True. I had to setup Jira for our team and must say it was an awful experience. Too many options, hidden in unintuitive places, awful (too verbose) documentation... Everything is just so difficult. Horrible UX. But it was still the best on-premise solution I could find. Trello on the other side is a delight to both setup and use.

I think buying Trello was great move for Atlassian. No way could Jira compete with them in the long run. And now they are even safe(r) from new Trello-like competitors. Brilliant move for Atlassian. Too bad for us users... :(

Had to do the same thing but had a different experience. It was hard to dive in and took some time but now I understand and appreciate the core concepts. There are many abstraction layers ("[...] schemes") and IMO that is a good thing. When you customize workflows etc. you can do that without leaving supported areas. Creating and changing a workflow is very easy. Plus, JIRA has a good pricing.

With ~350 employees and many mixed teams using only Trello would be chaos. In key areas we need fixed workflows (-> JIRA).

Right now we are planning to add Wekan (FOSS trello clone) to our toolchain for workflows which are more dynamic (less "C follows B follow A" + smaller teams - e.g. innovation and some planning).

JIRA is so customizable that it brings out the personality of a micro-manager, even in people who are usually not micro-managers. It's interesting to see how a tool used every day can shape thinking and behaviour patterns.

I consider JIRA a code smell: if an organization uses it, I probably won't be satisfied working with them. I don't think it's because of anything especially bad with Atlassian (although I was furious when they removed the ability to edit Confluence in raw mode), as that the managers I least want to work for seem especially attracted to it.

Your comment just illuminated that for me and I think you're right. It's the micromanager's dream, but for good managers it doesn't seem to offer enough over the competition to draw them in. The best I've worked with considered PM tools essentially fungible, and therefore weren't likely to invest in 1) paying for the Atlassian suite or 2) the overhead of getting it up and running.

>The best I've worked with considered PM tools essentially fungible

After taking a class and reading up on project management and trying to get more organized about my own projects, it's basically that. People have been able to orchestrate large projects with nothing more than pencil and paper and then typewriter. The best PMs don't need to force a tool choice.

Yes, but to my point, as you scale up you have to take into account people's varying skill levels and styles. If you can manage a huge project with pencil and paper, you'll do fine with Jira, too. If you are good but borderline, the structure Jira offers (and can be shared between teams/cascaded down) can help.

Exactly. Once a product meets the basic requirements, everything else tends to be complication and frippery. That doesn't mean there's not room to innovate on those basics, but it does suggest you focus on nailing them perfectly.

yeah but their lives sucked while doing that. Good tools don't get the job done if you don't know what you're doing but make it a hell of a lot faster if you do.