Re:The Process Is Not the Product. The New Agile Anti-Manifesto
by lmm on Monday February 22, 2021 @12:06AM
(#26221071)
> I wonder how you would have Jira 'help'. If you define a workflow step and set a certain field to a specific value based on post-function from some plugin that actually makes a REST call to some external system. How would Jira help you in determining that if you transition from that step back to one 3 levels before in your (also non-linear) workflow should unset that specific field?
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.
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.