My understanding of Jira is that it by itself does not suck but it bends over backwards for asinine “business processes” so it is difficult to find an implementation in the wild that does not suck.
I know a little about the inside of the jira sausage factory from second hand reports. It's got the "accrete everyone else's business processes" problem that you mentioned, but it's also got the problem that it's quite spaghetti on the inside as well, probably for the usual reason - startup founders writing lots of code in a hurry and conflating the purpose of the software with its architecture due to being too close to the problem. Compound that with the usual startup-in-growth problem of more people than necessary (with presumably very uneven capabilities) working on the codebase and you've got a recipe for a maintenance problem.
I do know that getting put in the jira team is one of the least fun parts of working for atlassian.
I’ve heard this from multiple sources as well. IMHO, atlassian has had lots of opportunity to fix this... they’ve just been too focused on the next shiny object to do the less fun work of refactoring and redesigning the engine layers into something more sustainable.
JIRA is essentially a platform. It is unopinionated and infinitely configurable. This leaves it open to abuse and many orgs will absolutely abuse it. Other products that are popular do very little by comparison. That lets them build a really tight and simple UI but any org with more than vanilla requirements will hit a wall.
Quite easy, I have am been around for 30+ years in IT and have yet to find something that beats Jira in all its integration options, possibilities of formating tickets information, and flexibility to definie project specific workflows.
Given the option, I will always push for Jira, and associated Atlassian products.
> have yet to find something that beats Jira in all its integration options, possibilities of formating tickets information, and flexibility to definie project specific workflows
I think the reason you like it is exactly the reason a lot of people hate it.
possibilities of formating tickets information, and flexibility to definie project specific workflows.
JIRA in its default state is fairly sane. People who hate it, usually with a white-hot burning passion, really hate the ham-fisted customisations their own organisation has done to it.
They're both tools to build forms. How horrible the forms are is really up to your organization. Whether they force you to fill 50 mandatory fields or not.
This really does not say any thing outside you have 30 years+ in IT. What did Jira fix? I find what you said fully false given the context of the statements.
Why has this had adds playing every time I turn my radio on for the last 2 years as well..?
It means I have seen a lot in what concerns bug tracking and planning systems, from home grown cgi scripts with a basic form submit to enterprise deployment platforms like DOORS and ClearQuest, with dedicated IT support teams to just keep them running, and anything else that you can think of in between.
I'm not the previous commenter, but I also have a similar 30+ years experience, and I've used quite a lot of project management software. I've seen Jira used poorly, and used quite efficiently for managing projects. My current job uses Jira and nobody in the company has ever expressed anything negative about Jira, and it's become quite nice to use. But again, I have seen some companies absolutely fail at Jira. YMMV.
I feel like I've had two experiences with it. Probably 10 years ago I was at a medium sized facility and we migrated 10 different ticketing systems to Jira hosted on-site. It was a little awkward, not quite lightweight, but served all the needs and it was amazing to move tickets between departments while maintaining history and the customization of presentation and fields. Confluence was a much nicer wiki system compared to others at the time and it was nice to integrate Jira/Confluence. Search and Filters are something many other systems suck that for both wiki and ticketing.
I left that job and for awhile working at places using different ticketing systems, hearing complaints on places like HN about Jira, and wishing for features those other systems were missing. A few years ago I started at a place that used the cloud hosted Jira at a much smaller company (with an enthusiastic lead who likely tweaked the setup himself). It was a much, much worse experience. It was horribly slow and I guess they had focused on "management" features that made a normal ticket process annoying and confusing (it may have been how it was configured). Reading around I think the horrible performance was because of scaling architecture decisions that Atlassian made, which I heard they've at least acknowledged and are addressing. I gasped when I saw this headline they plan to drop local hosting before getting cloud performance issues behind them.
Man Asana is a real mystery. It has fewer features and worse UX than JIRA. I constantly have trouble clicking on the right thing or having some auto action just do something unexpected. It's coasting on having a nice stylesheet.
Oh, it is very possible. Look at most ITIL software, although it might be hard, they usually don't have screenshots on their websites so the only way to see the product is in the company of a sales person.
I wish we had something even half as good as Jira.
Can you give me some examples of tools that are better? Genuinely curious.
I've used JIRA at multiple workplaces and really enjoy it. I like Github issues and Trello for my personal task/issue tracking but I don't think they're suitable for more complex projects.
I don't think it's possible to say that one project management project is universally better than anything else. What a team needs out of project management tools varies immensely.
In this thread there's people saying that inability to host on prem is an absolute blocker for them, for others they have zero problems with their data being SaaS-hosted. Some people need deep analytics to measure how their team is doing and they can meet deliverables, and some people could care less. Some people have 10+ workflow stages with tons of rules, some people are fine with Todo / in progress / done.
If you have a small team and dont really care about reporting, Trello is probably a great option for you.
If you want reporting, but are willing to work with a somewhat prescribed workflow / process, across a few teams at most, clubhouse or pivotal tracker are great.
If you need full control and flexibility, and are willing to give up some ease of use and speed, JIRA probably is your best bet.
