I fucking hate Jira

The main problem with Jira is that it echoes the people who manage it almost perfectly. Crappy Management = Jira Hate, but it's really Manager Hate. I figured this out at my last job. Then I left.

Love the idea, hate the implementation.

How can it be proper to show me the outcome of applying JQL to a db query but refuse to show me the JQL because of an ownership/acl problem.

Want automation? Chain tasks but it has no "this" or "self" so that last thing you made? Have fun reconnecting to it.

So many options but no way to flatten them and define a template with specific ones: some are baked in and some can't be easily specified as important to float to top.

Still no clean way to uplift org to confluence with native support

Just a friendly reminder that all Australian software companies are required to install backdoors at any time at the behest of law enforcement.

I feel like hating on Jira is the pastime that is now passed down from each generation of programmers to the next.

I'm going to stick up for Jira. I certainly don't "love" Jira, though I do think they've made significant improvements with "new Jira" (I think they call them team-managed projects now).

The problem I have with the incessant Jira bitching is that I rarely feel that bitchers have a true understanding for the extreme difficulty of the organization-wide problem Jira is trying to solve. It's always taken on from the position of "well, it didn't make my specific use case easy", but never with an appreciation with some of the complexity that Jira needs to solve for other users at your company, never mind other companies.

Obviously some of the complaints (speed, stability) are very valid, but here's a question I think is just as valid: why don't you think some other company has come along and toppled the Jira crown? Certainly tons of them have tried, and while many have their supporters, they are almost equally likely to have their detractors.

The fact is, building a generic project management and tracking tool is a really difficult, hard problem. In my old age as a programmer I feel like Jira is kind of like our form of government: "Jira is the worst project management tool, except for all the others".

Issue tracking is difficult in general. Any piece of software can be improved or extended in an infinite number of ways. Ideas for improvements are often too eagerly turned into issues, which looks like an easiest way to quickly deal with an idea, but soon issues management becomes an overwhelming activity.

Ooh ooh! Now do git.

I fucking hate JIRA because it encourages people to create and abandon tickets for years, creating an alternate dimension of irrelevant trash that gets in the way of doing things.

If your team has an append-only doctrine to information, like most tech debt mills in the industry have, JIRA will become an extension of that ever increasing pile of unmaintained, disgusting, revolting monolith of excrement that captures every activity in software development.

Nothing can be done about the gigantic monolith of soul crushing chaos therefore we need to embrace it, at the expense of our sanity. Nothing can be done about the hopeless hoarding of irrelevant, duplicate tickets that distract people from work.

JIRA makes it very easy to create new tickets, and much harder to close them. So naturally it becomes a virtual sewer. JIRA is about being able to present a large amount of information to easily impressionable people so that so some people can justify their job.

One word: GUS. IYKYK

This site is courtesy of folks that never used bmc remedy or ivanti heat.

I was similarly shocked when people bitched about confluence. First, do you have a better alternative? Second, do you undrstand the nightmare before jira and confluence?

Jira works well for my organization. I think the simplicity of our setup is the key. We have just 4 issue statuses: Not Started, In Progress, QA, Done… also no restrictions on state transitions. Any status can move to any other status. Each team gets their own project so that they can easily manage their own issue backlog. That’s pretty much it. My team also uses a plug-in for async planning poker which is useful.

I use Jira for 10, 20 minutes a day every day, and it almost always works just fine. Not spectacular or anything, but just fine.

This is not a rant about Jira. This is a rant about doing Agile in the enterprise.

I can rant about Jira, but it's about the horrible UI. It's buggy. The settings system is a mess. It's not intuitive. Even clever people need hand holding to figure out what's going on. Things randomly break for no apparent reason.

Jira does for software engineering what software engineering does for everything else.

After spending some time with Trac, Redmine and IBM ClearCase, I have to say that Jira and MS AzureDevOps are not THAT tragic. However it's a tool targeted at managers, not us, developers. At my previous company one of the KPIs was a number of closed Jira issues. Total BS, needless to say.

Where I work got rid of Jira and switched to some other, ostensibly better(?) competing product. I never had strong opinions about Jira before the switch, but now, after nearly 2 years of a Jira free existence... I miss Jira dearly. The grass is always greener.

Does Jira suck? sure maybe, but my personal experience suggests that everything else sucks equally as bad if not worse, and I know where all the buttons are in Jira.

Yea yea yea...but you still use it because the alternatives while better performing and even more secure...are not as feature rich or as well known.

I feel like this thread comes up in one way or another every few months but in a place where people almost have a hellbent desire to reinvent wheels nobody has reinvented this one in say...go or rails or whatever.

Why? Because for all of the hate jura actually does what it does pretty well when it's working and for most people and most businesses that aren't your homelab it works just fine provided you pay someone to maintain and administer it.

Jira drives me crazy. Why do I need to mark an epic as closed two different ways? Why is it really difficult to see what tickets were in a closed sprint? Why is it so slow or why does it sometimes get in infinite reload loop? Features randomly break like the ability to create tickets from confluence. My company is locked in and I doubt we would change, I just wish Atlassian focused on performance and consistency

I used to hate Jira with all the fervor and more. And then one day I discovered go-jira. Jira command line client written in Golang (hence the name). I wrote a few tiny emacs-lisp wrappers: to read the current backlog; to find a ticket; to list all the tickets assigned to me, etc. And that was all great. I realized - I hated Jira's UI, but its API is quite all right.

At some point, our infrastructure engineers changed something that made it difficult to login to Jira without the web interface (I don't remember what that was exactly - SSO or something...), and I wrote a Puppeteer script that would login to Jira [in a headless browser] and grab the token and use it to authenticate with go-jira.

I thought about cleaning up my elisp experimentation and making a proper Emacs package. Sadly, a few month later COVID hit the US and a bunch of us got laid off. At my new job, we don't use Jira, and I never made the package. And I don't miss Jira. And I don't hate it anymore (I think). But yeah, fuck Jira all the same.

I'll start complaining about JIRA when I find a reasonable alternative for my organization. Until then, I'm just glad we're not using IBM Rational ClearQuest anymore.

What I find the real problem is not JIRA itself, but the fact that most of the time JIRA, is abused up to a point where it's become unusable. The inability or unwillingness (or both?) of the teams I've worked with to structure their work, write good user stories and keep things simple is in my experience the root cause of any shitty JIRA experience I've had. Of course it doesn't help per se that JIRA allows you to do that, but I guess that's not the tool's fault. (You can write bad and good essays with Microsoft Word).

I wanted to make a site very similar to this but for Jenkins. Even bought a domain for it.

And never built the thing.

Some of these made me chuckle.

The two people who drove our company to Jira from other tools:

- One of them resigned soon after the migration.

- The other barely uses it today - in fact, he found other tools for his team because Jira is too cumbersome.

The rest of us are left holding the bag because "Jira is the industry standard".

I've used Jira in my last 3 jobs. I tried to like it, I tried to tolerate it, now I just try to spend as little time using it as possible.

I'm an engineer, I'm a problem solver. I want to add a task, move task to "doing" and then "done" and that's it. But Jira is not created for me. Jira is created for SAFe expert who wants to create workflow so complex nobody understands it. Jira is created for Scrum master who wants to create 25 reports to show their boss how beautifully our burndown looks sprint after sprint. Yes, Jira doesn't force anyone to do this stuff, but it enables it, because Jira is created for process managers, for people who just report things.

But that's not me. Jira is not for me and the best I can do it to use it as little as possible.

Edgy.

Not affiliated but linear.app looking good

I’m starting to wonder if one of the best features of Jira is that it directs all of the developer hatred away from management and toward the task-management software. I’ve worked on projects that used Jira very effectively, so I’m convinced that all of the complainers actually not fully aware of how bad their managers are.

I don't remember Jira as being that bad.

It was mostly the Scrummy culture that seemed like a bit of a waste of time.

I wasn't a big fan of the wysiwyg editor. This seems to address mostly non-technical people. I would always go for "Markdown with preview" (HackMD split-screen, or GitHub issue tabs, or Discord apply-formatting-to-codes).

I also don't like that it isn't an integrated part of a pull request system. GitHub/Gitea issues inter-linking with PRs in the same namespace is... golden. With the right habits, you can become an effective time-traveler.

Meh Jira is OK and people who hate Jira I feel like they really hate any process. I've used other tools and they are mostly the same.

I was one of the Jira admins two jobs ago (in additional to more normal responsibilities of product management & engineering). I finally got back to Jira at my current company and I texted an ex-colleague who was also an admin of the same Jira server (also part-time):

"We're starting the migration to Jira. The next sprint will be entirely in Jira. Honestly, I kind of missed it."

She replied: "That's the real test of a tool. Not 'would you recommend it to a friend?', but 'if you were to start a company, would you use it again?'"

And - I would and did with Jira. If you know the tool well, and your company doesn't have stupid technical workflows and human processes, it's just great. Too many people suffered from using it wrong or suffered from using it with the wrong colleagues.

I suspect issue tracking software is one of those domains where if a piece of code hangs around for long enough it will become a mess due to incentives. Which begs the question: What are y'all's opinion on the open source competitors? Redmine, OpenProject, Apache Bloodhound, and whatever else exists?

Jira is a product which serves two masters - one are development teams which use it to track bugs, tickets, projects, etc. The other one are middle management types who use it for project tracking, reporting to upper management, tracking metrics of different teams (no matter how dubious) etc.

The people who decide which software gets adopted internally generally care about the latter, and thus Jira is selected, and thus Jira grows to their needs - where complexity is often a bonus, and poor day to day performance a minimal concern.

Examples escape me at the moment, but there have honestly been so many times I've hit a wall trying to do - what seem to me like - basic things in JIRA; I couldn't comprehend how such a complex tool could not accommodate them.

And the stuff that can be done is often so comically painful it's mind-blowing. Trying to do something as seemingly simple as create a useful saved search in JIRA is so painful I can't imagine its creation was not an act of sabotage.

Due to the slow loading, I ended up writing some simple Jira API wrapper scripts for submitting bug reports quicker in our systems. I don't see our organisation switching anytime soon.

I used to like JIRA, back when it was only issues/tickets. It was essentially a nice, organized database for humans that you could sift through with precise filters & searches. Bug applies here, workflow describes where handling it is in the pipeline, issue types meant you could filter by "what is this", etc.

I loved using "basic" JIRA, mentioning issue IDs in places to clearly reference a web of "why this bit of code is the way it is", so someone digging into source code can self-answer stuff like "why not do X". (e.g.: because it caused a bug for Y)

Now there's stories, and boards, and sprints, and agile, and the worst part is that they all interact like crap. Why do "tasks" and "stories" exist? Why not the old: New Feature, Bug, Improvement? At least with those you could always see at a glance what that issue is.

Wait until you try Microsoft DevOps boards

I agree that Jira isn't wonderful, but I can't think of any of any task management system that I have used, that I would recommend.

Are GitHub Issues the answer? I have only tried those for small open source projects and not big enterprise projects.

1. I hate Jira, but that isn't the main issue

2. Atlassian has a terrible way of managing feature requests priorities, not unique to them, but they definitely have an impact on many developers, which is why they (deserve and) get the huge shaming

3. I managed to move my company from Bitbucket to GitLab, for many reasons, but the main reason for me was that I simply couldn't manage the settings using their APIs, they have a very weird concept of APIs

4. They send people to fill in tickets and on Uservoice, but rarely do they actually listen to reasonable requests (tickets I still get notifications: Bitbucket user public SSH keys and Archiving projects in Bitbucket)

5. So the issue is not this or that product, it is that Atlassian doesn't have the real end users in mind, just the paying users, the end users can suffer, but not many people will resign over a product used at their company, so nobody really fights the company over it, and thus Atlassian keeps getting paid for terrible products that get new terrible interfaces from time to time

Edit: line spacing

I promise I am not a shill: Our team is on the verge of switching 100% to ClickUp. Are we crazy?

Nobody really loves Jira, and we've gotten our Product, Design, Sales, and Customer Success teams using ClickUp and everyone is really happy so far (especially with the speeeeeeeeeeed. OMG coming from Jira it's a breath of fresh air).

We are chasing the dragoon of having a single tool and everything in one place. So far the eng team seems amenable to give it a shot (although we're going to transition slowly).

Are we crazy?

Not surprised that many are having a bad user experience with Jira. The interface design and usability is atrocious because it's a tool designed by developers. Developers lack the UX training and thinking that's needed to make the tool intuitive and easy to use.

Reminds me of this classic piece of Internet lore: https://www.internetisshit.org

I don't. I use it every day and rarely ever have an issue. It's well integrated with Confluence. There's even some decent CLI tools now (still young but have promise) that mean we could automate away the interface.

All the reviews I see on that site seem to be upset that it might require training, or that their project's admins have made it a nightmare. It's not a nightmare out of the box.

I'm kinda interested in the underlining element from the site. Is that some sort of sentiment analysis tool or is it just a manual "highlight" of the loud parts?

The people hating on JIRA never worked in a shop without it.

If you're old enough to remember before Atlassian came along - just how was it better? Spreadsheets? Trax?

You don't want structured workflow? Don't work in a company with more than 5 people.

"I am an accountant and hate ERP" .. tough shit, for real.

Recall the root cause here. The buyer is not the user. This isn't just true for Jira but the vast majority of enterprise software. Enterprise software is bad, not just Jira, or Confluence or whatever Atlassian product you hate most.

If you are working on enterprise software it's probably bad. Even if your sales and stock are doing well, your software is still probably very frustrating to end users because they have no say in how it's made. The only users who do are admin, governance, legal, or other non-productive user. Their voices get heard and they tell the Director/VP/CTO they are happy and then the software gets renewed and seats expanded. Nowhere in there is the end user who is beating their head against a wall consulted.

Enterprise software is bad and it's worst for people who make software because we know it could be good.

> Also LOL to SourceTree. The git command line commands aren’t exactly rocket science.

This one caught me off guard. I know of no other free GUI for git that's as easy to use or install.

Ironically, most of the stuff seems to be about Confluence. And almost all of the commentary is about bad company workflows and bad company processes and not really about the product itself at all.

JIRA might be OK if the organization on the receiving end of the JIRA queue is OK. JIRA can be no better than that organization.

What I really hate is not Jira itself, it's the company behind it and its engineering practices. Their mediocrity goes beyond Jira.

They've had server-side-rendered features that while slow, contained the slowness to the backend and bundled it into one single slow request - once you waited for that, you had a fully-working page in your browser. Since it was all on the backend, your browser remained responsive while waiting.

Nowadays however there's no longer a single operation to wait for - they've split their pile of shit and offloaded it to your browser. You have to wait for the backend which is slow, but then you also have to wait for megabytes of JS to load & execute in your browser, all while the page moves around and your CPU is pegged at 100%. And God help you if you click on something by accident, as "undoing" that means waiting for another load. To add insult to injury, everything is clickable and triggers some actions, even elements that represent content and that you wouldn't normally expect to be clickable (nor would want to - let's say you wanted to copy the text).

Recently they've added another annoyance - in Bitbucket they've done some changes with regards to diff rendering and obviously have to let you know. They do so via a persistent floating popover in the bottom-left of the screen that you have to manually dismiss and the dismissal status seems to be contained to the browser - if you switch browsers or use private mode you have to deal with it continuously.

My experience with Atlassian products has actually deteriorated despite CPU speeds, browser performance & network connections improving. I used to have a mostly positive opinion of the company 5 years ago but that's no longer the case.

What are some alternatives to JIRA? Also, how much of the hate directed towards JIRA buried resentment towards Agile and other project management paradigms?

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  Atlassian, please don't sue me.

Ticket := (title, description, time, tags, links, *Comment)

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…and everything else is culture or auxiliary tooling. It’s a schema as old as Web 2.0 and it works because most people just want to talk to each other and search for stuff they think or know is there.

100% of the time I just want to announce either what I want to do, or comment on something that’s in progress. The communication and progress tracking are the most important things for keeping me and my team aligned.

What does Jira get wrong? Bureaucracy. Modern day online triplicate form filling disguised as “agile” is still pen pushing.

Pro-forma for bugs is friction — I should be able to file a bug without having to think about how to categorise it. Have another tool / view for nagging me about that, not the create-bug workflow.

Epics / stories / tasks / sprints / bugs: what if I make a task when I wanted a bug? What if made a spike that’s really a task? Why does this matter so much at the top level of the “task” entity — it should just be a tag on a task and nothing more fundamental than that. Let me modify the structure of my task tree myself.

Clutter, of course. Jira has 15 fields of stuff per issue that could just all be tags once we’ve spent the first week shaking out what kind of patterns are appearing in our own team’s workflow.

Projects: why is it a three stage process to move an issue between projects, and why should the issue id change when it moves? What if a piece of work is small but spans two projects? Tagging not taxonomy please.

Jira feels like it was designed for contributors and teams with zero discipline. Tech teams with any kind of serious hiring bar and leadership structure should have zero problem with trusting their staff with being succinct and meaningful with communication, including with how they track tasks. If you need Jira to enforce this, then I feel sorry for you as I pass you by to join a different team who know how to and want to work together without form filling.

I can't take credit for this, but I also don't recall where I heard/read it from:

"Most teams would be better off using a shared spreadsheet for task management than they would using Jira"

Rings true to me to this day.

"<!-- Atlassian, please don't sue me. -->"

part of the hatred has to come from the fact that it's a tool used for hidden micromanagement. Whenever I experienced Jira being introduced into the workflow, human connection vanished, work became laboring and many times the better devs left the team due to lack of autonomy. Who remained were the people who didn't mind to just work and never question, like factory workers of the 1900's.

I don't mind using Jira as a verbose platform which aims to map project state and helps communication BETWEEN all participants, but this is rarely the case, especially with all those pseudo-agile practices that are part of mainstream software development.

Another part of the hatred may come from the fact that it's an overcomplicated tool for a moderately simple task. This complexity is standing in the way most of the time. I just want a simple board for a simple project with simple issues/user stories/whatevers and update their state which gets reflected on the board. For additional features i want to install/write a plugin and that's it. If I need a manual for software in 2022 it's either trash or something far from mainstream (in which case complexity and/or lack of ux might be acceptable).

It appeals to companies that think they only have to pay for one tool. It's awful for agile work but your boss sees the "agile" tickbox and says "fine"

One real benefit of Jira is that almost everything else out there has an importer for Jira. We chose to move from FogBugz to Jira ~3 years ago, in part because we knew if it didn't end up working for us, it would be relatively easy to move to another platform.

Many of the competitors don't fully understand this. They offer importers for Jira, but not an *exporter to* Jira. It's a pretty hard sell to even consider something else if I know I'm going to be stuck there. I wrote the tools for FogBugz to Jira migration and it took a stupid amount of time to do.

FYI: FogBugz provided a Jira exporter but it was abandoned (much like FogBugz as a whole), and was totally unusable for the migration.

I also hate:

The gray text. Cmon, we have a roomful of ppl and 1 monitor.

Subtasks fuck up the whole layout. And appear above everything.

Suggestions that only include the 1st N values from a list. You have to know what youre searching for.

Can't preview fakeSprint until it's started.

No easily-available view of each developer's workload.

All the confluence hate speaks to my soul. It's where ideas go to die. If you want to start a successful internal project and someone tells you to start documenting your ideas there, you might as well just move on to something else. Whatever you were going to do is already dead. It's just so ignorable. Nobody gives a shit about a confluence doc. Write up your thoughts and send it as an email to your boss, your peers, whoever. That demands a response and you'll get one, for good or ill! Getting outright rejected is still better than the sad withering away that is putting it into confluence. Anyways, what's the most common signal that people hate confluence? When they use it as a link repository to docs stored elsewhere.

The real problem with Jira is that every company adopts it without sufficient support. It needs dedicated admins. You can't just let every single team YOLO things.

Unfortunately, what happens is a company adopts it from the start, and then it grows into an impossible-to-use forest where there's no meaningful way to bring things back to actually usable, and everyone is miserable.

The worst thing about jira is it leaves the door open for confluence which is the actual worst thing.

In my experience, Jira is the dog that begins to resemble its owner. If you are working in a toxic, dysfunctional organization, Jira will reflect that:

- Giant forms with dozens upon dozens of nonsensical fields (preferably with abbreviations as names, like "IFE App.") half of which are required so you just stuff random words in them to make it shut up

- Thousands of tickets that would probably take 30+ software devs 100+ years to implement

- Can't find your project because your project's name is nonsense (also preferably with abbreviations)

- Task descriptions have hundreds of words of nonsensical boilerplate but don't actually say anything at all

- 50 different ways each to say "Finished", "Started" or "Abandoned"

- Workflow state transitions reminiscient of the outdoor maze in The Shining (crazy man with axe optional)

Historically JIRA has toed the line of being minimally acceptable to keep teams from transitioning to competitors, but their recent outage has left such a sour impression of their engineering and operations processes that they have finally crossed the line from minimally acceptable to completely unacceptable.

We're currently evaluating alternatives and what a transition plan may look like for ~5k issues with attachments/comments/mockups etc. Any products out there with a built-in JIRA migration tool?

I've probably said this before here but I just don't see what was wrong with Bugzilla. We spent years getting it honed to suit a good bug lifecycle model. Everything since has been fubar one way or another.

All the content on this site are symptoms of not using Jira properly.

That is all.

I don’t hate Jira. I strongly dislike working with people who love it. From https://honeypot.net/post/jira-is-a-code-smell/ :

> A useful task manager will be somewhat opinionated. It will almost, but not quite, do what everyone wants, and will annoy everyone equally with the few things they think it does wrong. A tar pit of a task manager will claim to be everything to everyone after customization, meaning that a few people will think it's heavenly and everyone else will despise it with the heat of a thousand suns.

Jira is bad, but the worst part about it is that it makes it non-trivially more likely you'll also be using Confluence, which is an absolute blight upon the software landscape.

Jira isn't perfect, but it fit our agency's needs well enough and the short comings haven't been bad enough to cause us to rethink it.

The truth is that there's very few project management tools out there that offer the flexibility to run individual projects the way an individual team wants to. When you're an agency with hundreds of projects in the system, that's invaluable. I researched 2-3 dozen competitors to find a better solution and there just wasn't. Other than maybe Redmine and its derivatives, which the team basically dismissed for being too outdated.

ETA: I should clarify that I'm using Jira Cloud and we don't have many issues with speed (at least today, anyway. Maybe in a few years, who knows)

https://shortcut.com/ is your savior. Try it.

OK, so what don't I like about Jira?

1. It's extremely slow.

2. It's difficult to predict the effect of making any kind of change.

3. The permissions system is so convoluted, I can be the admin of a board, and yet not have permission to see a ticket on it.

4. It relegates the conversation to a second-class UI element, when this is the most important part of any project management system.

5. Trying to operate on a bunch of tickets all at the same time (e.g. move all tickets in this status into some other status) requires a lot of time.

6. Every Jira setup is so different, trying to compare a piece of work from one area of the organisation to a similar piece of work elsewhere is useless.

7. The UI is extremely buggy. I can add a mandatory field to a ticket, then when I try to use a shortcut to create a new ticket, it won't work because I can't fill out that mandatory field.

8. There are random side-effects when one person does something on one bit of the system, and VOILA everybody's workflow is broken, with no obvious warning that would happen.

I'm fine with Jira now. As long as I don't have to use it that much. I agree about conversation being a second class citizen. I wish I could get integration with my mac notification system more easily. But the positive is that I can do a screen recording and drag and drop that video straight into a comment which is cool

I don't really get the hate to be honest. Maybe it's just me, but our DevOps team seems to have squeezed the best out of Jira. They organized the workflow very well, the Bitbucket Integration is seemless and I can easily get to the builds of my current issue and see what happens there. The only gripe I have about Atlassian suite is confluence. It's a mess.

I think it really depends on how Jira and the overall workflow is taken care of. For our part, it has been a pretty good experience and the DevOps team used the APIs pretty well and wrote their own tools.

To be honest, I don't have used many other tools, but it seems like our company has made a good choice in configuring the whole system "just right".

Wait until you use notion. I’ve been forced to use it for the last year, and I miss jira. I never thought I’d say this, but I really do miss it.

Just be glad you don't have to use VersionOne.

Anyone who's coped with VersionOne will nope back to Jira in a hot second.

A friend once said, "You can't software your way out of an organizational problem."

The complaints on the site generally criticize Jira from a technical standpoint, but it's important to realize that every "technical" shortcoming is based on a perceived organizational need: you never need the feature just for the feature itself.

So yeah, Jira is far from my favorite software -- it's bloated, slow, and embodies many product choices that make no sense to me -- but it's also possible to hate it because it doesn't support <obscure feature X> in exactly the way your organization has been doing it since you were working with spreadsheets, and that's not Jira's fault.

Shout out to the programme manager at my old company. His attitude was "Use jira in the way that works for you". He could set up and modify workflows for me, he had good useful advice, and in total I probably spent 20 minutes a week dealing with jira. Which as a manager of a decent sized team I think is fairly good. As one of the comments on that site said "I'd rather use trello" I disagree, it was much better for having multiple views on things and by standardising across the company it was much easier to just get an informal view on what other teams were doing.

Most of the problems with jira are the people using it.

So say we all

My Jira experience improved a lot when I wrote a tool that parses and serves the content of HTTP Archive files - not having to wait for all those panels, menus etc. was a huge boon, even if this view was necessarily read-only.

Also I'm pretty sure Jira saved my friend's marriage because he used the free version to coordinate finishing up their house.

Lastly while JQL has limited capabilities, it's better than having a bunch of API endpoints.

That being said it still baffles me how badly some UI elements are done there. Especially the menus would benefit greatly from some caching or preloading.

Ripe for disruption.

JIRA is the definition of building everything for everybody and let them customize it, it's got complex and to a point highly productive engineers don't want it anymore, it's a OVERKILL!

There are two kinds of programmers: those who hate Jira, and those with Stockholm syndrome.

It depends on how it is used. As a bug tracker it is perfectly adequate, and I prefer having all of the information connected to a given issue in one place. It took us some time to get the flows right, but what we have now seems to work well enough. It is certainly better than the crap system we had before we adopted Jira, though that isn't saying much.

Edit: weird that an honest description of personal experience with Jira was downvoted to zero.

These people are pampered brats. Try being forced to document all your time and projects in Rally or Version1. You will beg to get Jira back. Software “engineers” are such divas. “I don’t play other people’s song.” As if they are some kind of celebrity.

Its like you can't be fired for buying Microsoft (as an IT purchase decision). You can't be fired for buying JIRA. JIRA makes everything, the most broken or dodgy processes look respectable. It keeps Managers and scrum masters busy. They have a toy to play with, and why not?, why should only devs have toys. I'm not saying I hate JIRA, or that it doesn't work. Its just that sometimes the tail wags the dog.

I've seen absolutely ridiculous workflows on Jira. Things like - "i'm gonna make the most ridiculous workflow out of spite and boredom just to troll you."

From that perspective it's easy to hate it, but you hate the actual use of the tool not the tool itself.

Currently i enjoy more sane use of it. Simple workflow. You get in, read the ticket, clicky a button, get out. Slowness in that regard is very tolerable.

Single letter hotkeys are pretty bad. If it's not an input field you've focused but the page itself, you might assign the ticket to yourself and set it to some crazy state before you realize the focus is all wrong. Ask me how I know...

Ex project manager (few years Jira experience with local and overseas teams).

I believe a lot of the hate comes from the input rather than the software; aka what others are putting in. If you've got a really bad PM/BA your experience with the platform is going to be negative.

As far as everything else what are the alternatives? Most other platforms are horrible or lacking features.

I watched Margin Call. The huddling that goes on between the higher ups and the peons when the chips are down is what JIRA does for companies every day. If the firm in that movie had been using JIRA (and it it were real life and not a movie); I believe they would have had daily, much better communications and coordination and could have avoided the whole scenario the movie is about. Spoiler alert, Spacey's character's dog would still have died.

The poorly optimized performance of JIRA almost makes me believe they don't even use their own product. Perhaps performance is on the backlog of the backlog.

Software like Jira and Fauxgile processes like Scrum feed off and mutually reinforce each other.

Not going to read this rant because of time. But let me guess. Jira is a giant time waster. My main problem with Jira though is that it takes a lot of effort to configure it in good way. Jira is a piece of software that comes with plain horrible defaults.

Not using Jira is a red flag for me, and I won't work for any company that doesn't use Jira. The reason is, Jira is so standard at this point, if a team uses a non-Jira product, they must have an overly powerful CTO or team lead who rules with an iron fist. Sure, it sucks, but working under such conditions is worse.

Problem, is mostly with bad PMs, POs, Scrum masters and all the other potato heads, not Jira itself.

My org is using an in-house solution. Jira is the object of our wet dreams.

Problem with Jira: Its customers are not its users.

My past managers had a great time with Jira. But if I have to migrate or create tasks in Jira the only efficient and effective way I have found is paying for a desktop license. It doesn't suck -- that much.

Otherwise, it is a destroyer of productivity for its users. It is also a source of lock in, that is usually unnecessary.

I find Github projects to cover most if not all of the needs, for instance, in an efficient manner. Most managers though also don't/shouldn't care about the micro tasks of a project, so an excel sheet has done that job.

The consequence of who the Jira customer is, is its lack of efficiency and chaos. It is too customizable and fails to preserve any form of usability to offer that customizability. I have seen Managers being joyful of achieving the "ultimate Jira," only for everyone in the team to have to learn to abide by the new process, only so that 1-2 people can keep track of tasks and velocity without hitting github or gitlab.

You get great statistics, but if I have to spend 1/5 of my workweek on petting Jira, you lose that.

Managers love Jira, that is why it keeps coming up. You need one new manager to come in, say they know Jira, and using it will solve all of the company's velocity issues, to end up with people writing articles of how they hate Jira.

I came from Apple (and their excellent Radar issue tracking tool) to a company that uses Jira.

Jira is the worst. I routinely lose data in jira, like saving errors. Dragging and dropping attachments sometimes causes the page to crash and reload. Everything in the UI moves around or obscured behind some tabs. I want to be able to file a network of issues all at once, something Radar did great. Jira workflows are much to complicated, and their flexibility just increases your administrative hell. I can go on and on.

Thankfully my company built its own internal tool similar to Jira. Unfortunately this is not the case for other companies or smaller companies since it can be cost-prohibitive.

Jira's web interface I can live with. I've internalized the workaround for the UI bugs and I've learned to live with the slowness. Sure it reflects all the worst aspects of your organizations structure and process but that's not really it's fault.

What is it's fault is their REST API. In theory it's a well architected API. Follows REST principles. You can tell they read the whitepaper. But you have to jump through a ton of hoops to get any data beyond surface details.

Example: Want to find what epic a User Story is part of? It's a custom field. Which one? depends on how your instance has evolved over time. You'll have to scan through all the fields to find the field id.

This is what happens when an API isn't designed to fulfill a particular need but instead is meant to be infinitely customizable. Ergonomic APIs are impossible.

I thought I hated jira, then I joined a company that uses Pivotal tracker.

Good. I’d also like one of these but with Citrix.

I'm sometimes kind of surprised at how often I see people say they don't mind it. It's by far the tool I like the least out of everything I've used at any job I've ever been in.

if you hate jira try Trello, "the baby version of jira"

Jira is the worst possible choice, except for all the others.

Where is dark mode???

I read some of those rants and almost 50% of them were not rants but people ignorant of features and how they work getting angry. I’m not saying they deserve to be angry, but if a passionate rant can be dismissed by a ”you’re holding it wrong” it isn’t really a rant.

There are tons of real issues like ages old bugs or weird design decisions years ago that make something that feels very sane feel impossible to deliver.

All in all my point is that most of these rants are against knowledge of features/design and misuse by colleagues.

Jira was supposed to help us do the work, not become the work.

We have at least three people employed who's sole responsibility is to pester people about ticket status, apply bulk changes in Jira, define conventions, and ultimately make life harder for individual teams who wanna follow their own processes. As an EM, my higher-ups would rather have me ensuring ticket status is perfect to the T instead of pairing with and assisting my engineers.

I kid you not, we have directors of engineering who spend half their working day making bump/nudge comments on tickets.

I'm curious what other people's thoughts are when comparing CA Agile Central (formerly known as Rally) to Jira. Which do you like more and why?

I fucking hate software.

We’re in the midsts of a move to JIRA, and my own previous experiences with it are >10 years old at this point so I assume it to be a different experience and I’m willing to give it a shot. I made a glib JIRA hate comment to a very experienced friend and he retorted with this quip which I found amusing and suspect is probably very accurate:

“There’s only two types of people that hate JIRA: 1) those that haven’t tried any of the alternatives or 2) those that didn’t have a dedicated team to configure and maintain JIRA for them”

I think Jira development is secretly supported by Microsoft to make sure there's always at least one enterprise software product that developers hate more than Windows

I hate BitBucket more!

What I had figured in this past ~10 years since working with Jira: it is not this software that made my life hard but the project managers, administrators etc. who are misusing it.

E.g creating lots of fields with overlapping meaning. Creating very basic/lame status-flows but not enforcing it. Or creating very hard to follow status flows. Or misreading the data from tickets status history. Or never trying to learn how to use it but find the guy at (my) table, to create the queries, dashboards etc. (and then misuse them). Or the devs who were complaining about missing info but creating one-liner comments as well (if at all). Or the devs who are not searching for duplicates, similar issues and/or link them so it can be tracked.

It is far from perfect, and JQL is so far from being intuitive, but I can live with it - until there is a better alternative that is capable AND I have to use that.

Jira is practically called out in the phoenix project. Their solution?

1. Don’t use it

2. Do a manual process

3. Get buy in and deliver actual value

4. Run into scalability issues

5. Now automate which could be Jira but now you know what value your process is achieving

6. Don’t let Jira be the end in itself. Focus on the value of the process and tune that

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/17255186-the-phoenix-...

Jira is a great example how a slow application can frustrate users. Most of my complaints went away after upgrading my broadband over 50Mb and switching away from wifi to minimise request latency and throughout.

Yes that should be ridiculous.

I’ve used it at three companies and thought it was fine. Maybe my tastes aren’t refined enough or something but I thought it was fine.

Confluence is terrible but that’s a different product.

The problems with Jira can be extended to the rest of Atlassian and all of their offerings. Their company culture is very much one of "we're right, no matter how many people bring up the same issues." Things like:

- Shoving political messaging into git terminal messages - Renaming "blame" to something else without notifying the userbase ("annotate"? It's been a while) because, despite "blame" being a git term, its usage hurt someone's feelings (yes, seriously, even though no proof or elaboration has ever been provided) - Not fixing a bug for 6+ years where, if someone's typing a comment and accidentally hit the escape key, the entire post gets deleted with no option to recover it (I'm not sure if this ever actually was resolved)

That said, for a while, Jira had a lot of good things going for it. But by now, enough competitors have popped up with similar offerings that are easier to use without all of the unnecessary self-importance buried within it.

For a Jira alternative specifically, I've been using Linear.app for the last 8 months and enjoying it overall

I tried giving atlassian some feedback recently when they asked for it (via email). Unfortunately the very end of their survey had some fancy widget to upload a recording (which was absolutely unnecessary). The widget didn't load, and because of that the form didn't allow a submission - so I didn't bother figuring out how to give them my feedback, even after i had done a 3 page survey.

I hope it was a widespread issue.

I wish the comments were more specific about which features they don’t like.

For me a particularly frustrating aspect is the way the UI moves around a lot. I’m quite anxious to click anything until all the loading spinners have stopped in case I click the wrong thing. Then I could be taken to a page or feature I’ve never seen before.

Also it’s really annoying when I try to copy something from a ticket description but it starts editing the whole description field.

EDIT - I'd also like to add that as a developer, once I finish my ticket I assign it to a QA. Then I can never get back to the ticket. I'd like a really easy way to see all of the tickets I've ever completed. But completed tickets aren't assigned to me, they're assigned to QA.

Came to the comments hoping to find some solid Jira alternatives "the community" recommends. Sadly not the case. Instead this is my take-away:

* Jira sucks big time, and people hate it.

* There are no other tools that do what jira does, that doesn't also suck.

* After trying Jira alternatives that suck worse, folks move away from the Jira sucks camp to no-longer minding using Jira.

You should try VersionOne :) That tool made me appreciate JIRA.

Jira is bloated. Full stop.

It feels like there isn't a strong unified product vision for Jira. It's just trying to solve everything. It's all "just configurable." That likely is a selling point into Enterprises who need some level of flexibility.

But for a lot of situations, people just want something that works well out of the box.

I often wonder what the 37signals guys would do if they ever decided to tackle this problem. They don't always hit the mark, but I give them a lot of credit for self-curating and having a strong product vision for what they ship.

Is there a way (setting?) to completely disable keyboard shortcuts (hotkeys) on Jira sites?

Once a JIRA shop, we moved everything to Asana years ago, after trying literally everything else. Our design team just could not get on board with JIRA. It was too much "work", in their words, to track their efforts.

Asana seems to be a good balance between the depth of data developers want to track and the high-level task management every other team wants.

Jira should just start configured out of the box to look and work like Trello.

I used to hate Jira, and then, I had to use Asana...

To everyone asking "what else works better," I remember using Product Studio at Microsoft, which was a thin client over an SQL database. It had some flexibility problems, but it was so, so fast. It's the only ticket management system I've ever used that didn't feel like it was getting in the way. Unfortunately, about 10 years ago Microsoft chose to modernize/dogfood on Team Foundation Server, which was just awful, probably worse than JIRA. I have no idea what they're using nowadays.

I wonder if the performance we got out of Product Studio had more to do with having a locally hosted instance, vs. running in the cloud, and I wonder if teams that host their own JIRA/Confluence/Bitbucket servers have a better experience. I do find that one of the major gripes people have with planning tools is that they break flow, and I wonder how much of that comes just from the amount of stamina required to maintain focus while waiting for all the spinners.

Jira need to fix their loading times

Part of our company started using Click-up. If JIRA is really bad, Click-up is levels worse than it. I hate JIRA too, but maybe there is no a better thing out there?

I fucking do not hate Jira. Cause I do not use it.

I like Jira because it hides the crap I don't want to do or think about in this thing called the backlog, which I can point to as a "see, it is something in the works but we don't have enough resources" thing, and then I can focus on the things I need/want to do by putting them in the Will Do Soon column.

People, have you _used_ enterprise software? Jira is the first piece of enterprise software I've ever used that I _don't_ hate! Well, if Bugzilla counts, then I don't hate that either.

But in the past I've been exposed to BMC's products, which were, at least when I was exposed to them 10 years, horrible. And going further back, Lotus Notes, which even in the early aughts wasn't up to basic standards of UI from the 1980s.

Could Jira be better? Sure. But I think a lot of the complaints about Jira might only be relevant to the way their instance of Jira happens to be set up. Setting up a proper workflow that meets the demands of the organization is not an easy thing to do.

Now, I've never administered Jira, and maybe that's not good, but as someone who's used it for about 10 years, I'm fine with it.

The day I needed to bookmark the url to manage my options list because I couldn’t get to it intuitively due to probably be being wrong (like 90% of their current customer base I guess) was when it started to go seriously south for me.

Ok, it's slow, and navigation sucks, and lots of other things. Workflows are easy to get out of hand, but as long as you keep your workflows lean/tame/flexible, it's mostly "good enough". I suspect a sizable portion of the "Jira sucks" crowd are under the thumb of a maniacal administrator creating intense workflows.

That said, which competitor has a visual workflow editor, to which I can add custom statuses/transitions, which are applied based on various conditions/validations? And custom screen/field configurations? And custom resolutions? And time tracking? And apply security/permission schemes across all these things?

I get it, Jira sucks, I agree, but what's the go-to competitor?

Jira is as good or bad as you configure it to be. It's a tool. We long ago learned how to use JavaScript effectively despite its numerous flaws. If you're at an organization where you have to use Jira, surely you can find a way to make it work.

That said, it's certainly not the Right Answer for everyone. But unilaterally hating on it is just kinda childish.

Maybe the web is/was shit for this kind of application which has caused it to become the beast it is.

Gitlab Enterprise.

It's _far_ from perfect, but Gitlab Issues is a damn sight better than JIRA IMHO...