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Re:I fucking hate Jira by oneplane on Monday June 20, 2022 @03:50PM (#31814876)
No, it isn't. We have plenty of setups in multiple organisations where even within the org only the administrative settings of the server are locked down and everyone else is free to do whatever they need. Lots of teams just use it as a kanban board, while others setup a state machine-based funnel to process user/business input into usable tickets.

JIRA in its default configuration essentially lets you create anything, anywhere in any state. Anything beyond that is just bad product configuration. Now, there are plenty of products out there that suck no matter how you configure it (looking at you, ServiceNow).

Especially the comments about "I would rather use trello" seem extremely uninformed as you pretty much *are* trello when you just stick to one kanban board and one project.

Re:I fucking hate Jira by asfhagsdf on Monday June 20, 2022 @04:42PM (#31815667)
It amazes me how much hate Jira gets compared to ServiceNow. My last two roles have been heavy on the ServiceNow, and I'd take a fresh breath of Jira any time.

My guess is it's because Jira actively targets SMB, while ServiceNow is almost strictly enterprise, and folks in enterprise have already resigned to their fate.

Re:I fucking hate Jira by oneplane on Monday June 20, 2022 @05:28PM (#31816226)
I think the comparison mostly stems from the legacy enterprise where badly configured tools are pushed top-down and workers are told to 'deal with it'. Either you'll be a developer mostly using JIRA or a non-developer mostly using ServiceNow, and if you're really unlucky in such an organisation you'll be using both.

Having a Service Desk that actually provides usable and composable tooling is a benefit for all. Having a random contractor "implement" ServiceNow because Gartner said so is a pain for all. This is of course a bit of opposing extremes, but the same applies to JIRA and AD and pretty much anything else. Hard-pushed bad implementation will ruin your workday.

Teams that are capable and allowed to self-steer and deviate from company policy if they come up with a good enough reason seems to be the sweet spot of attainable & realistic.

Re:I fucking hate Jira by colechristensen on Monday June 20, 2022 @05:00PM (#31815884)
I have only ever seen servicenow used for… well, service requests. Reset my password, grant access, create this resource. Always administration, never product development.
Re:I fucking hate Jira by aweiland on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @10:19AM (#31824228)
I've seen it used for way more than that. Their sales (and customer support) people will gladly tell you it can, or soon will, do everything you may want it to do.
Re:I fucking hate Jira by blacksmith_tb on Monday June 20, 2022 @05:44PM (#31816449)
Well said. I have to deal with both of them in my current role, and while Jira is... not great, ServiceNow is next-level-clunky.
Re:I fucking hate Jira by Tagbert on Monday June 20, 2022 @11:29PM (#31819530)
ServiceNow is just about the most user hostile software I know. I know that any request I make that ends up in SN will take 2-4 times as long and i will never be sure that anything is happening or that they person on the other actually knows what I want.
Re:I fucking hate Jira by mathattack on Monday June 20, 2022 @04:51PM (#31815784)
And try to get a straight answer on pricing from the ServiceNow rep…
Re:I fucking hate Jira by _jal on Monday June 20, 2022 @05:29PM (#31816241)
The answer is "way more than is sensible, even factoring in how absurd pricing on crap like this has gotten."

We dropped SN a couple years back over this. They were charging us about 6-7x what we pay for Jira, and we still use the on-site enterprise version of Jira.

Re:I fucking hate Jira by mathattack on Monday June 20, 2022 @11:11PM (#31819412)
“Let’s have a kickoff, invite everyone in the company who may be interested, and white board out all the possible use cases. We have an exciting new pricing model that will greatly simplify pricing on your existing business. But I can’t tell you that price until after the kickoff.”
Re:I fucking hate Jira by oneplane on Monday June 20, 2022 @05:32PM (#31816299)
We have a few of those around as well. While they work fine, I don't really get why anyone would want to self-host JIRA or any COTS product like that anymore. Most instances now seem to be just a case of "our hosting company is fully responsible for it and it's pretty cheap and reliable" and until it starts failing or falling behind the cloud offering it'll probably stay like that.

Usually, if it isn't better from a staff-perspective or better for the customer, self-hosting or self-building is less likely to be the answer these days.

Re:I fucking hate Jira by shagie on Monday June 20, 2022 @05:36PM (#31816336)
Self hosting is sometimes easier to do than to argue with data governance about putting the information out a system that is offprem. The additional precautions for HIPAA or PII data that may show up in the comments or attachments can problematic. There are far too many users of all stripes that copy and paste data that they have access to without doing a check on it to see if it really does belong there (and if it does belong in the issue, then applying appropriate permissions to the object).
Re:I fucking hate Jira by colechristensen on Monday June 20, 2022 @04:04PM (#31815113)
And how long is this going to last before someone further up decides that Jira needs to be unified for reporting purposes?

Eventually somebody with the organization obsession is going to get hired and put somewhere important and their goal is going to be making something complicated and unified and dissent will be "discouraged".

Re:I fucking hate Jira by femiagbabiaka on Monday June 20, 2022 @05:32PM (#31816297)
“Data needs to be unified for my executive use case” sounds like an org problem not a JIRA one. I’ve encountered it at companies that didn’t use JIRA at all
Re:I fucking hate Jira by oneplane on Monday June 20, 2022 @05:10PM (#31815966)
Depends on where you work I guess. In reality, reporting really has nothing to do with SWE state tracking. You can also just write a report in a letter and mail it to the board. It's not like they are going to log in to JIRA or even have an account or SSO-allowed credentials since they don't need to be there.

On the other hand, like almost copy-pasted here, if a top-down 'unification make it worse for everyone' effort is started, no vendor or tool is going to stop that and your work will get worse.

Re:I fucking hate Jira by sherifmansour on Monday June 20, 2022 @10:18PM (#31819028)
Spot on. One of the reasons we created Atlas (new product) was precisely this: help stakeholders and dependent teams focus on common language between teams over this misconception that task-level reporting is how they help understand the true state of work. Disclaimer: I work for Atlassian on Atlas, and I didn’t think I could ever get so passionate about soling this problem.
Re:I fucking hate Jira by geraldwhen on Monday June 20, 2022 @06:31PM (#31817028)
This happened to me!
Re:I fucking hate Jira by Ensorceled on Monday June 20, 2022 @03:53PM (#31814943)
> JIRA in its default configuration essentially lets you create anything, anywhere in any state. Anything beyond that is just bad product configuration.

That's kind of the point, JIRA has been made into monstrosity at many organizations because the "create anything" mindset.

Re:I fucking hate Jira by oneplane on Monday June 20, 2022 @04:00PM (#31815046)
How does that make it a monstrosity? Unless we're talking about things that are shared across multiple teams, does it really matter how people use it? Nobody is going to care what someone else does in JIRA when they aren't touching that part anyway. Even with 1000 differently configured projects, your 1 or 2 projects you actually work with and configure are the only ones that matter.
Re:I fucking hate Jira by colechristensen on Monday June 20, 2022 @04:11PM (#31815215)
Because it attracts somebody 4 layers up to tell somebody 3 layers up to come up with a common Jira platform for everybody and then you don't control how your project is run and then Jira becomes the enemy, a faceless micromanager driving your work life that has strong opinions on how you do everything, a dozen steps that need to be done "right" or you get your half a dozen managers asking if you read the memo about TPS reports, er, Jira tickets.
Re:I fucking hate Jira by oneplane on Monday June 20, 2022 @04:27PM (#31815446)
So that is not a JIRA problem since you can do a

> it attracts somebody 4 layers up to tell somebody 3 layers up to come up with a common

with pretty much everything, including a spreadsheet or a plain text file.

Conflating bad business practises with tool configuration or products in general doesn't help anyone. If a business is very stiff and scared of its employees, they will try out all sorts of useless control methods hoping it will somehow make some metric 'better'. You can do that with Trello too. Doesn't make Trello a bad product, and it doesn't make JIRA a bad product.

At the same time, pretending a larger organisation with many teams can function without any form of state tracking is a nice dream but not a reality either, so it's not like you can do without anything at all. But like reposted a bunch of times, how you do it and who is responsible for it is pretty important.

Re:I fucking hate Jira by colechristensen on Monday June 20, 2022 @04:57PM (#31815849)
The point is that there are tools that enable and encourage bad behavior. The kinds of organizational toxicity simply aren’t possible with some tools, sure an ambitious executive could try but the attempt would fail very quickly. Such attempts to do the broken overburdened nonsense that frequently comes with Jira don’t fail, they are enabled and encouraged. What is technically possible and what is likely are two very distant things.
Re:I fucking hate Jira by msla on Monday June 20, 2022 @05:03PM (#31815913)
"The tool can't do it" is an excuse. Excuses aren't tolerated. Now, make it happen.

Tools can't prevent bad management because bad managers don't care about tools. They care about getting what they want, and if the tool doesn't enable it, that's their underlings' problem, not theirs. Jira doesn't stand in their way because nothing stands in their way.

Re:I fucking hate Jira by CRConrad on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @07:23AM (#31822642)
That's precisely why Jira sucks: Because it doesn't stand in their way. And why you want simpler software, which by not being able to bend to their misguided will, does stand in their way.
Re:I fucking hate Jira by oneplane on Monday June 20, 2022 @05:08PM (#31815953)
JIRA really doesn't encourage anything in any direction except writing down what you are up to in a reasonably friendly way. Anything beyond that is up to the implementors, and there is nothing in the world that can prevent bad top-down behaviour within a company.
Re:I fucking hate Jira by Supermancho on Monday June 20, 2022 @10:03PM (#31818941)
> JIRA really doesn't encourage anything in any direction

Given the amount of effort you devoted to replying to multiple posts, it feels disingenuous when you make an obvious and inaccurate statement as fact.

There is very little dependency graph organization (eg subtasks), which isn't reflected in most of the UI anyway as JIRA does push toward treating all tickets as a flat set. Work is a practical hierarchy of concerns and JIRA never made much progress away from a checklist (same as ASANA, Rike, etc).

Re:I fucking hate Jira by CRConrad on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @07:21AM (#31822632)
> Anything beyond that is up to the implementors

"Implementors". Anything that needs to be "implemented" is either a) not finished, b) too big and complex, or c) both.

Dunno for sure how much less code Jira has compared to, say, MS Excel or Adobe Acrobat, but I could imagine it might be up to an order of magnitude. But you don't have to "implement" those; you just install them.

Re:I fucking hate Jira by aaaaaaaaata on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @10:29AM (#31824346)
Better comparison product is MS Teams, not Excel.
Re:I fucking hate Jira by CRConrad on Wednesday June 22, 2022 @03:23AM (#31832978)
Yes and no. Yes, it's more like JIRA.

But no, that's missing the point: That's what makes it an equally stupid "Enterprise product". Excel, OTOH, is arguably more essential to more corporations, and yet you don't see big international consultancies snap up contracts for six-year-long "Excel Implementation" projects with Fortune 500 corporations. You do see that for SAP, Oracle Business Suite (or whatever it's called nowadays), etc. They're products that you don't just install and use; they need to be "implemented". JIRA is more like that.

Or, IOW: I wasn't comparing, but contrasting. (Which, OK, is also a kind of comparison. But for this kind, it's Excel that is the better example than Teams.)

Re:I fucking hate Jira by Ensorceled on Monday June 20, 2022 @07:19PM (#31817527)
We're just talking past each other, I'm saying Jira is bad because "it's a foot gun, and bad people keep shooting me in the foot" and you're saying "they shot you in the foot because they are bad". We are both right, technically, but I don't like working with foot-guns for this reason.
Re:I fucking hate Jira by RayFrankenstein on Monday June 20, 2022 @09:50PM (#31818857)
JIRA empowers bad management to be so, so much worse. JIRA is the assault rifle of footguns.