The sorry state of task tracking
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The common wisdom tends to be that JIRA is the best kid in town. But while it is kinda OK, it's somewhat hard to believe for two glaring omissions:
- Subtask workflow has no relationship to the parent workflow. I'd at least expect the parent task to be started when any of the subtasks is and either advanced automatically, or ask whether you want to, to the next past working when all subtasks are closed.
- The links have no effect either. I would at least expect it to prevent or warn you when you move a task before another it is marked as being blocked by or successor of.
Ok, I know that both the workflow and the link types are configurable, but I would expect a mechanism for this. Or are all our JIRAs just underconfigured?
Or is there any other issue tracker that can do those things – while being at least no harder to use than JIRA.
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My take on JIRA is that it is a beast of a thing that tries to be the solution to everyones problems, and because of that is retardedly complicated.
The thing that always bothers me is that epics do not get time estimates from the tasks in the epic, for instance. There is a plugin for that, but to me, that seems like a pretty basic thing. It's just the emacs of task management; kitchen sink and everything else inlcuded.
And pretty much every place I work seems to use and hate it.
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@Carnage said in The sorry state of task tracking:
kitchen sink and everything else inlcuded
It rather looks like a kitchen sink, and the rest has to be bought separately (= installed as plugins). It's true that we have a plugin for test management there, which uses its special types of tickets for that…
@Carnage said in The sorry state of task tracking:
And pretty much every place I work seems to use and hate it.
I don't think anyone really hates it around here, but it feels like it really needs you to complete things.
… that said every larger project that uses GitHub now has a bot that manipulates tasks there, because that task tracker does much, much less still.
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@Bulb said in The sorry state of task tracking:
a bot that manipulates tasks
“I'm going to close your issue without ever even looking at it.”
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@dkf
nobody looked at your task for 30 days so it has been automatically closed
look at our efficiency! all our tasks are done within 30 days!
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@dkf said in The sorry state of task tracking:
@Bulb said in The sorry state of task tracking:
a bot that manipulates tasks
“I'm going to close your issue without ever even looking at it.”
Google loves to do that, yes. Mozilla does not – their bot is mainly assigning reviewers and kicking off test and merge builds.
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@Bulb said in The sorry state of task tracking:
Google loves to do that, yes.
I was thinking about how quite a few larger projects on Github work. (My project only has the upstream-security-issues tracking bot enabled.)
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@dkf yes, and I am saying that the projects where I've seen it are mostly originating at Google. Which does not mean others are not guilty of it as well, but the Google-originating ones usually are.
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JIRA is the worst piece of time and ticket management software I've ever used, apart from all the others.
It is a bit of a donkey with 100 tails - almost every JIRA is incorrectly configured because it's so configurable you can be lost in those menus for days. To be fair to Atlassian that's because every company has different ways of working and so, if it weren't, it wouldn't really fulfil the needs of most very well.
I've always got on with it far better using Epics and Stories, rather than Stories and Tasks (the subelements of a ticket).
You definitely can have estimates (either time based or points based from a custom field) from stories sum up into an epic. I think it's set up like that for us at work.
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@bobjanova said in The sorry state of task tracking:
JIRA is the worst piece of time and ticket management software I've ever used, apart from all the others.
I think that's the only sane description for JIRA. It's infuriating at times, but most alternatives are much worse. Just like operating systems, databases and ERPs, there are no task trackers that you won't eventually learn to hate.
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@Bulb said in The sorry state of task tracking:
Ok, I know that both the workflow and the link types are configurable, but I would expect a mechanism for this. Or are all our JIRAs just underconfigured?
If that's an excuse, then any programming language is the best task manager ever, you just need to "configure" it.
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@sockpuppet7 well, that's true. I've caught myself several times writing one-off C# programs where the standard task schedulers etc. wouldn't work well.
One of the reasons why people hated Discourse here was because it provided One True Way of having Civilized Discourse, and had no way to disable e.g. ability to edit other people's topic names by particularly active users.
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@bobjanova said in The sorry state of task tracking:
JIRA is the worst piece of time and ticket management software I've ever used, apart from all the others.
I've used others that are much more bare bones that don't try to be a reporting platform, task tracker and everything else. I much prefer to use a single task tracking tool that does that well oer a huge blob of horrible that does everything poorly. JIRA is the SAP of programming.
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@bobjanova said in The sorry state of task tracking:
You definitely can have estimates (either time based or points based from a custom field) from stories sum up into an epic. I think it's set up like that for us at work.
Then that's likely a plugin.
At my workplace we happen to be running this one - it's rather bare-bones but it's cheap (after all, plugins for the cloud version tend to be billed per user).
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Have you tried using...
(•\_•)
( •_•)>⌐■-■
(⌐■_■)
Discourse?
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All issue tracking systems suck, in their own individual ways. Jira is kinda "the best house in a bad neighborhood."
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@boomzilla said in The sorry state of task tracking:
Have you tried using...
(•\_•)
( •_•)>⌐■-■
(⌐■_■)
Discourse?If using discourse causes that horrible scar
(•\_•)next to your nose that you have to hide with sunglasses, then I don't want to use it.
