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Comment by dan-robertson | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I feel like a lot of hating on Jira is just hating on bug management in general – it’s hard to know what things to work on, to deduplicate bugs, to track when they’re fixed, etc. That said, I do find Jira’s implementation pretty painful. Mostly I dislike that it is all a little bit janky/slow/inconsistent, and that it has a million features and possible ways to use it. But I’ve only used an old version and maybe the newer versions are better.

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31813957 (I noticed shortcut and linear being popularish alternatives there) and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25212441 which I always think of when Jira is discussed.

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I agree with a lot of the individual gripes people raise with JIRA, but I've never heard a strong case for not using it to track the progress of a multi-discipline team to deliver projects.

By which I mean, I've heard _dozens_ of cases, but they rarely amount to more than a gripes-fueled gish gallop. Even rarer still is the offer of a functional alternative, and on the rare occasions I have seen one adopted, the same gripes have reared their heads pretty quickly.

"I just want to do X, why won't it let me" is the most common, and it is akin to "works on my machine" for me. JIRA isn't trying to solve for ten sets of workflow preferences, it's trying to give you the minimal set whereby you can reasonably track and deliver. Anything more than that is noise, not signal.

I feel like the strongest issue I have with Jira, and the one that most often trips me up, is that so many features and settings are global, and aren't the minimal set. For a sufficiently large org, you need a high degree of rigor around things like Labels and Epic naming, or you end up with labels of "production" "prod" "Prod" and "PROD" and no one knows which one to use.

It only gets worse when you're working with addons - half of the UI of any ticket is things I have to go hide because one team integrated Figma with Jira and now it shows up on every project and ticket.

Yeah, Jira definitely needs Benevolent Dictator in charge of the stuff that bleeds out to other teams.

You can have any funky workflows you want, but labels and I think components are instance-globals.

The issue is Jira's permission management also seems terrible in the exact way that makes it hard to create that sort of role without making that person also responsible for a myriad of banal options that everyone needs turned on.

Better is subjective. It's less flexible now and it's not perfect. It has arbitrary constraints that make things hard (no cross Jira project tracking, wtf?) but it's as good as anything else and it's familiar.

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