Jira: Thumbs up or Thumbs down?

2 points by jiteshdugar 8 years ago | 11 comments

What is your overall opinion about Jira?

Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down?

mymotta 8 years ago |

Too complicated to use, especially in roles and permissions. I don’t need a Ferrari,where a bicycle will do just fine.

jiteshdugar 8 years ago | |

True. It is probably very powerful but is very complicated to use and get started.

Have you considered alternatives?

cimmanom 8 years ago |

A PITA to configure.

Magnificent if configured right (hint: simplify, simplify; provide use-case-customized simplified kanban boards and issue filters to anyone who doesn't want or need the complexity).

Irreplaceable for reasonably tech-savvy project managers.

And the new UI may be more modern and mobile friendly but is harder to use on desktop than the old one.

jiteshdugar 8 years ago | |

Yes. configuration takes a lot of time and it is not easy to get started. Have you considered alternatives that are worth looking at?

cimmanom 8 years ago | | |

Everything else I've looked at falls short in one or another crucial way. The closest has been Phabricator, which felt clunky in comparison (granted, it's been a few years now since I've used it.)

makecheck 8 years ago |

Down. Functional but over-engineered.

I don’t like wondering if the page will just hang or go blank when I touch one small thing.

jiteshdugar 8 years ago | |

Yes. It's become complicated due to the high number of integrations that it supports. It does make it useful, but it has been over-engineered like you said.

What alternatives have you considered? I found a couple of good ones recently Codegiant & Scrumpy, and evaluating between them currently.

makecheck 8 years ago | | |

The only other ones I’ve used for any serious amount of time were Bugzilla, Trac and ClearDDTS. I also dabble with GitHub Issues.

Bugzilla is another functional-but-not-ideal one. It just seemed bulky somehow; I don’t tend to want a lot.

Trac is probably my favorite but it tends to work best if you can adopt it all at once (code, wiki, etc.). At the time I was using Subversion, which it could tie into well. I don’t know if it handles “git”. It has a nice wiki format. Everything cross-links easily.

DDTS is quite old but was surprisingly robust and versatile (probably not even sold anymore though). It had a very Unix-style design with many commands, text file formats with a side database, and a web wrapper over it all that has page templates, etc. It does issue tracking and as far as I know it doesn’t integrate with anything else (no special knowledge of revision control...maybe ClearCASE?).

jedisct1 8 years ago |

Terrible.

jiteshdugar 8 years ago | |

What are you using as a replacement to Jira?