Jira's raise to power is one of those things I would never understand. Such a horribly designed tool. Today is much better, yes, but it is so over-engineer and at the same time lacks so many things.
The first time I used it around 2007 I thought it was great. It was basic, but did everything that I wanted ( I’d didn’t care about the project management that maybe didn’t even exist back then I don’t remember ).
I think that it’s been diverted from its original purpose,and is now indeed horribly complicated since it’s supposed to be all in one package.
I’ve also noted that in large companies the quality of the product for end users, as long as it’s not a massive drag on productivity or on recruitment and is not core business, is irrelevant and that other factors are more important ( costs, contracts , easy to install integrate and maintain, quality of support, breadth of use within the company etc ). This makes atlassian a natural superpower.
Unless you were a non-technical person — then it was a confusing mess. I think this is part of why Jira did so well, it was more approachable to non-devs.
PM like it because they can break it until it fits their worldview. I've worked at 3 orgs in a row where the JIRA was a complete fucking broken mess because the process in it didn't match reality but someone thought it did.
This is exactly it - it's "Enterprise" so you can (pretty easily, to be honest) make it fit your workflow.
The problem is that the workflow you officially have and wish you used is almost never the actual workflow, so it becomes horribly confused and insane.
Yeah, my cynical experience with B2B business software is that it becomes shitty and encrusted via special-case customizations (or worse, customizability.)
Even for internal projects, a lot of money is thrown at software because the corporation has decided (rightly or wrongly) that it's easier than changing process, culture, personnel, or internal incentives.
For example, salespeople on commission were closing not-very-profitable deals. The response was to layer in a complicated project feasibility/profitability estimation logic, configuration features for an "approval" org-chart hierarchy between users, and various new triggers to block the workflow at particular steps and e-mail people to come click and approval button... I still feel it would have (should have?) been better to change how the sales commissions worked.
Jira may be over-engineered, but I don't think it lacks anything. You can always get a plugin if something is missing. Our corpo Jira crawled because of a stupendous amount of plugins (close to a thousand). Once we had a Jira clean-up operation done, it became magically fast.
Huh - that seems a very basic missing feature in the cloud version. We use bog-standard self-hosted JIRA and markdown editing is basic working functionality. People also add mermaid diagrams/charts to the issue. As well as custom diagram plugins, excel sheets and a whole gamut of documents.
Replace Jira with Microsoft and this is the same complaint from the 90's/2000's about a business company that delivers features rather than making nerds happy. Nobody likes it, yet everybody uses it.
I think it's fundamentally easy to use once you get it set up, it's just absolutely madness in terms of configuration. But you can easily manage a backlog, sprints, update tickets, etc, plus they have a query language (JQL) that you can use to make widgets that are useful (although many of those should just be defaults). It's got a lot of flexibility in terms of required fields, forms, workflows, etc.
It's very easy to understand, developers just refuse to accept it for undermining their strongly held beliefs regarding success in the software industry.
It's true you need working software, but without sales and operations doing their part, the software will be scraped when the company folds.
Sales and operations get away with everything because they're the beating heart of any successful organization.
Yes, Jira is powerful, flexible and allows tons of stuff to be done. It can really store tons of data, accept workflows, etc.
But that thing is slow as a snail. Even if it's an on-prem installation. I want nimble tools.
I know it's a very unpopular opinion, but I'll take a fast Redmine over a slow Jira all day, every day.
P.S.: Another slow tool like this is OpenStack. Every CLI command, every web UI click means a ping-pong of 20 REST requests. At least, when it works, it works, which is 100% of the time if it's configured correctly.
