On: The Slow, Painful Death of Agile and Jira

[fernandotakai]

>JIRA sucks.

i used to think the same until i had to use azure devops.

i legitimately miss JIRA nowadays.

[badgersnake → fernandotakai]

Just because you found something worse it doesn't mean the first thing doesn't suck.

CVS isn't good because Visual Source Safe exists.

[makeitdouble → badgersnake]

One issue is that many many ticket management solutions suck a lot more that JIRA.

As an analogy, it feels the same as saying "git sucks", and going on a journey to try CVS, SVN, VSS, DropBox's version management, Apple's TimeMachine, Synology's file management etc. to discover the strength and weakness of these random solutions one by one.

At the end of the day you end up really liking git, but when telling to people that git is really great you're met with grunts and middle fingers.

[nickpeterson → makeitdouble]

Maybe you end up using fossil?

[marcosdumay → nickpeterson]

Fossil sucks in its own specific ways, that are different from git's, but still exist.

And that's the issue most people on this thread miss. If every tool for reaching some goal suck in some way, do the best of them really suck?

[fernandotakai → badgersnake]

i mean, i never said jira was good. i said that it was not as bad as azdo.

after 17 years working as a dev, i came to the conclusion there's no good ticketing system, there's only less-bad-ones. and i honestly think a well configured jira instance is the pile-o'-shit king.

[ike2792 → fernandotakai]

I used to think JIRA sucked until my company migrated to ClickUp. In general most of the tools can be made to be usable if a tech lead or engineering manager can tweak them to what a team actually needs. Usually they are left in the hands of TPMs or Scrum Masters who generally make the whole process too heavyweight and complicated.

[jraines → ike2792]

Yes, ClickUp was the worst I’ve used out of Pivotal Tracker, Trello, Wrike, Jira, Excel, Notion Calvinball, threatening emails, or text files

[EGreg → jraines]

What would y’all say are their best features? The must haves done right?

Our team used Redmine from a decade ago, but people like all the pretty ways to drag items between columns or something

[fernandotakai → EGreg]

oh wow, redmine!

i worked at a place back in 2008 and we used redmine -- i even wrote a plugin to track worked hours so we could properly bill clients (i ended up learning rails because of this).

[Izkata → jraines]

> Notion Calvinball

You got me looking, but this doesn't seem to exist. I kinda want to see a Calvinball issue tracker now.

[Izkata → ike2792]

> Usually they are left in the hands of TPMs or Scrum Masters who generally make the whole process too heavyweight and complicated.

This is what happened to us for years, trying to create a common process for multiple teams on the same jira project. Then the manager that oversaw those teams left and during the last reorganization we all split up into our own jira projects where each team could configure it however they wanted. There's still rough edges, like with how links are inconsistent, but overall it's been pretty great since then.

[TheRealPomax → fernandotakai]

JIRA sucks, and amazingly there are products out there that suck _even more_.

[m_rpn → fernandotakai]

ADO is not worse than JIRA... it's just a different kind of worse.

[JohnFen → fernandotakai]

Having been inflicted with both, I agree that if I have to choose between the two, Jira is the lesser evil. Azure devops makes almost anything else look great by comparison.

[tempodox → fernandotakai]

I suggest there could be some confusion at play here: It's not so much JIRA that sucks, but the processes being implemented with it.

[stemlord → fernandotakai]

Same, now that I'm forced to use Monday. Jira was so feature rich and power-user-friendly in comparison.

[TeeMassive → fernandotakai]

I just want an issue tracker with a customizable sate machine to transition status.