorly designed tool.
A simple list is a pretty good solution IMO.
Apparently you can only get "loads fast" or "is usable" and not both. But when in doubt, I'll choose usable.
Same with confluence, I don't mind if the editor takes a minute to start up, but why reading the page takes like 10sec?
For the same reason, managers often love it so they can model their workflow to the point.
(Disclaimer: It may be harder to justify hiring people full-time to manage these alternatives.)
It includes Jiras killer feature, links between issues, across projects.
But...
It can't sync issues with github, it must fully be the source of truth for everything. This made it a non starter for us, we tried but it just can't work when not every piece of work by everyone is in linear. Even Jira allows sync.
It also didn't allow enough detail. For lightweight task management it was great, but when you have big discussions it was weak.
Github is great, but is missing issue links and better lightweight planning like tasks lists that auto update when linked issues update.
If you’re looking for something you can configure every little bit of for a very large team (like Jira) it may not meet your needs, but otherwise I highly recommend.
EDIT: fixed typo
Jira can be a task manager, a bug tracker, a service desk ticketing system, a project planner (regardless of methodology applied), a Kanban board, a knowledge database and so much more if you know how to configure it. That's also why sucks in many cases. You end up in these weird situations where you have a service desk ticket marked as an Epic, or on person on the team uses a kanban board, while the rest are just going by a different priority. Sometimes priorities migrate from you service desk to a SCRUM project and things make no sense.
You can work pretty well with Jira, if you can stick to one set of feature and keep the entire organisation locked to one type of projects. There are some things it's not good for, I don't see it as being a good project planing tool, regardless of how you try to use it. As a service desk tool it's pretty good.
I will say Jira is much better something like Phabricator or Bugzilla. Neither of those are alternatives, Phabricator is the closet, but it still doesn't do all the things Jira does.