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Comment by vyrotek | Hacker News Reader

JIRA is pretty sweet to keep things in order.

Really? I use and love BitBucket, but the last 2 places I worked at used JIRA and it was the worst project management tool I've ever used. I'm sure someone will say they didn't configure it right or educate the devs or something. Seriously though, it was pushed down from upper management in both cases and it was a terrible experience. Then they thought Greenhopper would fix it, ha. (This was about 4+ years ago)

Edit - According to the comments below it sounds like my experience was a result of trying to do too much with it. I just might play around with a bit just for some bug tracking with some of my BitBucket projects.

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We use JIRA at Etsy (although we use Github for code reviews, not crucible). It is certainly frustrating, but I tend to think it's a "the worst except the rest" situation. Do you have something you like significantly better? I've experimented with stuff like trello, basecamp etc. and still haven't found them significantly better.

Pivotal Tracker has been the most pleasant team task management experience I've had. Have previously used JIRA, Github Issues, Lighthouse, Mantis, and even a shared Google Doc on one project (works surprisingly well for small teams/projects over a short time period).

Agreed Pivotal one is great. I've tried several others and it's the simplest and easiest.

I've been using one called GravityDev at my job and it's nice ( although my team is using it like a PMO tracker despite my best efforts... ) but Pivotal is way simpler and nicer to use.

Though I have only used it in small teams.

We've recently moved from Pivotal to GreenHopper (Jira) and every single engineer wants to go back to Pivotal. We've given GreenHopper a couple of months to give it a fair chance, and in every way it's clunkier and more confusing than Pivotal.

Just curious, what were the reasons you decided to move away from Pivotal? We're looking for a new project management system and JIRA is one we've been looking at, but on first look, it does seem like information overload.

I'm currently using Trello quite a bit and also Asana for some newer projects. I really like the "physical card" feel of Trello. I'm a post-it note kind of guy. Asana seems pretty nice so far but is more grid-based. It's very clean and slick though.

We use JIRA with GreenHopper to support Agile at work. The users mostly just go to the Card / backlog views and I can say it's working pretty well. Not as smooth as Trello, but still good :)

Phabricator is a nice fully integrated alterative.

My team has been using phabricator for a while now and it is a really wonderful tool for doing code reviews and repository browsing and linking. It's also has a nice paste app.

The only downside is that occasionally nagios will squawk about no more free memory on the box and we'll see some of the PHP processing using upwards of 5GB RAM.

That's PHP for you. If you get behavior like this, you should be bugging Priestley.

Yeah, come hassle me about it. (I haven't seen this or heard other reports about it, so it might be something environmental.)

We have been using YouTrack from Jetbrains. I'm finding that it gets a lot of the little things right.

http://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/ was really easy to get started with for us - things 'just work' much like all the Jetbrains products.

Pivotal Tracker is significantly better. We switched to Jira about six months ago and it has been very painful. The worst parts of my week are when I have to interact with Jira. Our sprint planning meetings used to be pleasant using Tracker because it helps guide things toward an effective agile workflow while mostly staying out of the way. Now that we use Jira, half of our planning meetings are spent fighting with the software rather than actually planning.

We use JIRA, but not in our planning meetings: a person writes down things on a whiteboard and then transcribes the result into JIRA issues. I don't know how applicable this is to your environment, but you may give it a try.

Check out Gemini from Countersoft: http://www.countersoft.com - something a little different from the norm

I think one of the big issues with JIRA is that it's configurable enough to be a project management tool. It's a really great issue tracker (IMO), and I think when you aim to use it as more than that (involve proper releases, milestones, scheduling/time-tracking, etc.), all of a sudden you get into the areas where the configuration and education issues that you mentioned become apparent.

Project management software is difficult, you either have a mess of features that don't work well without customization, or you have few features, and force teams to model their workflow around your features.

In the context of this post and the greater bitbucket vs github discussion - do you find GitHub issues to be better than JIRA?

Re: JIRA. At work we've been using Jira for several years. While it's very flexible, it does come with a certain level of complexity that makes doing things like simple Kanban heavier than it should/needs to be. I have a billion opinions about JIRA, and a love/hate relationship with it.

Github issues - bare bone basics, but I hear they're working on improving it. You cannot currently run something like a Kanban board off of GH issues without outside assistance.

For simplicity, boards like Trello and AgileZen are, IMHO, in the lead.

I have a billion opinions about JIRA in general, but I doubt anyone is interested besides Atlassian. ;)

My own experience with Jira is that it's easy to misconfigure when you start, then later on there's too much inertia in the userbase to fix it. I liked it, but you have to know it a little before you use it.

You must have never used Rally?

Because while I'm not a huge fan of JIRA (I've only used it in the past year so I don't know what it was like 4 years ago), I've unfortunately seen much worse.

Heh, I did use Rally for a little bit at one company. Not long enough to form much of an opinion though. It was mostly a glorified bug tracker at that job. Some managers tried to actually enter the "stories" and "milestones".

One system that I'm curious to try is called AtTask[0]. They're located here in Utah (just down the street from me!) and have quite the lineup of large customers. I don't personally know anyone who uses them though.

[0] http://www.AtTask.com

Funny, I've had the opposite experience; Rally has been mostly a joy to use, especially by comparison to Jira and Greenhopper.

Absolutely. I've had to use Rally for two years (haven't used it in the last five months, though). When I started using it, they didn't use URLs; it was a stateful app. Even now (well, five months ago) that's still often true...

Also until recently, from Melbourne it took just under thirty seconds to load a page, any page, from scratch. Sending 2MB (for a while it was 4MB) of uncached JavaScript on every page load helped with that. Quite why one would use Ext 3, Ext 4, YUI and a couple of other libraries all on the same page, I don't know. Now, I think it's down to only about half a megabyte, and it's mostly cached.

And I can just keep going on and on about it...

JIRA is something where it can be configured well or poorly. Configured poorly, it's nasty. Configured well, it's enormously nicer than Rally can ever possibly be.

I had the opposite experience. I didn't mind Rally so much at all and hated JIRA.

JIRA is really for issue tracking. Grasshopper isn't a fix, they are separate products and thus do not do the same thing. Slamming Jira for project management is like complaining about a rake's ability to dig holes.

Personally I think Jira is a great for issue/bug tracking when using bitbucket.

exactly, the integration between Jira and BitBucket is also top notch.

I currently use JIRA and love it. It probably just depends on the team and how they like to organize things.

In my experience it does not matter which tool is in hands of people who like to "tweak", "twist", "improve", etc.

I've seen trac with "features", now I see JIRA with "features".

JIRA itself is not bad as issue tracker. (Trac also is not bad)

I think the core concept of Trac is great: automatic linking between issues, wiki pages and revisions. I think it suffers from being slow and difficult to install and configure, as well as using a very uncommon rendering engine that has really stymied theming.

I use JIRA at work, and honestly it's completely fine. It's a goddamn bug tracker. If I can make bugs and close them it's doing its job. Nobody in my organization reads email or tracks their stuff anyway. Sometimes what you have are organizational/management problems, and no amount of wizzy technology is going to fix that.

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