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2021-01-19 - Jira the Venting

I will let you know my bias before getting into it. I don't like Jira. This is informed by years of mandated usage as a software engineer as a software engineering manager, and as a sr. software engineering manager.

Jira is an issue tracker produced by Atlassian Software.

Let's break it down.

Stunted Agile Process

Agile, for me, is a process for managing the lifecycle of work. It facilitates work prioritization, organization, execution and process evolution. The process evolution bit is, I think, the most important. It requires you on continually improving and evolving your process to better fit the work and the team.

Jira works fine if you use Scrum or Kanban and never evolve your process. However, as soon as you start evolving your process, you start running into many limitations.

There are many articles already detailing how Jira is either *not* Agile or inhibits Agile growth.

Automation and the Jira API

Jira's API is a good example of an API after the fact. It is not designed with Application Programming eXperience (APX) in mind. It may take one or many calls to create a single completed issue type. UI users are cannot also access the API. Issue types don't all operate with the same or similar sets of commands.

Editing User Experience

It's just painful. Some fields are editable, some are not. Sometimes you can edit the field inline with a smaller view, sometimes you need to open up the issue completely in order to make the edit.