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Comment by Steltek | Hacker News Reader

(I feel like we jumped topics from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28597895)

JIRA's Search is far worse than the regular JIRA hotkeys. The Enter key will incorrectly tab-complete JQL just before executing the search. Meanwhile, the Tab key doesn't tab-complete and instead focuses the Search button (which lets you execute the uncorrupted JQL). You have to actively train yourself out of how everything else works just to avoid going insane. Well, that or use the mouse just to click Search (eww).

Every ticket tracking system sucks. Trello was the closest thing to joy.

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Gitlab is another culprit for this and their UI/UX is growing to be as awful as every other complex enterprise tool on the market.

The search/filter box on the MR and Issues list has the appearance of accepting free input, but what you need to do is use some ridiculous no-code query UI to click your way to a valid query.

I can't type 'author: xxx' into the field, because that will tell me that searching that way is unsupported (so why let me do it?). Instead, I have to start typing, select the word 'author', then another box will appear and I have to select '=' in it, and then a third box will materialise where I can search for a username. At this stage, it's basically a coin toss as to whether you get the desired input or the whole form breaks and you have to start again. Someone, somewhere, thought this was more intuitive than parsing a string or offering some predefined filters.

My only question is: why?

It's out-of-band signaling which eliminates the ambiguity between searching for "author=" and searching for an author. It's still probably bad user experience. I'm not sure if it's justifiable, given how GitHub code search mostly ignores punctuation (whuch I hate too), whereas GitLab seems more literal.

It's specifically related to finding authors of merge requests, or issues, rather than a generic code search.

It's easy enough for me to try to load a Jira page, start typing something on the search field before the page is fully loaded, which causes all keystrokes to be interpreted as shortcuts. With obviously funny results. It is not uncommon for users in our project to suddenly select all the issues in the product, and assign all of them to themselves by accident (which, unlike delete, shows no confirmation whatsoever).

Above a certain level of complexity, Jira is the best work tracking and managing solution I've worked with.

Its curse, is its developed by Atlassian. A company that was capable of buying Stash, and, somehow, somewhat, turned that codebase into what we now know as bitbucket.

Other way around. They made Stash in house, they bought BitBucket, and rebranded Stash as BitBucket Server. The BB acquisition happened before Stash was released but Stash was not an acquisition.

I was of the impression that they bought Stash, renamed it to Bitbucket Server, and stopped development, while slowly attempting to reimplement stash code into Bitbucket cloud, one feature at a time?

Nope, you can see a condensed version of their acquisition history on their Wiki page for more proof: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlassian#Acquisitions_and_pro...

When BitBucket was acquired they were cloud only, and when Stash launched it was on-prem only. We used Stash and BitBucket Cloud around that time at the place I was working and I can definitely tell you that on-prem Stash was definitely not a reskinned on-prem BitBucket Cloud; for one I’m pretty sure BitBucket Cloud was written in Python (Django) and Stash was a typical Atlassian Java product.

If your org needs that much complexity it probably is at a point that the time and money wasted waiting for Jira todo things is probably small in comparison to the rest of the wasted efficiency.

The main issue with Jira is it allows you to build far, far too complicated workflows. And Jira + someone who believes in job security via complexity and obfuscation can be a horrific combination.

The best part of Jira is because it is so flexible, no matter how your process slightly deviates from a basic trello-like board, you should be able to make one or two adjustments in JIRA and have it reflect that.

That's not true of literally any other workflow piece of software I've used, and I've used a ton.

That said, because all the other types of workflow management software I've used are significantly more opinionated and limited, they also limit how bad of a process a bad project administrator can create in them as well.

Jira somehow manages to perfectly capture the soupy grottiness of a hangover with its user experience. The cloud edition especially is like swimming in treacle, there's just so many little glitches and random bouts of sluggishness it feels like you're dealing with a quick proof of concept someone wrote when they were drunk one afternoon, not the polished product of a billion-dollar juggernaut.

> Every ticket tracking system sucks. Trello was the closest thing to joy.

Absolutely this. I grew up working on an FRC team that used Trello, and I think we got more done as high-schoolers than most modern Agile teams could.

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