Ask HN: Should I fight back management enforcing Jira?

46 points by princesse 7 years ago | 75 comments

I'm a tech lead in a small shop (around 5 developers and growing) and our company has recently been acquired by a bigger one at the beginning of the year. We've been lucky so far as we've maintained independence of process and priorities. We've demonstrated times and times again that our development processes and our talent was order of magnitude superior to their existing dev teams.

Management from the head company is currently in the process of signing us up in Jira without consulting with us. Their motivation is to be able to track what the dev team is doing and keep a log of the activities, with the end goal being to be able to qualify this work as Capex.

I'm close to the product owner so I can pull some strings there if this is a trap but I need to act fast. We've got nothing similar to Jira in place and are dealing with things without any dedicated tools, which means I'm open to learning Jira as I know our current methods will not scale. I'm worried for the following reasons : - I haven't heard good things about Jira, especially on HN - I'm afraid it will only add more paper-filling work to my team (or myself) - I'm afraid they will use Jira to enforce a specific process to my team (I do not expect to have admin access to setup workflows properly)

Any thoughts on how I should handle this?

Carpetsmoker 7 years ago |

Management has a concrete problem they want to solve:

"Their motivation is to be able to track what the dev team is doing and keep a log of the activities, with the end goal being to be able to qualify this work as Capex."

So if you really don't want JIRA then offer an alternative that will meet those requirements.

Management may still say "just use JIRA". Before pushing back on this have a think about the cost/benefit ratio and whether this is really a battle worth fighting. You may lose credit with management, and more importantly, life is short. Arguing over issue systems is a stupid thing to spend your life on unless it's really going to save you a lot of time/frustration down the line. All in all, I would say it's unlikely that it's worth it.

wtvanhest 7 years ago | |

To add to your coment, depending on the company, moving a lot of $$$ to capex is incredibly important for management.

If anything you should embrace Jira and look for ways to help get things classified as capex. Ask for a meeting with accounting/finance to fully understand it.

Just think of it as learning a new skill.

For the people saying to look for another solution, I would first figure out how much work they put in to selecting Jira. It was probably a big decision making process and you may be too late to make a change.

awaywopassd 7 years ago | | |

Unfortunately, this is a reality. I am part of a small team where we moved pretty fast.

We used to write our own stories in Jira and they were mostly one liners. They have now implemented so many required fields to fill out. Filing out one story might take 30 minutes.

And the management has implemented a mix of waterfall and agile methodology.

It is combination of worst of both worlds. We are asked to plan our next 10 or more sprints. Assign points to each story. And then we are asked to justify points to management. It is a big mess. In a week, we might spend 20+ hours on planning and planning to plan bullshit.

I fought this as much as I could. But in the end, I realized that this is losing battle. All we can do is work with them and help them justify their jobs and our jobs.

We have stories for planning stories. We have stories for reading documentation. We have stories for breaks. Oh I want to cry.

But good thing is if you work with system and make your team look super busy, you will get big bonuses and pay raises. Kind of like in real world, you can write the cleanest code but if you don't write features that customer want and brag about your product, you will not get paid for it.

coffeemug 7 years ago | | |

> moving a lot of $$$ to capex is incredibly important for management

A few questions:

  1. Why is this the goal?
  2. Why does it depend on the company?
  3. How could you categorize development as capex? Isn't it obviously opex?
  4. Why do they need JIRA for that? Why not GitHub issues?
  5. Who's "management"? Engineering management? Executives? Someone else?

f055 7 years ago |

I think you should grow up. I mean, what’s your end game? Do you want to manage or own projects for the rest of your carrer, or do you want to move up and retire early? If the former, propose them a tool that you prefer and meets their requirements (maybe integrates with Jira?). If the latter, be the champion of Jira integration, get to know the new upper management who wants Jira in, explore how you can penetrate the structure of the bigger company, because right there is your opportunity - as, I assume, in your smaller company you almost hit the ceiling in terms of position advancement. Move up the ladder, earn more, retire earlier. What’s the point of doing the same stuff 20 years down the line for probably just a little more money than inflation adjustment? Btw I used Jira sparsely for 10 years and it is not that bad. It’s a matter of getting used to. Other more “cool” tools might look slicker but are often not that flexible.

wink 7 years ago | |

No need to sling terms like "you should grow up". There's both a reason a big share of developers hate JIRA with a passion and also a reason business people like it. It's hard to find the fine line of it being useful for both parties and not just making the developers' lives harder and I've seen people having to spend an extra 30min per day just fighting the tool. This is not about whining to keep your independece, this is mostly valid criticism that it creates work instead of making life easier.

_rrnv 7 years ago | | |

Indeed I could have spared the terms, but your comment is exactly what I am talking about: developers often place themselves agains business people, sometimes feel superiority, and are proud of it. But in fact it's wrong and immature – working in a company means cooperation, and both departments have experts in different skills. Another common pattern is to glorify tools and frameworks and be passionate about them. Again, why? It's not like being a github issues fanatic and hateful of jira makes any significant difference in the end. You say devs spend extra 30min per day fighting jira. For one, if they are as smart as they say they are, maybe the problem is not jira but between the chair and the keyboard. For two, say devs don't spend that extra time on jira. Who do you think will have to spend extra time to collect all the info necessary for the company to know what's going on? Probably the business owner. But who cares, devs want it easy. I wish luck to those who are very smart, because they will always find good work. I have hopes for all the others that they won't end up just typing code, because in some years time they may be replaced overnight by AI.

smackay 7 years ago |

The problem here is not the tool but the process that comes with it. From the managers in the bigger company's perspective integrating your team into the larger structure makes a lot of sense. What they are probably missing though is the impact that doing things their way is probably going to negatively impact your team.

Opposing the tool is not really going to get you anywhere. From the outside it will just look like you are resisting the integration with the bigger company and all the baggage that is going to come with not being "a team player".

For entertainment purposes only: fight fire with fire. Make a case for improving developer productivity by implementing a ticket quality score and use it as a metric. After all, the better the ticket the faster you can start work on the problem, rather than having to go chase down all the issues and requirements. Management will be rather annoyed at you flagging all their one sentence tickets as inadequate. As I said this is for entertainment purposes only. It's fun to make a point, but push quickly becomes shove.

artwr 7 years ago | |

I am always reminded of this story around throughput metrics for Software Engineering: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...

Your suggestion is delightful, and in a former company, one of our PMs, at a time when we were overwhelmed with requests, tried to tame the tied by requiring requesters fill out this simple template along the folloing lines (but I am paraphrasing): - What is the impact on you/your team from this feature/bug not being addressed? - What is the priority of this in comparison to other asks you have from the team? - What is the impact to the business?

Even though the team did not like the bureaucratic approach, the number of requests went down dramatically.

mongol 7 years ago |

I think you should embrace Jira but require that you get the access and permissions you think you need. Jira is not bad, but can be used in many ways, and when you figure out a way that works for you, it will not be a big deal.

seanjregan 7 years ago | |

Word. Solid advice. When you delegate all the decisions to a person looking at the global maxima at the expense of the local needs of your team you will not be happy with the results. For as long as you delegate this task, you will be unhappy with Jira. As soon as you take an active role, the perspective on Jira tends to change.

It's a good example of how being the change you seek changes your POV on something.

eksemplar 7 years ago |

I think jira is terrible because it’s complexity does the opposite of what you want management tools to do. It slows production to a crawl unless you invest heavily into change management and into building processes and training.

That being said, I think you’d be facing an impossible fight.

No developer loves these tools, and as a manager you hear complaints about almost everything imaginable, and if you have jira, and you think it’s working for you, then it’ll be hard to change your mind.

Leading upwards is really challenging, because you’ll need to show the financial cost of using jira and present an alternative as well as a plan and a budget for how to get there if you want to convince your manager, and you’re probably not paid to do that.

Waterluvian 7 years ago |

I've been at a company that used jira 5 different bad ways as they constantly churned through different ways of doing agile. I've also been at a company that used jira as a simple issue organizer with a handful of labels and literally nothing else.

It's just a tool that can be badly misused to make a bureaucratic mess, or can be barely used to write things down as we collectively think of them.

gorbachev 7 years ago |

We use Jira at work. We don't use it for everything.

This is how introducing Jira goes in a typical enterprise:

There's process, lots of it. There's training, scrum masters and Agile trainers flood the office floors. You can't move a task from in progress to done, because you didn't push the ticket through QA, QA Accepted, In Review, UAT and Waiting to be Deployed phases.

6 months later the Agile trainers are gone and sanity prevails and all the processes that don't make sense are quietly rolled back.

Thankfully you can configure Jira to do pretty much whatever you want, even the absolute minimum required to keep the dashboards management sees pretty.

jamestimmins 7 years ago |

I'd encourage you to consider what they're truly trying to accomplish by using Jira. Are they simply trying to take existing agile processes and add new tooling? If so, that doesn't sound too bad. Perhaps cumbersome, but if new tooling allows you to keep existing processes then it's a win. But if using Jira is shorthand for changing processes, then those are what you want to focus on.

It sounds like you may want to talk with the product owner to really understand what the long-term goal of this change is. Then, if you don't like that, you'll be in a better position to argue why your current/alternative process allows you to provide more value to the company.

peterwwillis 7 years ago |

To answer your concerns: 1) What you've heard is probably accurate. 2) It probably will add paper-filling work. 3) They will definitely enforce using Jira in some kind of way, but not necessarily a strict way.

How you should handle this: acknowledge that it's just a complex tool, and like any complex tool, how you (and others) use it determines the experience. Yes, there will be an up-front cost to onboarding. But it doesn't have to go horribly.

As your team gets trained on it, you will probably quickly experience pain points. Document them and constantly measure the effect of them on your team's output. Implement workarounds as necessary and measure the effects. Provide the results to management along with your recommended fixes. In theory you should end up with 1) "We tried it your way, and this is how it went", 2) "Then we tried it our way, and this is how we improved it."

This provides a method to work around problems, and a solid argument to upper management to modify their use of the tool. Make sure the argument makes it clear that your changes are in line with the business's objectives, or probably nobody will care if it's painful for your team.

znpy 7 years ago |

Not a developer here, but a Jira user anyway.

I don't have dislike Jira that much, and quite frankly I think it does it job and doesn't get in the way that much.

I have to say that my team is larger than your, so maybe (maybe?) if you're only five developers then Jira might introduce a bit of process overhead? Or maybe once you have some process in place scaling to more developers will get easier?

It seems to me that the problem here is how you look at things: who brought your company clearly wants to scale you up. Imho you should see this Jira introduction as an opportunity for better scaling rather than a threat.

One little side note: if your company has been acquired then all the games are over (and I hope you made a shitload o money in the acquisition). Don't get too much in the way o management, otherwise it'll be just easier to get rid of you than to deal with you.

My two cents, I hope my options help.

bumelant 7 years ago |

If the requirement is coming from accounting (qualification of spend as capex) there’s no way to push back, but it also doesn’t mean you need to follow the exact process of bigger company. You can negotiate minimum amount of documentation that for legal reasons your team needs to track in JIRA and do just that. Good luck!

burfog 7 years ago | |

Wouldn't that goal (qualification of spend as capex) be solved better by timecards? I don't see how a bug tracker helps unless you abuse it to be a timecard system.

Of course, timecard software can be awful too.

cimmanom 7 years ago | | |

Jira has a field for time spent on a ticket, and can produce reports about it pretty quickly. There are also plugins available to let developers use various timers with it, or even integrate with timesheet tools like Harvest.

I’ve worked in a company that qualifies development time as capex. They can’t just treat all developer butt-in-seat hours as capex. They have to allocate it to specific projects.

Using the issue tracker for that can streamline the process and saves the developer having to know which bucket to bill time against for each ticket, because the project manager or whoever can take responsibility for tagging each ticket with the appropriate accounting bucket.

And time spent on maintenance or meetings or peripheral tasks like interviewing candidates or configuring Jira goes into its own buckets that can’t be capitalized. Using the issue tracker to track capitalizable time makes that delineation easy to enforce. If it’s not in the issue tracker, it’s not capitalizable.

bumelant 7 years ago | | |

That would be one of the options - I have used Primavera in one of my previous jobs. But I assume from the question that the company has decided to use JIRA for that purposes.

meowface 7 years ago |

Jira can be pretty clunky and not great to use, but it gets the job done and really isn't that bad. I think it gets too much flak. A future product from a competitor will probably eat its lunch and eventually replace it someday, but if you just want to track different kinds of work, it works fine.

jb0x168 7 years ago |

My advice after working with Jira for the last several years: keep it light. Process heavy Jira is/can be a nightmare. Jira as "digital stickies" works well, and still provides plenty of metrics for outside stakeholders.

Based on my experience:

- Use the "Jira Agile" (formerly greenhopper) add-on so that you have sprint/kanban boards and reports to visualize planned and in-flight work. Enable the "Backlog View" for your boards to separate planned from in-progress work.

- Keep required fields to an absolute minimum (we only require Summary) so that you can quickly capture cards and flesh them out later.

- Avoid complex workflows - use the Software Simplified workflow if possible. Don't complicate it further without a really strong business case.

- Learn the keyboard shortcuts. C (create), E (edit), I (assign to self) "[" (hide sidebar) and "." (command palette) are your friends

- Confluence and Slack both have great integrations to let you publish and interact with your Jira issues

Those are just a few random thoughts on how we've kept Jira working for us and not against us.

trelliscoded 7 years ago |

I wouldn't be worried about Jira so much, I'd be worried that management is going to implement New Processes to Keep an Eye on the developers.

Above a certain scale you kind of need an issue tracker, but when you're serving it instead of it serving you, it's the implementor's fault, not yours.

One of the reasons Jira comes up so much is that it's so customizable that it will merrily allow you to construct the most Byzantine nonsensical workflow you can think of, and fairly quickly too. It's not Jira's fault that someone told it to do so.

It really sounds like they couldn't find a manager capable of handling both teams, so they're going to throw technology at the problem instead of investing in their people to grow them into the position. It might work if they are willing to pivot quickly based on user feedback instead of just dropping New Process on you, but it's always slower to manage that way instead of just hiring a competent manager.

twblalock 7 years ago |

My advice is to view this as an opportunity to improve the company's Jira workflow.

The status quo of issue tracking on your team is not scalable. And it's entirely reasonable that management should have a way to track your work. You are a small team in a big company and you're going to end up using whatever issue tracker everyone else uses.

You say that your team works better than others in the company. Tell management how your team's processes have resulted in high productivity and suggest improvements that other teams can benefit from. If using Jira hurts your team's productivity, find a way to quantify that -- ideally in terms of how the capex is higher than it needs to be because developers are wasting their time.

Recommend small, incremental changes rather than remodeling the entire system, and get other engineering teams on board with your proposals -- if the processes are bad, other teams are likely to want change too.

ilaksh 7 years ago |

The one place that I had to use Jira, it was poorly managed. The manager basically used it to create a list of every project and idea he could think of and then assigned quite a lot of them to me simultaneously.

The result for me was that I was overloaded with work. And then the manager became unavailable to discuss some important blocking items for about a week.

I am not saying that Jira or project management tools can't be helpful, but it does seem to have a tendency to encourage micromanagement as well as distracting from priority items with less important tasks and deemphasizing direct communication channels.

But of course management needs some way to know what is happening or that actual work is being done even, and a way to give direction about business goals.

I believe though that if not handled correctly this change could very well interfere with development. So you are right to be worried.

Personally I would do something like this:

1. Very quitely make a backup plan for alternative employment. Just in case.

2. Come up with an alternative to Jira that A) allows managers to to see that some development is even being done and they aren't just paying people to hang out and B) gives some details about what is being worked on. This could be just email notifications when people push to GitHub.

2b. I would also set up a weekly meeting with management to discuss dev progress and business priorities face to face. And as far as capex reporting maybe you can use a Google Docs with employee hours together with a dump of github commits, perhaps grouped by user.

3. Explain that you want the dev team to focus on their work rather than checking off boxes for a process, and they want to stay focused on core tasks rather than a lot of small unimportant ones. And therefore since the current process is working you believe adding Jira will only take away time from core activities and make the team less productive in terms of actually meeting business goals.

seanjregan 7 years ago | |

Spin up a simple one board kanban project, use the new roadmaps in Jira cloud to show the epics to management and move things from backlog to in prog to done. Add tempo for time tracking if you need to show the accountants how much work has been done.

Stratoscope 7 years ago |

> We've demonstrated times and times again that our development processes and our talent was order of magnitude superior to their existing dev teams.

That may be part of your problem right there. I'm sure your team is very good, but do you really think you are 10X better? It seems unlikely.

topkai22 7 years ago | |

Order of magnitude (base 2)?

Stratoscope 7 years ago | | |

Now that is funny, thank you! :-)

But seriously, even when I've only thought I was twice as good as someone else (and I'm afraid I have thought that too many times), it usually hasn't ended well.

calyth2018 7 years ago |

The majority of what I've heard at different workplaces about Jira has more to do with a) people not knowing how to use it and b) people not knowing and agreeing on how it was customized.

If the motivation is to track what the teams are doing, even if you win the fight on not using Jira, something will be proposed. Maybe it's Rally, maybe it's some POS that was sold because their sales guys and your CxO had a golf game.

You're better off ensuring that you could do what you need to do with Jira than anything else.

As an aside, I take issue with the term dev team - many people use Jira as part of an "agile" process, but they only plan things around development, but not test, only to find out later that their one liner change from dev could cause the tester a week to setup the environment for an automated test....

blaisio 7 years ago |

Objectively, JIRA is buggy, slow, complicated, and hard to use. Unfortunately, it is also useful. Is it a good tool? No. Does it sometimes let you do things that you couldn't do before? Yes.

I would not choose to use it under basically any circumstances, but I also wouldn't be upset about being forced to use it - assuming I'm being paid well.

You should probably find out why they want to make the change. Is it just because your team is sticking out as being different? Is it because they want to try and do task efficiency calculations? Do they feel they don't have enough visibility into what you're working on? There might be a communication issue you need to fix (which JIRA probably will not address, even though they might expect so).

riser9 7 years ago |

It sounds like you haven't even looked at Jira, you are basing your view on HN comments. We use Jira productively, and progress is made visible across the entire broader team with it.

Of course, it can be used to implement inconvenient, useless processes as well.

detro 7 years ago |

Don't base your judgement on software on HN. Jira is old and not the latest fancy tool: it's a battle hardened instrument that can be invaluable in the long run. But it needs to be used properly to bring out all its value.

Given you are a tech lead, this is the time to take ownership, create a Jira project and tailor its setup to your team needs.

Also, and this goes unsaid because Jira isn't new, the product has gone through many iterations of evolution and it's now a very nice UX. We use it for Kanban, Epics, Releases and the metrics help us visualize in an instant how efficient our team is.

If you give Jira a fair chance, you won't be disappointed.

a-saleh 7 years ago |

Disclaimer: I actually like jira.

If I were you, I would primarily fight to have enough privileges to be able to have your own workflow. In that case, Jira can be maleable enough to make it fit your current process, and if you can negotiate to be the one that decides/implements the workflow, you should be able to shield your team from any rashly imposed process from above.

TheGrumpyBrit 7 years ago |

I use Jira at work, and also at home for my side projects. At home it's little more than a self-hosted Trello instance. At work, it's more complex. Both do their jobs well enough.

Your problem is that you don't currently have any tools to track what your devs are doing. Your proof that you are "orders of magnitude superior" is nothing if you don't have the metrics to back it up.

If you accept that the larger company is going to want metrics on what your devs are doing (and that's an inevitability) then unless you have an alternative in mind and a compelling reason to use it instead of Jira, your best bet is to get on board, and do so with enthusiasm. If you're earnestly trying to use it, people will listen to the problems you run into and workflow changes you ask for. If you're complaining because you just don't want big brother watching you, you'll be ignored.

jamescodesthing 7 years ago |

What’s your alternative tracking mechanism? And what does it report?

Truth is you might be so good because you’re not at scale, they may be looking to scale you up which is great... you just have to get them the numbers.

Jira as a tool sucks dicks for pennies (trust me i’ve seen it)

Jira is however customisable as fuck, so if you’re being forced into it then get admin! Stick to a simple workflow, basic practices. Jira falls short with the amount of munging people do to it, at the minute my team has a 9 column board with 5+ projects on it... that’s not how it’s meant to be done and it drags time out of my day.

So by all means if you’re tracking already, demonstrate that (as long as it’s not a damn spreadsheet). If you can’t get them what they need then question why Jira. If you have to use it then get admin and make the tool work for your current process.

tokyodude 7 years ago |

probably the wrong thread to ask but what should a 5-10 person company with 20-25 outside contractors and lots of costumers that may need to access the issue use?

I'm currently consulting for a company who has no issue tracking system. they use an excel sheet which makes it impossible to have conversation about individual issue and nearly impossible to track updates.

I can't imagine getting them to spend $300+ a month for a managed system. bugzilla or Trac seem progammer oriented whereas this is a game dev company meaning copy/paste drag/drop image support is important (having to first create a local image file and then navigate to it is right out)

any solutions out there they could install on an unused computer or remote computer that might meet their needs or do they just have to be convinced to pay $4k+ a year?

peterwwillis 7 years ago | |

The dumbest, cheapest, simplest option is e-mail. No matter who they are, if they're an actual company, they have to have an e-mail provider for their domain. This means (at the very least) they can create a single account that will accept e-mailed issues, and forward to all relevant users. Track the issue in e-mail thread replies, which always has the latest updates.

There may be provider-specific productivity features, such as G Suite's Collaborative Inbox, or Exchange's Public Folders. The IMAP Protocol also supports shared mailboxes, so any IMAP server that supports this will allow you to collaborate on issues sorted into folders that multiple users can access. Some open source mail servers definitely support it. Once they pick up a real issue tracking system it will probably support issues created via e-mail, so it can be seamlessly integrated later.

cimmanom 7 years ago | |

Check out Phabricator, which is open source and easy to set up. It’s got a pretty robust issue database and can be set up with kanban boards.

chrisper 7 years ago | |

Can't you use something like trello? (I think they got bought by Atlassian recently, so I don't know how long they will be around)

chris-at 7 years ago | |

Take a look at Bitrix - IMO it's better (and cheaper) than Jira for small teams.

https://bitrix24.com/

raarts 7 years ago | |

Setup your own Redmine instance.

JackPoach 7 years ago |

Bitrix24 is pretty good and free. They have a bunch of local domains, depending on where you want to have your data hosted. Ex:

https://bitrix24.com https://bitrix24.eu https://bitrix24.com.br https://bitrix24.in https://bitrix24.de etc.

There are a couple things that are really good about Bitrix24. It's kind of like Jira+Confluence+Hipchat+Trello in one, but much easier use. Second, you have an option to choose between cloud and on-premise, just like with Jira.

tmaly 7 years ago |

I have converted my team to Jira and Confluence. There is some initial learning curve, but if you select a subset of the features, and train / document how you expect each tool to be used, they will provide a net benefit to your team.

A friend of mine was at a company that was using JIRA, but they had no processes in place and ended up going back to using paper.

I think you really have to establish some simple processes to really get the benefit from these tools.

You can go overboard and try to require people to document every single detail every single day, but I think this is counterproductive. You have to find a balance.

indigochill 7 years ago |

My team is in a somewhat similar position relative to our company. I like to think of Jira as an interface for management (and in our case, internal customers) to create and manage high-level requests and priorities. Then our team internally creates Trello cards for the actual tasks that need to be done because we find it significantly more efficient than Jira. On our current project, the ratio of Trello cards to Jira tickets is ~15.

As long as we also keep Jira reasonably current with the status of the project, Management's fine with however we want to track our work internally. YMMV.

gargarplex 7 years ago |

You can customize JIRA to fit your existing processes. Make sure you get the company to pay for that.

Embrace JIRA, it's like giving management an API into your team's performance.

moondev 7 years ago |

How do you manage projects now? Jira is fairly ubiquitous in agile development and has been used everywhere I have been in the last 5 years or so.

actionowl 7 years ago |

If it makes you feel any better JIRA is probably the least shitty of the Atlassian suite products (not by a large factor). You might want to be more concerned about Confluence, BitBucket, and Bamboo creeping into your workflow. I'd suggest seeing if you can get away with using a more lightweight tool such as Github issues, Redmine, or Gitlab.

nl 7 years ago |

Jira is fine - it's a complex tool and maybe slower than would be ideal, but they are really the only significant issues.

There are lots of positives, too - it is very flexible, and integrates with anything you want.

To be honest, I don't think there is anything nearly as good if you want beyond what Trello can do.

nwrk 7 years ago |

Slightly offtopic: https://www.neat.io/bee/ Native FAST client for Jira.

The point is - once you make it works for you, life is great again. As others here said, be Jira master and climb the corporate ladder.

wingerlang 7 years ago |

    We've got nothing similar to Jira in place and are dealing with things without any dedicated tools

Are you not tracking issues at all? I very frequently look up years old tickets to know why something is the way it is, and I could not imagine working without it.

sidlls 7 years ago | |

That's what comments in code and project/product and technical documentation are for. Work tracking tickets should contain as little text as possible. Ideally the contents would be a brief 1-3 sentence description of the work, links to the relevant parts of the product/project and technical documentation, and whatever the definition of done is (e.g. "success measures", "acceptance criteria", and so on).

For normal work I simply don't allow my team to create tickets in JIRA unless there is at least a technical design document which contains at minimum a bullet-list describing the complete scope of work and some documentation or links to documentation regarding the specific requirements. For bugs I require the ticket created and put in our queue to be updated with the same material once the cause of error and the fix are identified.

seanjregan 7 years ago |

Some companies treat their software teams like factory labor focusing on process and efficiency above all else.

I and most of us at Atlassian believe that epowering developers with more autonomy will drive better outcomes, better products, and better teams.

To help resolve these conflict, aspects of Jira needed to change and team culture needs to change.

To fix this we've been investing to democratize Jira's permissions model. We have been focusing on autonomy and flexibility to let any team design the way they want to work while giving administrators the power they need.

The SW biz is a very fast-growing space. When you combine massive growth, speed, and impact it is easy to lose control.

Feeling like you need tighter control means people often try to grip tighter. Sometimes that shows up in insanely complex and structured Jira instances. Sometimes Agile has become more important than agility. Sometimes using Jira has become more important to leaders than the outcomes the actual customer wants. This shouldn't be the case.

It can become easy to over-index on process and control at the expense of agility and software team autonomy. Don't do it!

This results in some over-designed Jira boards and workflows.

Leaders and managers in business and software development need to balance the desire for control with the need for S/W team autonomy. This endless dance between autonomy and control always shows up in every HN thread with detractors saying Jira sucks and fans saying Jira is great but the people setting it up must suck.

There is responsibility all around. Jira, for example, needed to improve the permission model to better empower teams with project level controls. We've needed to simplify the setup and clean up the issue views. These changes in Jira Cloud help admins feel more comfortable delegating more control to teams to design their own way of working.

We can't police how people use Jira in the wild but we can share our POV, our playbooks and we can make changes to the product to make it less likely that managers treat dev teams like factory labor focused on process and efficiency above all else.

A well-running team in a well designed Jira instance should work more like a lab than a factory.

Triads or squads should be able to chase a hypothesis, they should be better able to adapt to new information and respond to change than a factory assembly line. Leaders should be looking for more than process and efficiency out of the team and out of Jira.

How should you handle this?

Make Jira work for you.

Play a role in designing the way you want your team to work. Take the lead in changing the board design or the workflows when your work requires it.

The teams that make adapting to change their competitive advantage make the biggest impact on their company, their customers and the world. But, it takes trust and courage for leaders to create the conditions necessary for this. It means giving software teams a degree of autonomy and flexibility. Mastering this is the core competitive advantage for innovative companies today. These companies retain great talent, they hire great talent, they get great results.

Over the years we've heard the wishlist from Jira users and administrators in large companies and startups.

Make it easier to use and get started!

Give me flexibility and control when I need it!

Let my team design their own way of working!

To bring a new level of simplicity and power to Jira we needed to re-think the basics of the product. We also decided to open up and share our practices to go along with our tools (Team Playbooks https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook). We needed to learn a few things from the Trello team. We needed to think deeper than new features. The good news is that we've been doing that in a big way and you should be seeing that in the Jira Cloud product you can try today.

A couple examples

Project Level Permissions- Have you ever felt like the Jira you are using was designed for some other team or project? Alert! It might have been. Jira SW Cloud now makes it easy for next-gen project owners and team leads to design their own Jira projects, boards, and custom issue types without creating concerns that it will impact other projects.

Agile features can be turned on and off with the click of a button, so your team can customize to best suit its own unique workflow depending on its maturity level and the project at hand. For example, you can now flip between scrum and kanban methodologies in seconds

You can create issues and columns in-line, without ever leaving the board

Out-of-the-box team filters on every board, such as epic, issue owner, or labels make it easy for anyone to sort and filter in a click, no JQL needed.

You can define a rule to automatically update an issue's field or assignee based on the column it is moved into

You can display issue attachments as card cover images on the board

You can create, edit and delete issue types in independent projects

You can create issue types and customize the fields to suit your team's needs

We've got a lot more coming. The good news is that you can customize, modify, adapt and design Jira Cloud to do pretty much anything you want. The bad news is that means someone who doesn't know what you mean might do it for you if you don't participate.

Building software is complicated work. Jira's secret sauce is the way it simplifies the complexities of software development into manageable units of work that can be predictably shared and worked on by many different teams at the same time. Well designed Jira boards and Jira issues enable collaboration across increasingly diverse software teams that include design, marketing, analytics etc.(via integrations to the Jira issue)

That's a lot of text for a really small text box in HN. I'm trying to stay awake long enough to see the end of the Red Sox game. It's longer than that the typical bit of snark about Jira sucking or your admin sucking or doing work at work....sucking.

My advice:

You can have admin or project admin permissions, you can design the way your teams wants to work, you can integrate the tools like GH, BB, INvision, New Relic, Launch Darkly, etc that your team uses already. You can give the managers the vis they want and need and you can do it without sacrificing the sanity of your team day to day. And, you can use Jira to show whoever needs to know what you've been doing and how it impacts the business.

Jira should feel like the center of gravity that helps all the work your teams are doing hang together across different teams and tools.

slipwalker 7 years ago |

> We've demonstrated times and times again that our development processes and our talent was order of magnitude superior to their existing dev teams.

i would love to read more about these "superior development processes" without any issue tracking or activities log.

bra-ket 7 years ago |

jira is customizable, just cut some layers of default crap and it can be pretty simple and useful

sjg007 7 years ago |

No need to worry about Jira. If you want to worry, worry about capex accounting... and even then, this is your managers problem, not yours. Also this is not a serious problem per se. It’s about justification, mostly to financial auditors..

mynegation 7 years ago |

So how do you track and manage issues now? You gotta use something. We can discuss JIRA against some other issue tracking tools, but I cannot imagine proper industrial software development without using any issue tracking at all

zwhatever 7 years ago |

If you are working locally then, IMHO, there's nothing better than a physical kanban board, our PM needs to 'manage upwards so they maintain a separate Jira for epics only.

iandanforth 7 years ago |

Jira is pretty cancerous. It will likely lead to hundreds of developer hours wasted on buggy, complex UI, new processes which are put in place because the features exist to support them, and eventually a slide into a multi-atlassian-product cluster of almost-working cruft.

That said you're SOL because you don't have a solid set of tools in place today. I know large, distributed teams who use github effectively for example and they have the processes and cultural inertia to make it work, but it doesn't sound like you've even got a solid home-grown alternative.

BobFromDown 7 years ago |

JIRA gets a 5/10 from me. Interface is too much of the same colour for different information. Gets confusing when trying to move around quickly.

mbrodersen 7 years ago |

I have used JIRA for years. It isn't perfect. Nothing is. But I have little to complain about.

lazylizard 7 years ago |

they optimise their company , you optimise your job? 1. its their company its their money and how they want to spend it 2. its your job you can try your best to make it easier or you can switch employers ?

Meai 7 years ago |

I dont think that there is anything wrong with Jira apart from the fact that it's slow. Other than that it has a lot of great features. I looked for an alternative for a long time, in my opinion nothing comes close to jira and it has only gotten better.

trhway 7 years ago |

I recommend try it - if you dont succumb you'll have immunity for the very long after that.

gaius 7 years ago |

end goal being to be able to qualify this work as Capex

This is a common piece of tax optimisation, basically if you say to the government “we did X hours R&D this year and here is the proof” they give the company some tax back. Of course it is pure coincidence that the word “development” has been overloaded in this way and you can get cash back for cranking out CRUD apps...

If that’s the goal, you will not win this one.

comesee 7 years ago |

Theres nothing you can do. Just accept what management wants and do your job as best as you can

1. Why is this the goal? 2. Why does it depend on the company? 3. How could you categorize development as capex? Isn't it obviously opex? 4. Why do they need JIRA for that? Why not GitHub issues? 5. Who's "management"? Engineering management? Executives? Someone else?