Jira has some asinine design issues, e.g. the only way you can link a git commit to a ticket is by putting the ticket ID into the commit message, generally has confusing choices for UI, code blocks {code}are annoying to add{code} and don't follow any existing conventions, integration with Confluence sucks, basic functionality is locked away in paid extensions, the list goes on
My biggest complaint is the nonsensical UI. I never know when I click a ticket if I'm going to get a) a split screen view, b) a modal pop up, c) a full screen view, or d) sirens in the distance.
When I click the 'back' button, I never know if I'm a) closing the ticket I have in a split screen, b) going back to the search results, or c) going back to Confluence and losing my search results and wondering how I was in Confluence to begin with.
You'd think this would mean there was a healthy market for native client apps using the JIRA API with a more pleasant UI (as there certainly is for Git, e.g.), but strangely not.
MVP Jira just needs to present a list of stuff to do.
But now it's used like a panopticon of social control where I work.
And I'm thinking I'm not the only one with stuff like Scaled Agile being out there.
Jira doesn't have to be evil. It is intrinsically awful due to that tendency enterprise database products have of growing the flexibility to reimplement various wheels inside of them, poorly. But using it for evil depends on managerial intent.
At my gig, everyone grumbles about Jira, because it sucks; see above. But, we have workflows built primarily around it with various integrations, and it works for coordinating ~200 folks in a starting-to-get-there "Agile" model.
It is actually the worst for the managers - they spend a surprising amount of time noodling around in Jira to feed the workflows. For individual contributors, it works and isn't too much overhead.
From an administration standpoint, it is OK (we run the on-prem version). More stable than some enterprise monstrosities, but the with occasional problem. The plugin-store-thing is annoying - somehow it manages to entice nearly every new business-side user into asking for some random thing, they usually get what they want, and then they sit unused aside from occasionally breaking things.
It must have gotten a lot of stability improvements since I stopped managing jira clusters a few years ago because, from the ops side of things, JIRA was one of our main "make a cron job that restarts tomcat every night" running jokes at multiple companies over the last decade.
I've also had wonderful (/s) experience with the unicorns in Gitlab but that's another tale.
My previous QA manager tried to get the QA/engineering/product management groups to "do agile", heavily because of the agile board functionality added to JIRA. Nobody ever got any training on how to "do agile" but the fact that we were becoming an "agile company" was heavily pushed as the internal narrative, all the way up to execs.
Most of product teams still don't function with any kind of actual agile process. Many try to fake it by endlessly throwing all of their work into the JIRA agile boards, which constantly have sprints rolling over, and are impossible to track any kind of actual velocity with. On our team we just said screw this and went back to getting things done, and tracking things how we wanted to track them.
Don't even get me started on the nightmare that is JIRA TCM, which my company is currently still stuck with for test case management.
Thanks for putting this into words for me. This is exactly how I feel about Jira. Incompetent middle management automates their micromanaging and enforces bad ideas about how their subordinates should do their jobs.
It's also daaaamn slow. And when you paste formatted content into it (at least from vim on a mac), lol, have fun cleaning up your newly-unformatted content.
Presumably after the fact by linking them entirely within Jira. You could mention the commit in the ticket, but that wouldn't make a back-link from the commit if someone's browsing from that direction.
That said, I don't really mind mentioning the ticket in the commit. It's relevant to what one is doing when one makes the commit.
But then I use gerrit at my job, so I don't have room to complain about others' systems.
I think naming the branch and/or the pr title after the jira ticket works too. I think it just needs to contain it, too. My feature branches usually look something like feature/proj-123-short-description. But to be honest, my extended commit descriptions usually contain the ticket number too, so I may be remembering wrong.
Your ticketing system is Turing-complete. I don't remember where I heard this first, but someone at my company (at least supposedly) proved it once.
Jira has managed to grow into such a bloated, complex, incredibly pointless piece of software that I've never met someone who likes it. It's like software design by committee, where every manager involved had some pet project that NEEDED to be included for some asinine reason.
Personal anecdote time: I had my interns start on Jira this summer. Three days in, I realized they weren't "getting" it because of how many damn buttons and knobs there are in the Jira UI. So, I switched all their issues to GitHub issues, and they went from having ~20 tickets in the project to over 100, and began adding, grooming, and closing their own without any input or direction from me. Sure, it's lackluster from an automation perspective, but they developed their own tagging system in the span of a few days and maintained their own board all summer.
I loved Atlassian for BitBucket in college, but when I entered the workforce and was forced to use Jira and Hipchat, I lost all love for them.
From my limited experience, Jira workflow at a company reflects the culture. Maybe jira can be a tool to surface organizational defects and deficiencies...
Honestly, it's just enterprise software. The problems I have with Jira are largely the same problems I have with any software developed exclusively for enterprise customers. Enterprise customers always get what they want, so every piece of enterprise software is a bloated piece of shit that does 900 more things than any sane person should ever want it to do, and nobody gives a shit because the people using the software are rarely the people deciding to buy it.
I think the reality is that the software is not bad. But it is very often customized to fit ridiculous management desire and it then become difficult to use. And it's always simpler to blame the tool than your boss.
I don't think it's any specific event. Many of us are forced to use Jira for everything at work and it has grown from a simple bug tracker to a confusing one-place-for-everything mess.
My favourite part of interning at Google was learning that tickets for Sev0 globe-spanning outages and "the bathroom tiles are too shiny and let you see into other stalls" lived in the same issue tracker. When all you have is a hammer…
