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Comment by cjk2 | Hacker News Reader

I’m not even surprised. I worked at a company whose bug tracking system was an excel spreadsheet mailed around. I’m not talking 2-3 engineers, I’m talking 250 engineers. There was one guy whose responsibility was to consolidate all the copies once a week. You can imagine how much information was lost there.

I put JIRA in there because even that was less shit.

Edit: also their VCS was a giant corrupted SourceSafe database as well.

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I'm going to look on the bright side of this. Look at how far we've progressed in collaboration! We complain about Jira etc but it does have a lot of great features that an emailed, weekly manually reconciled Excel spreadsheet does not.

That’s not apples to apples. You can host the spreadsheet online to solve the syncing issues. When doing that, Jira becomes much less advantageous.

When things need to get done, I see people writing spreadsheets for fast adaptive tracking and then once they are done, they sync it with Jira manually post-factum just because they must. Jira becomes a tax to pay, and a slow centralised versioning system.

I agree that CRDT spreadsheets like Google Sheets have similar features, but we only got those recently as well.

I wonder, what is the current in-favor issue tracking tool if Jora is out?

I like https://www.redmine.org/. It’s stable, contains all features I expect from issue tracking, fast, easy to export and configure. And if you must, very easy to go into the code or database and change.

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