For those complaining about Jira... I used to be one of you. After changing jobs and using several alternatives, I am begging to be back on Jira. Manage Engine is currently the bane of my existence.
I also wonder if people complaining about Jira are still on Jira Server. Jira Cloud is a much nicer experience. Certainly not perfect, but I've yet to see an actual viable alternative (once worked someplace that tried to move all project management to Gitlab... 🤮).
Cloud is way worse than server in my experience. Server was only bad because it was usually configured poorly and IT would never give admins to anyone who actually needed it. Cloud is bad because it's slow as hell and can't be configured correctly because the ability to configure it correctly has been sitting in "Gathering Interest" on Atlassian's issue tracker for two years despite thousands of votes and comments.
I worked at a engineering focused contract where we moved all our project management to gitlab and it saved so much time for everyone. Only hard part was collating data up to management in a way they could understand but I was happy to spend a few hours every few months to do that than using jira in any capacity
We had to change to Jira Cloud. (Vendor lock-in, mainly because of time-tracking appendix tools of that.) It's horrendeous. UI and UX is horrendeous. The DOM is horrendeous. Performance is horrendeous.
My CSS Hacks to fix the UI to a degree I can reasonably work with it are a lot more work now with the generated DOM class and ids. Sometimes they at least have test IDs which can be used.
Some things, like the board component quick filter, are not even available anymore.
The interactivity functionality is irritating and annoying most of the time.
The browser extension we use further fucking up doesn't help either of course.
Don't even get me started on Confluence. Which can't even find pages when I type the exact page title, or ranks them low. And editing tables is a hassle beyond belief now that responsive tables (self-sizing) are gone. It's wasteful on space too of course, with huge spacing.
Honestly 95% of Jira complaints are because people have crap workflows configured. Out of the box Jira is pretty terrible but it's very customisable and you need to adjust it to suit your needs - and they have to be your needs and workflows.
That being said, there's that last 5% that Jira just gets in the way. If anyone has ever had multiple teams working on a single product, Jira is very prescribed about how you're supposed to structure that and If you don't, it's a pain.
I'd suggest that 95% of Jira complaints are actually about corporate culture which is felt most keenly through asshole PMs trying to micromanage you through a ticketing system. It's mostly a fine piece of software - if you have a certified wizard to configure it it can be great... if you have a dummy it's going to be barely usable - but you can say the same thing about github issue tracking.
The unfortunate thing is that the teams most likely to use Jira are also the teams I most likely never want to work on.
Right, the entire issue is that it basically acts as a massive layer of insulation between reality and bad management. The whole thing is like a fucking paradox - any time you make a change to workflows or procedures there's this stupid period where you need to "wait for buy in" where it doesn't matter how outwardly idiotic the change is, you can't actually call it obviously fucking stupid for like several weeks, or you are seen as being contrarian, or causing trouble. And the real bullshit is that the "better" the tools are, the more this effect is amplified. So as an engineer, I have paradoxically come to appreciate bad management tools simply because when someone does something stupid with them, I can call it out more easily.
The issue is more that all of these planning tools enable bad managers to implement bad management practices and workflows without any actual tracking for what constitutes bad management. Almost without fail, every manager I've worked with who is very attached to these products ends up using them for the sake of using them. And then when that produces shit results it's all about "engineering buy in" and "process learning curves" and they end up doing real damage to products before someone notices that Jira actions are not correlated with protective management.
The biggest issue is that good, effective management tools actually end up being a double edged sword because of how they shield bad managers the illusion of legitimacy.
We switched to a different tool that's developed by the same company I work for, and there has been nonstop complaining about it ever since. Jira might not be the best tool, but it's better than the alternatives by miles.
Also technical shit posting on Confluence is just the best.
(I don't like Atlassian, I just want to go back to Jira)
What the? I thought Manage Engine was mainly for MDM. If they crammed an ITSM in there, there's no way it's as robust as software that was built for it.
All my homies hate agile, Jira, scrum, kanban, etc.
In truth none of these items are inherently wrong - what's wrong is leadership picking up new tools and adopting management structures expecting them to solve fundamental organizational issues.
Instead they only serve to magnify the outcomes of your existing corporate culture.
It's funny that "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" is the first of the tenets of agile and the most ignored. I think most people's frustrations with agile are from people worrying too much about processes and tools.
I think you hit the main issue right there. Devs don't hate the tool, they hate that the tool doesn't solve the issue. Like trying to drill a hole with a screw and a hammer.
Strong agree! It drives me crazy how much hate scrum agile gets because when it's implemented intelligently I've found it really helps align everyone's expectations (I'm a dev)
I use Teams and Jira, and I can't even imagine the amount of wasted time when I click anything in either of them and nothing happens for a good while, just waiting around.
I hate jira because it slots your work stupidly by the management, or so I feel it.
A manager usually works with time slots, say 8 a day (or whatever), they are all mostly disconnected, like do meeting with A, go to standup of team B, PMD for dev C etc etc. Dev isn't like that but everyone seems to start thinking it is: how many "items" was finalised last "sprint" etc and other stupid metrics.
Am I alone here or is there even worse things with jira in your opinions?
Now imagine a very large company implementing that shit software for other kinds of engineering projects! Yey! Lot's of great engineers have quit because of it.
Jira, we'll brain drain your company and make it seem more productive!
Next thing you know....well the guy who understood that is no longer here. But we can take our best guess.... should the door pop inward or outward during a flight?
They have a predatory business model. "Hey we're cheaper than the competition". Once you're soaking in it and need features, they have options but it'll cost you. I reckon they have slick sales people who know how to pander to the egos of middle management as well. You know ... The people who don't actually have to use the tool but sure like to feel like they somehow matter.
Seriously though - JIRA isn't always a massive pain in the ass. It's just the way it's used that sucks. Workflow restrictions so devs can't move tickets from testing back to in progress, dozens of mandatory fields, etc.
When your tools start dictating your workflow rather than the other way around then it's time to switch tools.
Idk man, better than a post it Kanban... which is where I came from.
If Jira is shit, it's not Jira, it's your Manager. It takes some effort to learn and use, but when it's set up and maintained, it helps a lot, especially for Virtual Teams.
Edit: But their Ai is shit. They gave it for free and now want to charge money for it. Nah bro, not for that retard.
Yeah, jira is going alright for us at work, but there are a lot of supporting people maintaining it and prioritizing things in meetings that we engineers don’t have to attend.
Teams and the entire Office-Package is pure pain on Linux. We have mixed OS (based on preference) but we all use Office and it's a dread for our SW-Department. =[
Here's my Jira experience. MS shop, have a programming department, but I'm not in programming and programming isn't our core product.
Need something that requires a Jira request. I use MS Edge because that's what IT recommends and it's not my computer. The only putative upside is that it knows who I'm logged in as. I click on the link for Jira, it asks me if I want to sign in with my account, which I assume is the MS one since it has the right email/user for it. It tells me that's the wrong one. Would I like to use my Atlassian account? Sure, let's use the same email. Whoops, you don't have an Atlassian account, but there's an MS account for your company. Do you want to use that, or something from the usual list of places that will log you in (Google, Facebook, MS)? Note that the MS option is only included in the list of third-party logins even though it knows my company has MS logins setup. So I click the MS option, and it may or may not ask for my password, because I'm already logged in via Edge, but it will certainly do my 2FA. And now I'm finally able to tell IT what is bothering me, and they wonder why people always seem frustrated.
So, now that I've gone through that once, I can save a single click by not choosing the Atlassian account option and go directly to signing in with a third party. I can only assume this is supposed to be the streamlined process.
Just do a lightweigt process in a few docs and Excel, and meet in person often enough that you know what folks are doing. That's SOOOO much better and more natural for getting real work done. Great ideas die in JIRA among endless planning meetings and premature decomposition and estimates.
JIRA is fine as long as you forego using fucking align. Goddamn fucking align is a the biggest waste of upsell that they catch product managers in ever.
That's actually reassuring to hear. Aside from Chilli, it's the only program I've ever used (12 years going). I've got teamates pushing for changes but jira comes at a high cost. Redmine may look old and I hate that it's written on ruby, but it's free and with some plugins it's been able to suite our needs well.
I use both Redmine and Jira at work. I don't know if we're using an older version but Redmine feels like something from 2001. Even the API for it is unpleasant.
We've been using Linear in my latest company and it is actually quite good. No bullshit fast UI, boards, issues linking with Git, a support that can take a feature request that is often implemented in a week or two after asking it.
While I don’t like the main Jira software, the Jira Service Management part is actually kind of decent for my needs. It basically allows me to create a help desk for my small business, where they can report issues and I can view them in the Jira app. It’s somewhat limited on the free tier, only allowing 3 agents, but it works plenty fine for my use case.
As for the actual Jira software, I wouldn’t use it, since my workflow needs don’t require it.