The goodbye email where I linked to this was the highlight of my career.
Powerful tools are flexible enough to be used correctly by knowledgeable people and help people become knowledgeable. Badly designed tools are tools which don't help people become knowledgeable and don't prevent unknowledgeable people from harming themselves or others using them.
Atlassian tools, like JIRA, are almost always powerful and flexible -- capable of great good in the hands of knowledgeable people. However, they are not well designed tools, and so - the vast majority of JIRA installations and setups are just as broken as the orgs which install them and JIRA offers absolutely zero assistance or resistance to that brokenness.
Yeah.
The bad news is that I've never heard of a workplace that's managed to change that culture once it's set in. The good news is that there are plenty of places to work which don't have that nonsense - which you can work in, if you can find them; which, to be fair, is pretty difficult. That said, it's worth the effort.
That's one of the questions I ask potential employers - "Say I'd like to make a small change to the workflow, in order to meet an oversight requirement - for example, on a project I'm engineering - how would I go about doing so using your work tracking system? How many people would I need approval from to do so? Let's assume the effect is internal to my project and would require no other team to change how they work. Is that possible?"
The answer usually says a lot more about the prospective employer than any technical questions about their code-bases do - and those are generally easy to suss out with a quick inspection, and SCM log perusal, anyway.
* A task with a title that can be understood in context (by the implementer/stakeholder) is sufficient.
* Pointing/effort estimate is even better. Ideally, everything should have points because it helps the team manage workflow and set expectations.
* A description is nice, but often completely unnecessary. In fact, I'd prefer no description to a stale description.
From there, individual teams/developers should choose whatever tools they prefer for actually implementing a feature.
I regularly meet with tech companies in the 2~10 person dev team range and easily 70%+ still use Jira. These co's have the choice of choosing Jira (i.e. it isn't being jammed down on them by a corporate overlord) yet there's still hate? I don't get it.
I'm beginning to think the Jira hate is simply an echo chamber about perceived overhead of project management by IC (mostly engineers), not Jira the actual product. Yes, Jira is complex, but it doesn't have to be. Most dev teams I know just need a tool to organize task intake and allocation. And most smaller ones use Jira because in most cases it'll come batteries included for a dev team.
PS - according to their financials, Atlassian is doing just fine: https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/TEAM?tab=financials
Stock Jira is not substantially worse than any other bug tracking system, other than being proprietary.
However, Jira is incredibly customizable, and if your organization adds a dozen mandatory custom fields, Jira can become horrific to use.
Workflow customization is one of Jira's selling points, and also one of its biggest dangers.
There's some value in a system that doesn't allow that level of workflow customization, and instead forces everything into a fairly simple and lightweight issue-tracking framework.
I personally am hopeful about this GitHub feature, but I do think there's a real danger of losing usability here.
I've also been on Jira for at least 4 years now and the development is just sad... New UI stuff wasn't "better" just different. Pages are still slow if not slower. Reporting is abysmal; we use the API to pull pretty much all data into a database and report from that. The one tool our team's universally loved was canned– a browser extension that allowed you to screenshot and open ticket with things like browser info and URL already in the ticket. We even tried to modify the extension to put metadata from within our application (didn't work and product was sunset anyway).
My outlook is that developers will move towards something like Jetbrain's issue product or maybe even GitHub issues someday. Support teams will move towards a more dedicated support style system like zendesk or a custom solution around twilio. And for non dev projects, I hope better tools come up... Microsoft project seems to still be a leader in my industry, and also seems to be universally hated amongst my teams.
compare this experience to trello or github issues and you’ll see the other end of the spectrum. obviously jira does way more enterprise related features than those two.
Haven't used it since though.
We tried to self-host initially, and our server with "only" 4G of memory (remember, this was 10 year ago, and was a respectable amount for a small office server) couldn't handle it; it was super-slow even with just a few people. lol? None of us were Java peeps and didn't really know how to tweak the JVM thing. We ended up just using the hosted option, which wasn't that expensive anyway (certainly cheaper than having a dev spend a day on this).
There was a lot more complaining during our self-hosted GitLab days but I can't recall a specific reason why.
Not tense at all. You'd be surprised at how many people actually like Jira, mainly because of how customizable it is. That in my opinion is it's biggest boon and its greatest curse. Every Jira instance is so different it's hard to compare between them. Stock isn't bad at all and works quite well. There are performance issues for sure, but I've yet to see a competitor that has the level of complexity Jira provides do so at a significantly faster speed.
For what it's worth, culture wise Atlassian was great because of how not tense things were. A lot of that is the Australian values in the company. It's very much work-to-live rather than the live-to-work of most Bay Area companies.
Are there any numbers of how many of the users like it, compared to how many users struggle with it? I can't imagine that a majority of Jira users likes it, as that's not my experience. I have met very few people (mainly project managers) so far, which believe that Jira (and other Atlassian products as well) are great products.
I first started being annoyed by it when I joined a large corporation with a central department that would enforce specific workflows and processes. Now I can't move tasks into a sprint without assigning them to a person first, can't move task from status x to y and have a 100 custom fields in there. It's no fun anymore. At the same time the projects are owned by project management and it doesn't feel like home anymore. Where I initially opened up my Jira Board first thing every morning it now has become a chore.
At the same time I have to say that I kinda understand where those processes come from. I now work in an industry where accidentally using a wrong issue type or forgetting to assign issues to specific code changes can become an actual issue due to traceability requirements mandated by law.
Nobody has either the time or the will to switch because, while all the software kind of sucks, it doesn't suck enough to the point where someone is going to stop working on their product and/or service to jettison Atlassian from their org.
I have a lot of awful things to say about GitHub Actions but it's probably the best fit for our team.
However those orgs often have a Very Big License for GitHub Enterprise, and therefore with some enterprise porting tools it's not that high friction a switch (supplier managers will be all in favour; one less contract to manage!)
Then we switched to BitBucket Server because it integrates better and cost a lot less, plus GH Enterprise was a weird black box VM back then that we had to hack into to make work for whatever reason.
I couldn't point you to anyone who likes BitBucket Server, but as long as you're on the CLI and don't have to use the terrible web UI too much, it sort of works.
E.g. https://www.slintel.com/tech/source-code-management/github-v...
I hate JIRA but there is very little else serving these customers.
Jira has a gigantic moat. Too many people - non devs mostly - are invested on it. While this new product is not negligible since it comes from a service people are likely already using, I'm sure Atlassian isn't scared in any special way.
I get frustrated with it when I need to dive into basic admin tasks - like spinning up a new project or board. Their admin and setting panels are completely incomprehensible.
Also, Jira doesn't have a story for archiving tickets. Only a straight, permanent, hard delete with no recovery. I got reminded of this the hard way.
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We're currently switching to Clubhouse (though a completely unrelated thing was the forcing function). It comes with it's rough edges as well, but it's simple enough we can comprehend it within out headspace.
GH issues? I click a link without thinking twice, and it's open fast. Almost every interaction is quick. I can leave a dozen tabs with GH issues open for weeks and not notice. Jira? Asana? "Ugh, a list of five issue links and I don't know which I need... fuuuuuck I don't want to open all these to find the right one, should take 10s total but will take a minute or so", and "why's my whole system feel weird? Damnit, I left Jira/Asana open again, didn't I?"
It's basically the CPanel of ticket systems.
This seems like a product area where hitting all the features on a purchasing manager's feature list is more important than being good. Atlassian seems optimized for that.