Honest question.
JIRA has a tendency to.... decay. New ticket types are created with custom fields that aren't ever kept up to date. Everyone starts to choose random entries because they have no choice, and no way to add new ones. Once that starts, things fall into chaos because nobody knows the "right" way to file tickets. Tickets soon become immeasurably immeasurable. Projects become categorized incorrectly on a constant basis. The only people who know how to use JIRA effectively are the ones who know how to ignore all the noise. Once those people leave, you're left with pure, unadulterated chaos.
And then you get people who try to fix it by adding a new ticket type or project group, etc. Rinse, repeat.
If you haven't already, then you should check out JIRA's query language and its API. The query language is... special (and doesn't support wildcards, last I checked). Its API, instead of displaying field names as you see it in their interface, shows "fieldname_21234". No joke. You have to run another api request for all of the field names and associate them yourself. It's painful
To your point - sure, JIRA can be used effectively. Though, any bad tool can be used well if enforced. But that's not what most of us have seen in the wild. JIRA eventually just becomes a behemoth of a tool.
It is anyday better than getting tasks over email.
We had very minimal customisations. A simple set of swimlanes that we update throughout the product development process.
From what you are telling it looks like your team had other problems in delivery. You tried to solve it via Jira by adding new custom fields and forcing people to update them. Solving the deeper issue would have helped there.
I have been able to track my deliverables. See how my team is performing. Plan for the next sprint. Perform retrospectives and capture action items. The tool hasn't broken while doing this. UI is decent. I really don't see a problem with the tool, it serves its goal.
Is there any enterprise scale tool that doesn't, when it isn't managed correctly? It needs management just like any other tool that's being used on an enterprise scale. People just want to be able to set and forget, but then it doesn't adapt well to individual departments and teams. Then people either start messing with it, or if they can't, they start hating it.
The benefit of a smaller tool is then, that teams can just get their own instance and mess that up without impacting the organization.
With Jira, one can create project-specific issue types, fields and workflow.
All that is to say, a human problem is fundamentally a tool problem.
1) It's sometimes a tool for managerial micromanagement, such as the extraction of unreasonably certain estimates as "promises", which can then be adjusted further down by your project managers, which can then be used to pressure devs into crunch or worse, instead of as a means of adjusting expectations.
2) It's an extremely complicated piece of software which you can (read: will) overcustomize into oblivion, confusion, and general busywork. Having grown over the years, it's various complications are also not consistent with each other, so some features don't really work well with others. The antithesis of KISS or YAGNI.
3) Project managers will still ask you about stuff instead of referring to JIRA. What's the point of sending time estimates into the void if they're going to swing by and disrupt your flow to hear those same estimates from you in person anyways?!
#1 gives people a (reasonable) emotional reason to hate JIRA, #2 gives people a (reasonable) rational reason to hate JIRA. #3 probably counts for both. I feel like I'm the weird one out not having come to hate JIRA in my social circles.
Project management is important, but JIRA is just a tool, not project management. Ultimately, that's a communication problem with your stakeholders and the people who get to call the shots. Email, slack, trello boards, even water-cooler chit chat can be better than an over-configured JIRA install in the right hands with the right managers. Get everyone on the same page in terms of tasks and priorities, manage expectations, track progress, avoid last minute surprises...
Something like a Trello board is sometimes popular with the "JIRA is overcomplicated" crowd. I use it for personal projects sometimes. It's OK. I'm OK with JIRA in the right hands too though. You don't have to tweak every single knob and settings. You can practice some self restraint and avoid it nerd sniping you, probably.
Our team grew to the point where we needed a bigger license, so we just migrated over to Jira Cloud. And it was even slower than the on-prem install.
No "no project management" isn't a better solution. No, I can't name any alternatives off the top of my head that are better than jira. But holy cow, jira is not a good piece of software. It has a lot of great concepts, but it runs like garbage and really isn't THAT fancy for what most people require. Especially for the cost.
It's not good, but it's not exactly a risky move either. "No one ever got fired for choosing IBM."
Good project management systems are simple and frequently not completely technically automated. Trello, or its older cousin "index cards on a whiteboard" are popular. Regular GitHub issues handle much of what needs to be handled, as long as you impose an organizational policy for how you'll go about triaging and updating status in them. Scrum stand-ups are just... regular meetings. None of this is very fancy; none of it needs to be.
The Jira environment I’m currently working in, takes 2+ seconds for any interaction to update the interface (that’s the sped up version. People tell me it used to take 20...).
Creating a new ticket displays no less than 150 fields (not all of which are required, thank god).
This is excluding Jira's design, which frustratingly makes you click several times to uncover data that should be obvious, and various other minor issues that just create headaches, for example: estimations for individual tasks don't bubble up for stories or epics, so you can have two wildly different sets of data to maintain.
The alternative systems would change depending on what people's issues with Jira are -- i.e are they design-based or ideology-based.
Jira's just a tool, a tool with an API, if it burns you so much then set up an email filter and spend a weekend on some GitHub-workalike wrapper or whatever other tool you believe does a better job. God I hate the damned thing, but placed beside all other similar tools in its class, I'd recommend it any day of the week, including over the joke of a system GitHub supplies - hell the ancient Bugzilla even compares favourably with GitHub.
The sad part is... yeah, you're right. It's the best ticketing tool I've used, too.
I'm not sure what the solution is. My naive thought has always been that good management can mitigate most of the need for JIRA - even at large companies. Management like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Johnson_(engineer), perhaps.
The saying is JIRA is yo project management what PowerPoint is to public speaking. For people who are good it can marginally improve the output but for most people it’s an easy way to wank away your time convincing yourself you are working on the right thing as you ignore the real issues.
Replace "yourself" with "others" and you have the answer as to how Jira makes managements life easier ;)
Personally I’m a fan of a physical Kanban board. This definitely scales far worse than JIRA does.
Does it? I think there are compelling arguments against it wrt remote employees. But I've seen no evidence that once you get bigger than a project that requires more than a physical Kanban boards any project synchronization becomes a farcical activity.
That's almost too easy to counter, having worked at a startup with just 3 employees, all devs, and no typical managment whatsoever. Jira was and after like 10 years still is, the go-to tool for bug tracking and it does the job just fine, after a one-time and somewhat lengthy setup phase. Which is obviously nothing compared with the years of use..
Speaking of >making programmer's job easier<, we could say that GitLab Auto DevOps eliminates the complexities of getting going with automated software delivery by automatically setting up the pipeline and necessary integrations, freeing up yourself to focus on the culture part. That means everyone can skip the manual work of configuration, and focus on the creative and human aspects of software creation.
Here's more about it https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/topics/autodevops/
I was afraid the acquisition by Microsoft was going to lead to it becoming more enterprise-oriented and less user-oriented, and it appears like that's exactly what's happening.
I don't mean that to come across snarky at all; I'm honestly curious what people are using and enjoy.
(We are coming from Trello which just doesn't deal well with a large number of tickets as you have only one view on them.)
It makes management's job easier, but it does nothing for the managed, except lead to frustration and hundreds of emails that have to be waded through for that 5% chance of relevancy.
Their integration seems particularly targeted to JIRA, when they've lapsed on many other useful features and improved UX implementations. It reflects GH's priorities as a company.
It's a sign that github is catering to management over the programmer. Contrast that to gitlab, whose implementations are designed to make the programmer's job easier.