Is most of that work waiting for Jira to respond to your action so you can take the next action?
I don't know if it's possible to have an adequately fast installation of Jira (since I've never seen one in a decade of Jira use at various places), but I do notice that people who have to put a lot of things into Jira seem to mostly use text editors or word processors to actually plan, and then transfer it a piece at a time into Jira once the initial result is done. Yesterday I was in a planning session with two others, and we did that planning with headings, bullet points, and concurrent editing by all three of us in a Google doc.
That's not my experience of Jira. The cloud version is the best, and our current on-prem installation is perfectly fine. I agree that Jira isn't the snappiest tool to use, but I don't sit there consciously waiting for it to do stuff.
For example, I just tested following a permalink to a comment on a ticket. After 1.3 seconds I see the ticket - but it takes more than 7 seconds until I'm scrolled to the right comment, all the ticket details are loaded, and so on.
And the slow-ass lazy loading means you daren't click something between 1.3 seconds and 7 seconds, because at any moment a new button or linked issue box or the addition of status icons next to links or something will reflow the page.
In my experience this shitty performance is baked into every single interaction with Jira. You want to create an issue? Two seconds to show up the form. You click the 'epic link' dropdown on that form? A full second just to display a dropdown menu. Oh, and you also want to open the 'label' dropdown? That'll be 1.8 seconds.
And all those are on Cloud Jira, at a weekend, on a <300 ticket project, on a powerful developer workstation.
It is forbidden in the ToS 3.3 to “(i) publicly disseminate information regarding the performance of the Cloud Products“.
That would be one legit reason for thinking about writing this clause. Because it’s really curious to think about writing that.
They might as well say it:
Will be slow, we feel that does not impact the value proposition.
Our license revenue is super necessary and this is not a race.
Ya, slow now because we need users and features now, go faster later.
If you need it to be more performant, pay us more and make the hardware investments we tell you to...
I personally would respect those more than a blanket gag attempt.
It just gets in the way. Individual actions are tolerable-ish. But it’s never setup right. Constantly hunting for the field that is blocking story creation. Permission issues all over the place.
Finding things is often nightmarish.
Management basically doesn’t care, and doesn’t want to put effort into making it work in sane fashion. Yet freak out if team wants to use something else. So we do all our planning and story tracking in google sheets instead.
Fast solutions clearly exist. But somehow everybody ends up using slow Jira.
100% of the time I want Jira to do stuff is when I'm interacting with it, and thus absolutely waiting for it.
It's not just issue tracking, but alerting, issue management ITSM tools, source control, CI/CD, release management, documentation and I don't know what else that all need talk to each other and provide traceability from any point to another. You can do the integration yourself, but it's a gigantic PITA, and as the number of tools rises, the number of integrations you need to set up is going to rise terrifyingly fast.
I have a litany of complaints about the Atlassian suite, but none of the competitors have even have the services we need.
You are right that it's difficult to replace the entire Atlassian suite. The thing about Atlassian is that when there's if there's a box to check on a feature list, they've made sure to check it. If you go around the office asking everyone what features they want, Atlassian is going to check all those boxes. That's pretty hard to compete with.
I kind of want a modern version of Trac. Trac is essentially a collection of integrations that just happen to have useful features.
There's no "coherency" to them.
Take for example the admin UI. When adding "Application Links" to link Jira and Confluence with each other, Jira has a nice tabbed interface allowing you to configure it easily, whereas in Confluence, you have to scroll down a long sidebar with dozens of options until you chance upon the required link. Had similar experiences configuring various other options at the filesystem level.
Jira configuration was more coherent, fault tolerant and failed gracefully. Confluence configuration on the other hand was messy in comparison.
Whoever thought it was a good idea to build a CI tool on a concept of information hiding is a monster who should be banished back to whatever eldritch plane they crawled out of.
You can’t have a coherent conversation with anyone about the functionality of Bamboo versus other CI tools because Bamboo is constantly lying to you about what is available. You don’t even know to ask other people for help with something because you don’t know if Bamboo can do it. So people use the ugliest kludges that their privilege level allows to get things done, creating an unmaintainable mess in the process.
Isn't Phabricator trying to do all of this? It seems to get quite a lot of fairly high-profile usage in both enterprise and community-focused/FLOSS contexts.
It's just those two though, it's also the git branches, pipelines, and release integration from jira, being able to see the support ticket cases and / or alerts that were the cause of ticket/branch/release.
I'm in no way arguing that atlassian does a great job here, only that no one else offers that end to end integration. (Possible exception of phabricator mentioned in a sister thread)
I remember when we used Trac on a project and it seemed so primitive in many ways, but as soon as I had to use something baroque (broke), I wanted to go back to Trac.
Not to say that Trac isn’t fancy, it just chose a very specific dimension of fancy to focus on and ignored anything else.
It shouldn't though. Jira wasn't always here, and it wont be here forever.
And what's even more important, and is the point of the post, trends don't stay the same, whether a tool still maintains its existing userbase or even increases it.
In a changing market, a tool might hold or even increase its userbase, but still end up with much smaller marketshare.
If we add qualitative considerations too, then it's also very possible a tool to remain dominant even in market share, but still lose mindshare (and eventually be dropped by the next gen of developers).
Tons of people and companies use Visual Basic too, but it's not where things are happening (or what one should study to get a job in 2021).
There's probably a crowd of people that want to move on to the next issue tracker flavour and that's fine but I've got work to do that isn't tool shuffling.
I'll use the one that integrates with so many of our systems and, though flawed, does a great job.