Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

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Haven't heard of ClickUp before. Perhaps I instinctively ignored it before because of the name. It looks like a crossbreed between Airtable and Jira, and it makes me wonder how well it'll handle dense task lists... Still, thanks for mentioning it, I'll take a closer look.

RE Jira - I've never seen a GANTT chart & critical path pulled out of it, though I imagine management 2 layers above me had that option. That said, my experience with Jira was somewhat painful, with a rather slow and annoyingly click-heavy UI. Also, IIRC, tasks in Jira can only have one level of subtasks, and I don't recall being able to form DAGs from them.

I imagine it's hard to prevent featuritis in this tool category, when you're addressing different hierarchy levels simultaneously. That said, there are many successful companies, like Trello, that thrive on delivering bare-bones, simplified tooling with perfected UX. I just wonder why there doesn't seem to be anything like that for a featureset that includes tasks forming DAGs, GANTT charts, computing critical path, and relative scheduling (e.g. "task Y takes starts after X and takes 5 work days").

EDIT: OmniPlan, not OmniProject, and I promised a footnote ;)

JIRA is as system that is hilariously hobbled by two forces - JIRA admins and management, the latter often driving JIRA admins into making bad changes[1].

It has a very keyboard-capable UI that isn't highlighted enough (make it exempt from anything that might hijack keyboard, and hit . (dot) - it will bring you an autocompleting text box allowing you to do every action you can on given page).

The big issue however is that there's nothing really integrating the links system between JIRA items, and the basic task model is indeed rather limited. The links are fully free form (which can be a pain when someone defines a new copy of every standard link type, in german, without connection to localization system), but I have yet to see something that isn't the advanced query (i.e. the SQL-like queries you can type in various places in JIRA) that exposes it nicely and graphically.

That said, graph-based task representation is the norm on the higher end of _desktop_ project management tools, ones that often involve physical things to make, like MS Project or OmniPlan (and going back all the way to LisaProject, which apparently became very liked at NASA for exactly that graph based view).

[1] At one point, a friend of mine had enough and implemented exactly what the management asked for, without spending futile time trying to help them see the truth, or fixing it quietly by themselves. The results were glorious, as the whole project essentially ground to halt for a sprint or two, and could be a poster example of why people tell you to not mess and use provided standard workflows. Management never again asked for workflow changes after asking for reversal of their own design[2].

[2] Management, in their infinite wisdom, designed a one-way-only workflow, where a task could proceed a workflow a bit like this: Backlog -> TODO -> Development -> QA -> Done. Notice lack of any way to move a stage back, and there was no way to force change a task to different stage. Tracking real status of tasks became impossible as everything was left at "Development" because if you found anything to fix after it left QA... well, no way to change the state without hacking the database, which might have not gone well with Atlassian Cloud admins ;)

Thanks for the explanation!

> and hit . (dot) - it will bring you an autocompleting text box allowing you to do every action you can on given page

How I wish I knew that at my {previous}^2-job, where we were heavy JIRA users. I remember getting so angry off at the frontend performance that I actually (somehow) got minimal API access and ended up timesheeting from a Lisp REPL.

I thought about my previous comment through the night and realized that, at some point, I should have had found a reference manual for JIRA and read it end-to-end (reading manuals cover-to-cover is a superpower, but that realization only truly hit me around the end of said job). Also, I now know enough to articulate what was my biggest discomfort with JIRA (beyond abysmal performance): lack of clear mental model of what it does, and what is being represented inside. This came about not just because the product is large, but also because JIRA admins - we (developers) had access restricted only to a tiny portion of the product, so I couldn't just poke around (my usual way of grokking software) and build a clear mental picture. Next time in such situation, I'll just go straight into "read docs cover to cover" mode.

> That said, graph-based task representation is the norm on the higher end of _desktop_ project management tools, ones that often involve physical things to make, like MS Project or OmniPlan (and going back all the way to LisaProject, which apparently became very liked at NASA for exactly that graph based view).

I suspected so! I saw some of these capabilities during my brief exposure to the "corporate pointy-haired MBA" project management tools during my time at the university. But I get the feeling that it's another place where Agile culture is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

JIRA becomes a lot simpler (in the same way Lisp is simpler, not user-friendly UI) when operated from issue search with JQL filters and heavy use of the keyboard ops.

You can then make a mental model that ultimately JIRA has project, which have a "table" of issues/items, with various attributes each - plus simple workflow engine - everything else is just built around it, whether kanban boards, SCRUM, various reporting tools (very powerful), or random plugins (integration with SCM, time tracking, etc. etc)

There is a decent GANTT plug-in for Jira called WBS Gantt. I am not affiliated with them, but I've used it successfully. https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1211768/wbs-gantt-cha....

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