Dan Luu
patreon
What's so bad about JIRA?
🕑 Added 2018-12-09 20:43:53 +0000 UTC JIRA seems like some of the most hated software used by programmers. Right now, there's an article that's #1 on HN that's an anti-JIRA rant. Maybe half-ish of the comments agree that JIRA is terrible.I've been using JIRA recently. I don't love it, and it has some annoying UX bugs, but it seems pretty decent? If I had to rank the bug trackers I've used, I think the ranking would be:
1. Centaur homegrown bug tracker (written by one person in a weekend)
2. JIRA
3. Bugzilla
4. Github
5. Internal Google bug tracker
6. FogBugz
Neither team I was on at MS used a bug tracker (!!!), so I used github for the open source project I worked on and kept a private list for the closed source team. I'd rate keeping a list in a text document as better than FogBugz, but worse than any other "real" bug tracker I've used.
Anyway, JIRA doesn't seem so bad? A lot of companies and/or teams seem to want to impose a lot of structure around the use of JIRA and maybe that structure isn't so great, but if you ignore that and just use it as a bug tracker, it has some nice features and the performance is pretty good for a webapp bug tracker (although still much worse than the command line tracker we used at Centaur).
Comments
(Patreon: your commenting system is terrible.) Came across this while reading through the backlog after signing up, and I think the answer is actually something like this: 1. *All* of those are pretty bad, so the fact that Jira does indeed suck less than the others doesn't actually tell you much about the experience of using it. It's somewhat incredible to me just *how* slow and hard-to-use most of these tools have consistently been, such that Jira has historically been the least bad option of the set (and it has, for at least a decade!). The tool itself is and has always been thoroughly *mediocre* from a UX and performance POV, but in a field where the competition has generally been as bad or (sometimes much) worse 2. Most developers don't experience Jira as a tool *they* can tune to their own wants and needs. Instead, they experience it as a tool tuned for the wants and needs of PMs and EMs. Combine that with the fact that Jira instances are usually shared across a whole company and this compounds the slowness (400 fields! on every! single! ticket!) *and* it sits perfectly in a spot to work as a synecdoche for *other* frustrations with process.
I stand by this post for the version of JIRA I was using at the time, but the new version of JIRA is really quite bad. Not as bad as FogBugz, but probably worse than anything else on the list!
