Item — HN Reader

Jira to me is a mostly a tool for managers to coerce developers into a more manager-friendly interpretation of “agile” than anything else rather than something developers would use out of choice.

When you’re doing something for the sole purpose of keeping someone off your back about it then you inevitably half-arse it, so in reality we’re paying Atlassian a small fortune for nothing more than a wall of fairly bullshit estimates. Don’t even get me started on how slow and flakey the UI is on the cloud version, it’s such an intolerably poor quality bit of software to actually use as a dev. I’d be very surprised if Atlassian actually dogfooded the cloud version because it really is an abysmal effort.

1 comments

Yeah and the thing is... I'm not even a developer. I'm an IT Architect. It's just a really poor fit so they 'bend' all the development stuff to make it mean other things (like the epics). When you do need that you know the methodology is just a poor fit. But anyway... they want the entire Enterprise IT team to work off Jira because "we need to be agile". And because of the cool reports. So the director can sit at his desk and see the cool graphs and pretend they actually show him what's going on. Obviously they don't :) For example, some of the stuff we're not recording is how teams work together on inter-team stuff (like endpoint architects working to enable something for the network team). Everyone just makes up their own labels. It was a mess from day 1.

And yeah it's slow but not super slow. Pretty sure we have onprem though. Because I can only access it on VPN. Unless they fiddled with some port forwarder which I wouldn't put past them.