But at other companies I’ve been at, it’s not a productivity tool. It’s a management too.

Estimates for planning. Which is fine. Until pointless rules appear. We’ll use standard story points. But not 1, that’s too small. So things start at 2. But after a while that’s too small. So they start at 3. But you can’t go over 8, past that they have to be split. And you shouldn’t probably use 8 anyway. Pretty soon everything will be 5s. No matter how big or small. Good thing we point.

And of course the whole point of pointing is to put things in sprints. That’s fine. But then the rules come. You can’t go over your capacity. You can’t go below your capacity. You have to roll over everything you didn’t do. You can’t roll things over. We committed to finish by Junetober 37th even if we’re not ready so it has to go in the sprint now. So now you put things into the sprint after the sprint started and remove things before it’s over so that the magic numbers look correct even though they are complete BS.

But luckily you can track things.

Except every team is forced to use the same workflow even if they don’t work the same way. Because otherwise it would be “complicated“. So the IT tickets have to look like software development tickets. And the planning tickets have to look like software development tickets. It’s important to have tickets to plan your future plans so you know what tickets to make. After all, if you don’t schedule everything 18 months in advance to the day, are you really doing agile sprints?

But you can link tickets. For example you can choose requires, or needs, or is dependent upon, or can’t be done without, or is waiting on. Wouldn’t one thing do for all of that? No one actually knows. It’s an unanswerable question.

Did I mention there’s Kanban support? You’re not allowed to use that. Because.

And all this gets so complicated you need people whose job it is to wrangle Jira full-time. Make reports, add more fields, etc.

Of course those fields don’t make sense in a lot of cases. But sometimes they required. And other teams want them required but aren’t allowed to because everyone has to work the same way.

So the ZRX team invents their own email gateway to put issues into Jira their way. You didn’t know about that right? Because if you add the issue directly they’ll ignore it. Productivity!

I don’t know if it’s fair to call the thing I used at those companies “Jira”. That’s a bit like calling a battery made out of a box full of potatoes a “vegetable medley”. I mean it’s sort of true but that’s not the point anymore is it?

I like actual Jira. It’s a good product. Too bad almost no company will let you use it, only corruptions. It doesn’t exist to do its real job but to instead generate management reports. Which they don’t read.

Poor Jira.

We are apparently moving to the cloud version soon, and it’s being sold to the users as the saviour for all the performance issues we’re encountering.

On-premise was designed for LANs. It does not traverse the internet well.

As an example, Atlassian themselves still use the on-premise version, and it's really snappy: https://jira.atlassian.com/issues/