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Comment by _RPM | Hacker News Reader

It seems that it’s fashionable to hate JIRA on this forum. I’m not sure how one can be so religious about a workflow management tool.

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It should be pretty obvious to anyone that's used both JIRA and it's competitors that it's a piece of shit. It's missing basic functionality that competitors have like live updates (I guess I'll just telepathically guess when my teammates have made an update and hit F5), it's got basic UX problems that everyone else seems to have solved just fine (opening outbound links in a new tab etc), and their new redesign appears to have done fuck all to make any of it better.

I don't care how many features it's got for BAs/PMs to wank over. If the basic usability isn't there, the devs won't proactively participate, which means they'll either be forced to (incurring a big hit to morale), or they'll use other tools like Trello or physical boards to organise instead, and you end up with multiple sources of truth and synchronisation problems.

How it's ever become so popular is a mystery to me. I wouldn't inflict it on a team of my worst enemies.

Interesting. These seem like relatively minor issues to me. We switched from Asana to JIRA about a year ago. We spent about 2 years using Asana, and I hated working with it daily. JIRA is very far from perfect but like it many times more. We have significantly better understanding of where our team is and our projects now, and we scoured the web for every way to use Asana we possibly could find. To each their own...

One of the things that bothered me the most about Asana was how slow it was (also a UX issue).

Hmmm...I don't really share the same opinions about JIRA. Complex teams with a lot of stake holders and JIRA was light years better than what was used before. Maybe you just have super simple needs? I also don't see at all what's so complicated about using the tool, and my org has some super complicated customized workflows to get a ticket to flow efficiently through all facets of the org. Also, even on our smaller teams, that have simple processes right now, people can open up and create a ticket easily with most of the effort in filling out the description?

Even more concerning is that you state your devs would have negative morale by being forced to use this tool? You must have bigger issues?

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