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Meh, I get people hate Jira, but every time I ask people "What would you rather do instead" there's absolutely no agreement on what's a better solution.

I think it's imoprtant to recognize that if a whole crowd of people say "We hate X" but everybody in that crowd hates eachothers proposals even more, it just creates a facade of agreement where there is none.

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"I hate that we eat a bowl of feces every day, can we switch to something else?

"I want steak!"

"I want salad!"

"I want fish!"

"Alright, well, there's absolutely no agreement, let's stick with the feces."

I feel like maybe you're intentionally misunderstanding the point I'm making, because your example kind of illustrates my point:

In that case you'd probably find nearly 100% agreement on steak over feces, or salad over feces, or fish over feces. You'd have complete agreement on any alternative to feces.

But if you read this thread, it's actually full of people actually saying "I was forced to use [alternative tool] and I prefer Jira". There is no tool that has 100% support over Jira.

In fact I'd be surprised if there's a single alternantive to Jira that even 40% of people agree is better.

Same point I'm trying to make, but you _absolutely_ win on effect. Well put!

I once worked with a surly backend developer at a company where for whatever reason the relationship between front and backend was quite poor. One day we were sitting in a long boring meeting and this guy told a story about how his children learned to talk with one another in preschool. The point was we had failed to achieve what the toddlers had, and this comment garnered a big round of laughs. Later on I filed a bug ticket with backend that was legit and this same developer acknowledged it as such. Then what happened was he and the other backend devs made the endpoint completely non-functional, removing even the workaround I had been using. The ticket stayed in limbo until they got back to me and basically said they could return it to its original buggy state or "explore" the matter further. Not keen on more passive aggressive shenanigans I said just return it back to original form. All this to say that.. making a fun joke that obscures the actual complexity of the problem is a sure way to score points with thoughtless buffoons, but it doesn't mean you aren't a hypocritical jerk and that you're mostly wrong.

Best comment of 2024, maybe even 2025 just on trust.

Don't give me that sort of trust, I'm sure I'll find some way to milkshake duck myself.

This is a defeatist attitude. There are plenty of jira alternatives that have fewer problems. There are obvious problems with jira that have gone unaddressed for years. For instance performance is horrendous. I would also remove infinite customization. It’s a sales pitch to executives but doesn’t benefit line managers or people working on tickets.

For my money Linear is just about perfect.

I think Jira is in there just because it is the most used tool. Pick and choose any other tool, if the mindset with the new tool is the same, then we are in the same spot. The point is that all the prescribed rules pushed down the throat of developers. (e.g. You must have a daily stand up. You must have a story that is no bigger than x Points, you must NEVER roll in our out stories into a sprint once it starts.. and the list goes on and on..The rules - no matter how "small" they are, they are still a big barrier to being agile in the truth sense of the word. The above are only my observation and my thouhgts, your mile may vary.

How about "figure out different solutions that work better for different teams instead of force-fitting everything from three-person startups to enterprise organizations into the same straitjacket of a framework"?

Do programmers not end up taking any management courses? Because we learned of contingency theory within the first month of the semester when I was in college.

I think you just described SOC2, which your dumb-as-fuck customers will insist you do anyway because their even-dumber-than-that customers insist on it.

Every individual, and on a broader perspective every group, has innate preferences to different forms of organization. It‘s called contingency theory. Agile fails because it was a form of adaptive organization, built out of the highly adaptive/performant cultures of software development, that was never able to be scaled like they tried. In major part because it lost the adaptive aspects in the hard-coded systems, and created unproductive busywork because people were too busy putting something on the board, rather than focusing on work.

They probably hate Jira for the UI/UX or something similar.

I've worked at places that tried to do project management via worksheets and it's quite a challenge to keep those up-to-date, much less add dynamic connections to different repos for updates, adding new stories/tasks, etc. Jira is a godsend by comparison.

I just left a place that had three different tracking tools that devs had to update, with the Azure boards being customized with all kinds of unrelated 9001 process fuckery that necessitated failing to save any update ever until you dug out the field that was missing. The fields changed on each move across the board.

Unsurprisingly, they were planning a project to introduce another tool on top of it all. Pretty much just bike shedding the company into the ground.

I remember MS Project. Those were the days...

But it indicates that something is really wrong, right? And that we should all keep noticing that and keep working on a solution?

I think the negative responses are directed at the use of "meh" and the seeming indifference to an actual problem that could really use a solution, even if we don't have a perfect one everybody agrees on yet.

Isn't that the point though? Should there be an alternative we all agree on? All our situations are different. The whole point of being agile was to not take a one-size-fits-all approach to solution development.