I really don't get the Jira hate. I need a place to read about the problem/project, comment/question it and know what work was completed and what remains to be done, which it all does well enough. It also integrates directly with GitHub.
I guess if GH had its own version that would be slightly easier. I think most people dislike Jira for how their orgs use it, with sprints and points and as a management/overseer tool. I feel like 90% of engs hating anything is due to management using something as a shortcut metric to battle royale their team with BS efficiency stats (tickets closed! PRs pushed!)
My hate for it is based on their UI. Lots of clicks, lots of panes opening everywhere. Scrolling to see everything, having to expand various thigns to see all fields. Navigating to new tickets sometimes takes you full-page, sometimes open yet another panel. And it all is slooooowwwwwww.
You can make Jira functional for the team. But you can't make the UX performant.
I also don’t get the hate.
My theory is that, because it is often self-hosted on-prem, some orgs under-provision the hosting and end up with a really sluggish instance, but at the companies that I’ve worked at it has always been quick. Maybe someone here can confirm or refute that theory?
I've had to use Jira Cloud, hosted by Atlassian themselves and presumably meant to be their hosting showcase, and it still chugs and is sluggish once "configured" for a large enough team or the whims of enough managers above that team. That Inner Platform Effect of Jira's weird scripting languages and SQL-like-but-not-exactly SQL filters provides a lot of room for management to slow everything down on every page forever.
Talk to people who have admin'd it instead of just users and you will understand very quickly there are a host of issues. Even with tons of hardware the software is just bloated and slow (tons of reports of "I threw a big system at it and payed for on-prem and it's still slow as cold molasses), the backend/api is atrocious, the tooling isn't foss (who customizes versioning?!), migration is another level of PITA, etc, etc, et al
> I guess if GH had its own version that would be slightly easier.
GitHub does have its own version. You can organize GitHub Issues into GitHub Projects. GitHub Projects have all sorts of iteration planning tools and team management tools and metrics reports that light up as you configure it. I've heard and seen screenshots that even more light up if you have an Enterprise Cloud account and/or pay a GitHub Consultant (they way some companies love their overpaid Jira Consultants).
I've tried to make the case for GH Projects to employers before. Supporting only one tool is very nice from a developer experience viewpoint. Of course, that's not something management often cares about, and Jira isn't always just software development, but also sometimes incident tracking and support desk and everything else and having more "synergy" there appeals more to some sorts of managers.
JIRA is a little overbuilt and overconfigurable, and I think that leads to it often being used in confusing ways. I don’t think it’s a bad product or anything, but my experiences on teams that use something simpler like Linear because the tool kind of guides you toward sane behaviors instead of letting you go nuts.
My biggest gripes are mostly Atlassian's fault, in that their products seem to take AGES to load (wasting my time) while also providing a UX that seems designed to force as many page loads as possible (wasting even MORE of my time). They keep hiring product people from the Marquis de Sade School of User Interface Design, and it shows.
I also have a huge dislike for all the horrible things so many companies do with Atlassian products, and although that is not necessarily their fault it is still somewhat related to those products. Want a guaranteed raise next time? Just chop your code up into a zillion commits, and write a crapton of sub-issues. SMH
GitHub issues/projects are great for small teams, but can't remotely stand up feature-wise in a larger organization (and assumes everyone is a developer) so as much as I love their stuff, it cannot really compete in the Enterprise space by design.
0. It takes too much effort to create and manage tickets. There are too many things to click, too many fields too fill, and half of them should be auto-filled.
1. Manager types think JIRA is a solution to getting shit done when the real problem is bad communication and politics.
Yeah Jira is just a ticket tracking system. Everything to do with the fields that need to be filled in, the workflow steps you need to move tickets through, and the granularity of tickets are entirely an organization specific thing.
My theory is eventually every ticket tracking system converges to the same bloated thing which is a completely customizable slow mess because every company and every team within every company wants something slightly different. The developer adds all these features and then the team running the product at each company customizes it to meet all their internal feature requests.
ServiceNow, Jira, you name it. Under the hood they are just a database but the customizable monstrosity of fields and forms rules and reports and workflows on top makes them all eventually suck. Heck, this is probably why SAP and PeopleSoft suck too.
I guess if GH had its own version that would be slightly easier. I think most people dislike Jira for how their orgs use it, with sprints and points and as a management/overseer tool. I feel like 90% of engs hating anything is due to management using something as a shortcut metric to battle royale their team with BS efficiency stats (tickets closed! PRs pushed!)