Jira has some asinine design issues, e.g. the only way you can link a git commit to a ticket is by putting the ticket ID into the commit message, generally has confusing choices for UI, code blocks {code}are annoying to add{code} and don't follow any existing conventions, integration with Confluence sucks, basic functionality is locked away in paid extensions, the list goes on
My biggest complaint is the nonsensical UI. I never know when I click a ticket if I'm going to get a) a split screen view, b) a modal pop up, c) a full screen view, or d) sirens in the distance.
When I click the 'back' button, I never know if I'm a) closing the ticket I have in a split screen, b) going back to the search results, or c) going back to Confluence and losing my search results and wondering how I was in Confluence to begin with.
You'd think this would mean there was a healthy market for native client apps using the JIRA API with a more pleasant UI (as there certainly is for Git, e.g.), but strangely not.
MVP Jira just needs to present a list of stuff to do.
But now it's used like a panopticon of social control where I work.
And I'm thinking I'm not the only one with stuff like Scaled Agile being out there.
Jira doesn't have to be evil. It is intrinsically awful due to that tendency enterprise database products have of growing the flexibility to reimplement various wheels inside of them, poorly. But using it for evil depends on managerial intent.
At my gig, everyone grumbles about Jira, because it sucks; see above. But, we have workflows built primarily around it with various integrations, and it works for coordinating ~200 folks in a starting-to-get-there "Agile" model.
It is actually the worst for the managers - they spend a surprising amount of time noodling around in Jira to feed the workflows. For individual contributors, it works and isn't too much overhead.
From an administration standpoint, it is OK (we run the on-prem version). More stable than some enterprise monstrosities, but the with occasional problem. The plugin-store-thing is annoying - somehow it manages to entice nearly every new business-side user into asking for some random thing, they usually get what they want, and then they sit unused aside from occasionally breaking things.
It must have gotten a lot of stability improvements since I stopped managing jira clusters a few years ago because, from the ops side of things, JIRA was one of our main "make a cron job that restarts tomcat every night" running jokes at multiple companies over the last decade.
I've also had wonderful (/s) experience with the unicorns in Gitlab but that's another tale.
My previous QA manager tried to get the QA/engineering/product management groups to "do agile", heavily because of the agile board functionality added to JIRA. Nobody ever got any training on how to "do agile" but the fact that we were becoming an "agile company" was heavily pushed as the internal narrative, all the way up to execs.
Most of product teams still don't function with any kind of actual agile process. Many try to fake it by endlessly throwing all of their work into the JIRA agile boards, which constantly have sprints rolling over, and are impossible to track any kind of actual velocity with. On our team we just said screw this and went back to getting things done, and tracking things how we wanted to track them.
Don't even get me started on the nightmare that is JIRA TCM, which my company is currently still stuck with for test case management.
Thanks for putting this into words for me. This is exactly how I feel about Jira. Incompetent middle management automates their micromanaging and enforces bad ideas about how their subordinates should do their jobs.
It's also daaaamn slow. And when you paste formatted content into it (at least from vim on a mac), lol, have fun cleaning up your newly-unformatted content.
Presumably after the fact by linking them entirely within Jira. You could mention the commit in the ticket, but that wouldn't make a back-link from the commit if someone's browsing from that direction.
That said, I don't really mind mentioning the ticket in the commit. It's relevant to what one is doing when one makes the commit.
But then I use gerrit at my job, so I don't have room to complain about others' systems.
I think naming the branch and/or the pr title after the jira ticket works too. I think it just needs to contain it, too. My feature branches usually look something like feature/proj-123-short-description. But to be honest, my extended commit descriptions usually contain the ticket number too, so I may be remembering wrong.
