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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

I wrote “Jira Is a Code Smell”: https://honeypot.net/post/jira-is-a-code-smell/

Short version: Jira, in a vacuum, is neither great nor awful. It just is. But it has a complication that makes managers I want to work for dislike it, while strongly appealing to managers I don’t want to work for.

That’s not universally true, I’m sure. However, it’s been my experience.

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> But it has a complication that makes managers I want to work for dislike it, while strongly appealing to managers I don’t want to work for.

I think that could also be described as Jira gives people who don't really have anything to do, something to do, but for those who are blessed with an abundance of work, Jira can be unnecessary overhead.

My primary problem with JIRA, is that there is very little support for dependency trees. I have tickets X and Y linked to A,B,C,D and nothing but an ad-hoc way of determining how they are related. A visualization and tool to assign places in a tree, are part of what keeps JIRA from being excellent...ok that AND the horrid UX.

If Jira could take a dependency tree and estimates against each item and build out a timeline and display it like a Gant chart, that would be incredible. Even better, factor in employee working hours per week and bank holidays. Even better, dynamically update the timelines based on estimate updates, delays in external dependencies, or sick days.

But actually my biggest grievance is the terrible search function. You can search for the literal title of an issue and it won't come up in the results.

Didn't our whole software industry come to a consensus to stop doing things like this because the results were fundamentally inaccurate and the invariable outcomes were stakeholders feeling hard done by and/or ICs being victimised by middle managers?

Possibly, but in my experience a lot of software development happens effectively like what I described above, except in a more manual way with more potential for error and way more effort to update dependencies when things get delayed. I'm currently working for a business-to-business company and the POs are continually pressured to come up with roadmaps plus timelines. They therefore continually ask senior ICs to give "rough estimates" of feature sets that will take months. Those roadmaps are then handed to the client, who will moan about the length of time and demand it gets shortened somehow. In some cases the product manager (who is also the MD) will make something up to tell the client, or will tell the dev team to get something done "as much as possible" in one month because the client is going live with a new contract.

Obviously it's broken and inefficient, but I'm sure it's how it goes in a lot of places.

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