this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2024
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I’m a dev and have not heard good things but I’m hoping the negative reputation is an exaggeration.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

There are a million ways to use jira and most of them suck. Still, it's possible for jira to be a great tool as long as you focus on the question "what problem is this new workflow solving?"

Jira can be an excellent tool for communication and managing workload expectations

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

It will be a little annoying to use at first, then pretty helpful because it is full-featured and keeps track of things you need to know, then over the next 1-2 years your managers will slowly start using its stats to judge everything you do, and over the next 2-3 years your company will slowly grow a class of project managers who exist to add more convoluted processes that you have to follow on Jira before doing anything.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago

This, but it took the company I work for 5 years to hire a product manager so the timeline is really stretched out for me

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

This isn't even the end stage

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Not sure why you spelled it that way but gyros are succulent greek dishes that you can enjoy with almost any kind of condiment. Think your sales will go up if they are used at work to make meals, congrats

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Greek? Thought gyros were Turkish

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago

Döner is Turkish

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 weeks ago

i mean it really is about how its utilised and what addons are used. I seen it go from a nice bugreporting and project management tool to a glorified timetracker.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 weeks ago

It really depends on how your board owner configures it. Jira can do nearly nothing or it can have an immense amount of restrictions and automation and notifications. It's up to the board owner how much it helps you work vs how much it gets in the way of your work. If there's something you think you'd like it to do, find your jira admin or expert and ask them....it probably can, if the admin knows how to make it.

The only thing I can guarantee with Jira is that the moment you get used to a workflow or a process, someone, including and especially atlasian, will change it. Then you get to learn it all over again. So look forward to that.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I don't think it will really make much difference. Ive been on dev teams who use Jira, and even do all of the agile ceremonies, but are still super chill. If you're management is ok now it will probably stay that way.

Also most devs seem to be illiterate and can't write more than 3 sentences at a time. So when you write stories you can get tons of praise from everyone just be writing a couple of paragraphs that actually describe the problem.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

most devs seem to be illiterate and can't write more than 3 sentences at a time

This never ceases to baffle me. In 15 years, I have met exactly one dev who knows how to write more than two words in a commit log message or an issue sign-off narrative, but he turns into full-on Herman fucking Melville.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

what tracker are you using now? Jira is better than Trello for large projects, and better than Hansoft because it has a clearer workflow.

Trello is much better for small projects with only a few developers though.

but that's just, like, my opinion. I've worked with Jira for almost 10 years so I'm biased.

if there is agile brainrot in your organization, expect it to continue, I'd say. if you already have people hassling you about story points and epics now, it'll be about the same. if not - buckle up, they might get encouraged.

producers and other project people love Jira but so does QA, and as a dev I want QA to thrive so I'll take the good with the bad.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

if not - buckle up, they might get encouraged

This is what I’m worried about. And we are our own QA so that advantage isn’t super helpful unfortunately.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Maybe try to get them to use the simple Kanban workflow to get started, and test out adding features slowly (but never let them by rallying the workers to your cause)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

We use Jira at my job. It sucks because time management suck but other than that it is a decent tool for structuring the tasks in a project. It all depends on how your project management uses it. If they are trying to micromanage you and strangle you in red tape, Jira absolutely allows them to do so but if they are interesting in getting things done Jira is also good at that.

It can get a lot worse than Jira though. When my old job got bought up by some big fancy software firm we were switched from Jira to some Microsoft solution that was probably decent enough but it was annoyingly Microsoft-y and it was integrated with an absolutely cursed third party time tracking app whose buggy turn-of-the-milennium UI made timesheet red tape a daily nightmare. Switching jobs and going back to Jira (and a less anal project management culture) was a huge relief.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Jira's a pretty good tool, but I've never used any other issue tracker in my decade plus as a dev.

You will lose PMs to the process whereby they transform into creatures that live entirely on Jira.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

Azure DevOps is cancer, and stole the name of a completely unrelated discipline during its unholy birthing.

Redmine is free, but it's clunky as shit and has an entire ecosystem of plugins in various states of abandonment.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago

We use it at work and it's okay. But I'm not a Dev so I don't know how it will be for you

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

JIRA is fine as a organizational tool, the problem how it's applied and abused by management. The second you get some project manager sharing their screen with the entire dev team to go over "burndown" and talk about "velocity" you can safely zone out, unless there is a serious effort by management to couple metrics like "JIRA ticket points completed" to individual (or even team) performance.

Especially if that last point becomes true, consider this a good opportunity to apply this handy guide. Bouncing back requests with "please create a ticket" or "please make sure this ticket is assigned to the right epic" or whatever hairs you can split is a great way to get nothing done while also giving the appearance that you're somehow actually doing work. Most managers are already just pushing virtual papers around, so they are often completely blind to devs doing the same with systems like JIRA.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

That's not even sabotage; that's just CYA so your workload is documented. If it isn't visible in your issue tracking system, your manager has no way of quantifying that you're getting dragged into that work above and beyond your normal "day" job. In a perfect world (read: after capitalism is dragged out back and beaten to death with a baseball bat covered in rusty nails), this would affect budgeting and staffing requirements estimates. In late-stage capitalist hellworld, it's more of a measure of how over-exploited you are, but can work in your favor for at least not getting dinged on performance reviews.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago

I'm at the end stage of Jira mentality which about 6 years ago started as self run agile teams using it for tracking to help with estimates and organise teams.

Now we're running a skeleton crew where my daily job which was once software engineering is now ticket engineering with 9-5 meetings every day and micromanagement of a degree I'd expect from a factory line where all i do is write tickets for faceless offshore contractors i won't ever meet who work on those tickets.

It's very dependent on the actual culture of your workplace for a few places I've worked at it didn't really change anything but it can get really bad if the powers that be figure out how to use it as a cudgel to wring you dry.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

I like Jira itself. What's negative about it is requirements are hard and most scrum masters and whoever will be writing your tickets suck at it. The problem is getting good at establishing requirements and putting that into text. But as for Jira itself, it's brilliant.