Ideally I'd like to be able to revert to the state as of a specific point in history - JIRA has an "activity log" that shows that it keeps all the history of transitions, but unlike say a wiki I can't just click on one of them and say "reset it to this version". Obviously that doesn't solve everything if your transitions have done something non-idempotent in external systems, but it would cover a lot of cases.
TBH all I really need is a way to undo the last action, for the case of "oh shit I didn't mean to click that" or "oh shit my mouse slipped and I dragged it to the wrong column" - or worse still, because the column I was dragging it to changed midflight because of JIRA's ridiculous performance issues. Again obviously that could go wrong if there's an external integration involved, but I'm ok with enabling confirmation for transitions that are going to make a change to an external system (I might even be ok with enabling it for every transition if I didn't have to drag a card through five different states one by one and wait 30s for the UI to unfreeze each time). But being able to irreversibly screw an issue up just by dropping it in the wrong place is not cool. (My current company has one of the less bad Jira setups I've used, but I still have a task that I can't see on my open issues view because I accidentally dragged it into some kind of fixed/resolved/closed state, and even though it's now back in the right state, its Resolution isn't Unresolved and there's no way to put it back to that).
> Would you rather have a centrally managed IBM Remedy? :)
I've not used that. I've had a much better time using Trello, Trac, or even (going back a few years now) Bugzilla to fill the same role. Yes, they don't do as much as JIRA, but I really think that's actually a downside. More concretely I think capturing requirements/planning/roadmaps and tracking the status of work in progress are actually separate things that should be done separately, and the fact that JIRA tries to do both is part of what makes it so complex and slow.
I don't envy you and I feel for you. It does not have to be that way but you also can't blame Atlassian for letting those sorts of companies, which let's face it are larger companies with more licenses bought, buy Jira and catering to them. However, Atlassian has kept things very very simple and open enough that you don't have to be a victim of that.
> Who maintains your Jira workflows, and what's the process for making changes to them? I guarantee you're doing something unusual, because like I said, I've seen Jira in five or six companies and it was bad in all of them. (Blind guess: at your company the people who are actually using it are empowered to make changes to the workflows, which is very much not the default and not what Jira's permissioning system guides you towards).
I do have to give you this, Jira is not great for empowering people to make their own changes to workflows and such, so you _are_ entirely at the mercy of your company. They are sort of changing some of this with at least Jira Cloud and the new issue view (which I hate with a vengeance for the most part) in that you can both "pin" fields yourself on a per project basis (which is bad, because in our case I want the same ones pinned in all projects, as they all share the same issue types and workflows but there's a project per product we have) and you can move fields between the left and right context (or removed from screen) without having to be a Jira admin. It's still lacking in many ways though. Just so you know, I'm not saying Jira is the best tool ever out there and everything is perfect about it. I'm just saying that your company misusing it doesn't mean that the tool isn't valuable and doesn't have some great features. Did you know that Jira since not too long ago allows story points to have floating point values now, because so many people requested it? That is absolute utter BS and not in line with any agile methodology I've ever come across. But I guess this is where I have to refer back to Money, Money, Money ... :)
FWIW I've been both at companies where other people were Jira admins and to get something changed you had to go through someone else and where I was the admin. Sometimes the changes requested were denied. In other cases, even within a large (10k+ employees) companies, we just had our own Jira for the project and I was actually (one of the few) Jira admin(s). At my current company I am not but most things are actually configured just as they should be. If you want something changed, you ask for it and it's usually not a problem and the stuff they're putting in is not crazy.
Would you rather have a centrally managed IBM Remedy? :)
P.S.: And just on the axe, I think it depends. Is it a standard axe with a hickory handle? By default that definitely doesn't slip. Oh you say you oiled it so much that it slips all the time now? Not the axe's fault!