I Hate Jira Because ...
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I'm surprised we don't already have a thread for this, but I couldn't find one.
I don't know if the fault lies with Jira itself or the way our instance is configured (
), but right now, the #1 reason I hate Jira is the way it handles session expiration.I have multiple tickets. I have each one open in a tab, so I can easily switch back and forth between them. Occasionally, I want to update one of them. There's a lovely, big
Add Commentbutton. I click it.My session has expired, but I don't know this, and Jira doesn't tell me. It opens a text box. It lets me type my update in the text box. Sometimes, the update is just a sentence or two ("I was working on $other_project, so I didn't make any progress on this."), so what happens next isn't a big deal. Sometimes, the update is several paragraphs, with a very detailed explanation of the failure mechanism, with lots of copy-pasta from various, log files, spreadsheets, etc., which has taken a significant amount of time to put together.
When I'm done typing/copying/pasting the update, I click
Submit. The whole window is grayed-out, with a little spinny spinner. That just keeps spinning and spinning and spinning. Note that it still hasn't actually told me my session has expired, much less given me an opportunity to re-authenticate. Nope. Just spinning. And everything exceptCancelis disabled. Including text selection. I can't even select the text I just spent a half-hour typing to copy it.Canceldiscards the text buffer. (And still doesn't tell me the session is expired). At this point, the only way I know my session has expired is previous experience. The only way to find out my session has expired is to reload the page, which doesn't reload the page I was on, but takes me to the login page (after discarding the text buffer, of course). There is absolutely no way to salvage the text I entered. (Except screen-shotting it, I suppose.)
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I hate Jira because it somehow manages to make it hard to find out what anyone is really doing. Everything is just split up into itty-bitty things to inflate the number of issues and it's all just spread about so nobody gets a view of what is going on. It might be because my cow-orkers have made too many things. Projects? Epics? I just don't care any more. I'm in a confusing soup of stuff designed to hide the wood from the trees while making mountains out of molehills. You certainly can't tell what someone is doing from the assignments...
Sometimes, less is more.
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@dkf said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
I hate Jira because it somehow manages to make it hard to find out what anyone is really doing. Everything is just split up into itty-bitty things to inflate the number of issues and it's all just spread about so nobody gets a view of what is going on. It might be because my cow-orkers have made too many things. Projects? Epics? I just don't care any more. I'm in a confusing soup of stuff designed to hide the wood from the trees while making mountains out of molehills. You certainly can't tell what someone is doing from the assignments...
I hate JIRA as much as the next guy, but the above allows me to
my way out of work so maybe it's not as bad as I thought.
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@HardwareGeek said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
I'm surprised we don't already have a thread for this, but I couldn't find one.
I don't know if the fault lies with Jira itself or the way our instance is configured (
), but right now, the #1 reason I hate Jira is the way it handles session expiration.I have multiple tickets. I have each one open in a tab, so I can easily switch back and forth between them. Occasionally, I want to update one of them. There's a lovely, big
Add Commentbutton. I click it.My session has expired, but I don't know this, and Jira doesn't tell me. It opens a text box. It lets me type my update in the text box. Sometimes, the update is just a sentence or two ("I was working on $other_project, so I didn't make any progress on this."), so what happens next isn't a big deal. Sometimes, the update is several paragraphs, with a very detailed explanation of the failure mechanism, with lots of copy-pasta from various, log files, spreadsheets, etc., which has taken a significant amount of time to put together.
When I'm done typing/copying/pasting the update, I click
Submit. The whole window is grayed-out, with a little spinny spinner. That just keeps spinning and spinning and spinning. Note that it still hasn't actually told me my session has expired, much less given me an opportunity to re-authenticate. Nope. Just spinning. And everything exceptCancelis disabled. Including text selection. I can't even select the text I just spent a half-hour typing to copy it.Canceldiscards the text buffer. (And still doesn't tell me the session is expired). At this point, the only way I know my session has expired is previous experience. The only way to find out my session has expired is to reload the page, which doesn't reload the page I was on, but takes me to the login page (after discarding the text buffer, of course). There is absolutely no way to salvage the text I entered. (Except screen-shotting it, I suppose.)Huh, I always figured that was just because of the way ours is hooked into SSO.
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@PleegWat said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
Huh, I always figured that was just because of the way ours is hooked into SSO.
Could be. Maybe ours is hooked into SSO in the same stupid way.
Whatever the reason, I need to get into the habit of refreshing the page before starting to type an update.
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@HardwareGeek I don't have the specific session problem you're describing.
For me, if you have Jira set up the way you want, it works alright. It just takes a LOT of work to get that done. Tinkering with automation with shitty documentation, having to add filter after filter to get a good view of what you want on a regular basis, and getting workflows set up is just a big pain in the ass.
Although I just go with the
method for workflows: Just allow you to set any state from any other state. If I want to put a ticket from in-review back to backlog for whatever reason then so be it dammit.I think so many of Jira's problems stem from a common problem in enterprise software: Every company has its own weird workflows and policies, and Jira is trying to be flexible and as a result becomes a feature-bloated mess that evolved over time. Just like most things, things aren't absolute. Few companies are purely agile or purely waterfall or purely whatever else, so Jira's designed to handle whatever weird nuance any dev shop has.
At my present company, my biggest annoyance isn't with Jira itself, but how my company decided to use 8 other completely different software systems ranging from help desk management to CRM, and created a clusterfuck of an integration between all of them, resulting in so many fucking headaches with those moving parts I sometimes want to scream and throw my laptop out the window and go move to a shack in Montana.
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@The_Quiet_One The one time I've seen JIRA work OK was when it had virtually all the fancy workflow and hierarchy features disabled, and with only a minimum of issue states. The more you try to codify a workflow with lots of states and such, the less you fit the workflow that the team is using in practice and more you increase the pain for everyone.
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@dkf And it doesn't help if the different small teams in the overall large team interpret the general "human" (rather than "Jira-encoded") workflow subtly (or not-so-subtly) differently.
Overall, yes, it's best to keep the defined workflows simple and flexible, keeping in mind that "flexible" does not mean "lets one side change the workflow from day to day to suit themselves without consulting the other side". Especially when the side that jumps in and changes it (Product Marketing) doesn't even tell the other side (R&D tech lead team) that they changed it.
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I don't hate JIRA because I have not been forced to use it. Plenty of homegrown solutions and a couple that are now owned by IBM, but not that specific one everyone seems to adore.
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@HardwareGeek said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
There is absolutely no way to salvage the text I entered. (Except screen-shotting it, I suppose.)
Did you try accessing the textbox through developer tools?
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@HardwareGeek said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
Whatever the reason, I need to get into the habit of refreshing the page before starting to type an update.
No.
You write your long texts in Word (or similar) frist. Save that document to your local disk. Only then copy the contents over into Jira.
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@BernieTheBernie Either that or just never write up your findings and stick to the most monosyllabic utterances possible.
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I hate the way you talk to me, and the way you cut your hair.
I hate the way you drive my car. I hate it when you stare.
I hate your big dumb combat boots, and the way you read my mind.
I hate you so much it makes me sick; it even makes me rhyme.
I hate it, I hate the way you're always right. I hate it when you lie.
I hate it when you make me laugh, even worse when you make me cry.
I hate it when you're not around, and the fact that you didn't call.
But mostly I hate the way I don't hate you.
Not even close, not even a little bit, not even at all.
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@dkf said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
never write up your findings
Well, I was (in this case) trying to pass the buck to another guy to finish debugging (and hopefully fix) a particular test failure. It's not practical to do that without describing what I found. I could have typed it in a Teams chat, but that's not much better.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
@dkf And it doesn't help if the different small teams in the overall large team interpret the general "human" (rather than "Jira-encoded") workflow subtly (or not-so-subtly) differently.
Overall, yes, it's best to keep the defined workflows simple and flexible, keeping in mind that "flexible" does not mean "lets one side change the workflow from day to day to suit themselves without consulting the other side". Especially when the side that jumps in and changes it (Product Marketing) doesn't even tell the other side (R&D tech lead team) that they changed it.
Why the fuck marketing and R&D even have a shared workflow?
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@dkf said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
<runs screaming from the room>The more you try to codify a workflow with lots of states and such
And we so many required fields now just to resolve a ticket. Lots of duplicated info. And, no, I'm not going to look up the spec to reference the section. You wrote the bug - YOU do it!
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@HardwareGeek said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
@dkf said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
never write up your findings
Well, I was (in this case) trying to pass the buck to another guy to finish debugging (and hopefully fix) a particular test failure. It's not practical to do that without describing what I found. I could have typed it in a Teams chat, but that's not much better.
Some of ours bugs actually have links to the slack conversation. Thankfully, this has been brought up as "don't do that - copy the conversation into the ticket"
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@PleegWat said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
@HardwareGeek said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
I'm surprised we don't already have a thread for this, but I couldn't find one.
I don't know if the fault lies with Jira itself or the way our instance is configured (
), but right now, the #1 reason I hate Jira is the way it handles session expiration.I have multiple tickets. I have each one open in a tab, so I can easily switch back and forth between them. Occasionally, I want to update one of them. There's a lovely, big
Add Commentbutton. I click it.My session has expired, but I don't know this, and Jira doesn't tell me. It opens a text box. It lets me type my update in the text box. Sometimes, the update is just a sentence or two ("I was working on $other_project, so I didn't make any progress on this."), so what happens next isn't a big deal. Sometimes, the update is several paragraphs, with a very detailed explanation of the failure mechanism, with lots of copy-pasta from various, log files, spreadsheets, etc., which has taken a significant amount of time to put together.
When I'm done typing/copying/pasting the update, I click
Submit. The whole window is grayed-out, with a little spinny spinner. That just keeps spinning and spinning and spinning. Note that it still hasn't actually told me my session has expired, much less given me an opportunity to re-authenticate. Nope. Just spinning. And everything exceptCancelis disabled. Including text selection. I can't even select the text I just spent a half-hour typing to copy it.Canceldiscards the text buffer. (And still doesn't tell me the session is expired). At this point, the only way I know my session has expired is previous experience. The only way to find out my session has expired is to reload the page, which doesn't reload the page I was on, but takes me to the login page (after discarding the text buffer, of course). There is absolutely no way to salvage the text I entered. (Except screen-shotting it, I suppose.)Huh, I always figured that was just because of the way ours is hooked into SSO.
I think the non-SSO one used to do it too, or maybe did it so it was obvious the session expired, but you still lost the comment you just typed.
And Jira is not alone in doing this either. It's the problem of authorization cookies and the many conflicting requirements on them in general. The problem usually is that when the session expired, the user has to be redirected to the login endpoint to refresh it—even if that endpoint will immediately conclude that the user is still logged in, as is often the case with SSO, and promptly redirect them back with a new token—and preserving the state across this is non-trivial work.
Lately the Azure portal's been pissing me off with this: you come back to a tab with log queries, it pops up a dialog that you need to log in again and then it will pop up a confirmation dialog whether you want to leave the page because you have unsaved work, but in case you click no, the tab will completely freeze anyway so you can't really save the queries at that point anyway.
… and of course the reason why you can't pop up the login in an iframe in an overlay or something is security—if the login dialog could be opened in iframe, some misfit could open it so with an overlay and do a clickjacking attack, so that is prevented by the attributes on the login dialog.
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@The_Quiet_One said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
@HardwareGeek I don't have the specific session problem you're describing.
The cloud version seems to not have it, or maybe it's just that the refresh tokens work fine for account connected to Windows.
For me, if you have Jira set up the way you want, it works alright. It just takes a LOT of work to get that done. Tinkering with automation with shitty documentation, having to add filter after filter to get a good view of what you want on a regular basis, and getting workflows set up is just a big pain in the ass.
There is one glaring omission that can only be fixed with automation to an extent though: you can define relationship between tokens that one depends on another, but that has absolutely no effect on other things. I would really expect a blocks/blocked by link to have two effects: you can't add the blocked into a sprint without the blocking one, and the blocking one is always higher in the ordering. You can do this with automation, but you can only do it by moving the other ticket after the fact, but I don't think you can pop up a dialog warning you it's happening or otherwise making it obvious when you are moving the first ticket.
Although I just go with the
method for workflows: Just allow you to set any state from any other state. If I want to put a ticket from in-review back to backlog for whatever reason then so be it dammit.IME anything can be put back to backlog usually. It's more things like returning a ticket from testing back to review that the workflow does not provide for.
I think so many of Jira's problems stem from a common problem in enterprise software: Every company has its own weird workflows and policies, and Jira is trying to be flexible and as a result becomes a feature-bloated mess that evolved over time. Just like most things, things aren't absolute. Few companies are purely agile or purely waterfall or purely whatever else, so Jira's designed to handle whatever weird nuance any dev shop has.
Indeed. It looks like it should be simple, but it ain't.
The other problem is the UI inconsistencies as they piecemeally rewrote the UI from the separate edit dialogs it used to use to directly switching any property to editable on click. It was a big mess for a while. Now it's mostly done, though it resulted in some less than intuitive things like you change type of a ticket by clicking on the type icon.
At my present company, my biggest annoyance isn't with Jira itself, but how my company decided to use 8 other completely different software systems ranging from help desk management to CRM, and created a clusterfuck of an integration between all of them, resulting in so many fucking headaches with those moving parts I sometimes want to scream and throw my laptop out the window and go move to a shack in Montana.
Yeah, hyperinstrumentemia has been a chronic issue of software companies, but it's up to epidemic levels lately.
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@Bulb said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
@PleegWat said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
@HardwareGeek said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
I'm surprised we don't already have a thread for this, but I couldn't find one.
I don't know if the fault lies with Jira itself or the way our instance is configured (
), but right now, the #1 reason I hate Jira is the way it handles session expiration.I have multiple tickets. I have each one open in a tab, so I can easily switch back and forth between them. Occasionally, I want to update one of them. There's a lovely, big
Add Commentbutton. I click it.My session has expired, but I don't know this, and Jira doesn't tell me. It opens a text box. It lets me type my update in the text box. Sometimes, the update is just a sentence or two ("I was working on $other_project, so I didn't make any progress on this."), so what happens next isn't a big deal. Sometimes, the update is several paragraphs, with a very detailed explanation of the failure mechanism, with lots of copy-pasta from various, log files, spreadsheets, etc., which has taken a significant amount of time to put together.
When I'm done typing/copying/pasting the update, I click
Submit. The whole window is grayed-out, with a little spinny spinner. That just keeps spinning and spinning and spinning. Note that it still hasn't actually told me my session has expired, much less given me an opportunity to re-authenticate. Nope. Just spinning. And everything exceptCancelis disabled. Including text selection. I can't even select the text I just spent a half-hour typing to copy it.Canceldiscards the text buffer. (And still doesn't tell me the session is expired). At this point, the only way I know my session has expired is previous experience. The only way to find out my session has expired is to reload the page, which doesn't reload the page I was on, but takes me to the login page (after discarding the text buffer, of course). There is absolutely no way to salvage the text I entered. (Except screen-shotting it, I suppose.)Huh, I always figured that was just because of the way ours is hooked into SSO.
I think the non-SSO one used to do it too, or maybe did it so it was obvious the session expired, but you still lost the comment you just typed.
And Jira is not alone in doing this either. It's the problem of authorization cookies and the many conflicting requirements on them in general. The problem usually is that when the session expired, the user has to be redirected to the login endpoint to refresh it—even if that endpoint will immediately conclude that the user is still logged in, as is often the case with SSO, and promptly redirect them back with a new token—and preserving the state across this is non-trivial work.
Lately the Azure portal's been pissing me off with this: you come back to a tab with log queries, it pops up a dialog that you need to log in again and then it will pop up a confirmation dialog whether you want to leave the page because you have unsaved work, but in case you click no, the tab will completely freeze anyway so you can't really save the queries at that point anyway.
… and of course the reason why you can't pop up the login in an iframe in an overlay or something is security—if the login dialog could be opened in iframe, some misfit could open it so with an overlay and do a clickjacking attack, so that is prevented by the attributes on the login dialog.
Slack did get an improvement on this relatively recently - sessions last a week, and we get a notification at the bottom of the window starting an hour or so before the session is due to expire with a link to re-log in immediately. Before that it used to be a sudden "supprise you are logged out", where it typically wouldn't even notice until you tried to send a message.
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@PleegWat said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
Slack did get an improvement on this relatively recently - sessions last a week, and we get a notification at the bottom of the window starting an hour or so before the session is due to expire with a link to re-log in immediately. Before that it used to be a sudden "supprise you are logged out", where it typically wouldn't even notice until you tried to send a message.
Which, for Slack, is still very wrong. You expect it to receive messages whenever they arrive, and having to watch over it so it continues to do so seriously limits the usefulness.
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I hate Jira because it doesn't seem to matter how much configured it is, or not, it still runs slow as molasses even on Atlassian's cloud with less than 10 users and no extra addons.
I have only seen one instance of Jira that didn't underperform. It was a cloud instance with 1 user, showing projects in swimlanes (i.e. a basic kanban board) with never more than 15 tickets in its entire lifespan.
The workflow nonsense is just the icing on the shit sandwich really.
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@Bulb said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
hyperinstrumentemia
Seems like there should be a pill for that.
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@Arantor said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
it still runs slow as molasses
I've never noticed that, but generally I only have to interact with it once or twice a week, which is why my session is always expired.
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@Gustav Technically oriented studies for the PM roadmap.
And that's a whole WTF of its own, since doing those studies is the job of the tech leads, and yet it appears nowhere on our(1) formal job description(2).
And to be honest, it's not really a shared workflow, except for the last step (based on the study, does PM add the project to the roadmap or not).
(1) I'm one of them, duh.
(2) And it shouldn't, either, because it shouldn't be our job.
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@HardwareGeek said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
@Bulb said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
hyperinstrumentemia
Seems like there should be a pill for that.
No. The only cure possible is a coup de grâce.
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@HardwareGeek said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
@Bulb said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
hyperinstrumentemia
Seems like there should be a pill for that.
It would be great if there was a pill for that, but that would basically have to be a pill for stupidity.
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@HardwareGeek said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
@Bulb said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
hyperinstrumentemia
Seems like there should be a pill for that.
Anyway, I'd prefer a pill against that.
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@Bulb said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
hyperinstrumentemia
Hyper meaning high.
Instrument meaning instrument.
Emia meaning presence in blood.
High instrument presence in blood.
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@The_Quiet_One said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
Hyper meaning high.
Instrument meaning instrument.
Emia meaning presence in blood.
I thought this was a bit more generic, but I think it works well enough.
High instrument presence in blood.
I would call it close enough to “too many tools in circulation”.
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@The_Quiet_One
A company bought six different process management products. This is what happened to its employees. "TD", a 107-year-old financial services firm, presented to the bankruptcy court insolvent. ...
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@TwelveBaud For each
LSigma, you need a process management product of its own. So it sums up correctly.
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@BernieTheBernie said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
@TwelveBaud For each
LSigma, you need a process management product of its own. So it sums up correctly.Six Ligma sounds like the next great fad in corporate management.
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Mail time!
Take a fucking guess Megan.
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Everything from Atlassian is terrible. It's the Boston of software companies.
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@Bulb said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
Emia meaning presence in blood.
I thought this was a bit more generic, but I think it works well enough.
In the context of Jira, the word is "emesis".
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@MrL
given the origins it's more likely that it's trying to kill us
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@LaoC said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
@Bulb said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
Emia meaning presence in blood.
I thought this was a bit more generic, but I think it works well enough.
In the context of Jira, the word is "emesis".
That's a possible symptom. But for the condition, -emia works best from the common suffixes.
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I currently Hate Jira Because …
… it is progressively switching to markdown, which on its own is a worthy goal, except it means you currently have to type one in some entry fields and the other in others, resulting in ugly mess.
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In surprising news, Atlassian discovering that people don’t like the cloud so much.
Atlassian predicts on-prem products to outgrow its cloud
That is not the plan – nor was a larger loss – so investors whacked the Aussie’s share price
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@Arantor said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
In surprising news, Atlassian discovering that people don’t like the cloud so much.
It's … complicated.
They discontinued the single server install already, so the “on-prem products” are mainly the “datacenter edition” ones, which are used by the huge enterprises that pay extra for the privilege to have the installation in their own security zealots' grubby fingers instead of the provider's grubby fingers. It's quite possible the few installs by such big corporations will make more revenue for them than the thousands smaller companies using the provided service.
Plus it's “datacenter edition”, it will run in a datacenter, either one operated by the company central IT, which to the rest of the company is no different from a cloud provider, or from a big cloud provider like Amazon or Microsoft, just the central IT rents the raw VMs and Kubernetes clusters and installs the software themselves with their carefully customized network settings to make sure everybody has to keep coming to them to get access here and there.
So it's all running in the cloud either way.
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Back to reasons I hate Jira…
You can't ever find a fucking thing in it. A lot of times I have a vague recollection that there must have been an issue for this or that, but with the various filters on the various boards there is always a handful of them that exist, but don't show up in the right place, so then I resort to the search, but with the narrow column the results are in (especially compared to the wide column of backlog) and manual paging (at this day and age) that just makes surveying the results hard. Also, the search sucks.
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@Bulb The main reason to hope for a classic Colony Drop is that it would wipe out Atlassian.
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@Bulb yeah. Jira's search makes
's search look great.
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@Bulb said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
@Arantor said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
In surprising news, Atlassian discovering that people don’t like the cloud so much.
It's … complicated.
They discontinued the single server install already, so the “on-prem products” are mainly the “datacenter edition” ones, which are used by the huge enterprises that pay extra for the privilege to have the installation in their own security zealots' grubby fingers instead of the provider's grubby fingers. It's quite possible the few installs by such big corporations will make more revenue for them than the thousands smaller companies using the provided service.
Plus it's “datacenter edition”, it will run in a datacenter, either one operated by the company central IT, which to the rest of the company is no different from a cloud provider, or from a big cloud provider like Amazon or Microsoft, just the central IT rents the raw VMs and Kubernetes clusters and installs the software themselves with their carefully customized network settings to make sure everybody has to keep coming to them to get access here and there.
So it's all running in the cloud either way.
Yeah, we have a corporate license. We also have a big deal with AWS (that satisfies all the security weenies) and we run it there. It's technically the Data Center license but we run it the same as when we had it running on one of our own single servers.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
@Bulb yeah. Jira's search makes
's search look great.I find stuff all the time with both searches.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
@Bulb yeah. Jira's search makes
's search look great.The full-text one seems to have gotten quite a bit better lately—in the cloud version; the server edition is no longer being updated, so there it will continue to suck until the users give up and move to the cloud—, but our problem is compounded by having a mixture of English and our native language there
.
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@boomzilla said in I Hate Jira Because ...:
It's technically the Data Center license but we run it the same as when we had it running on one of our own single servers.
My understanding is that the difference is that “server edition” you get as a .war, while “data center edition” you get as a docker image and maybe a helm chart to set it up.
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@Bulb could be. I'm just a luser when it comes to our Atlassian stuff (we also use Confluence and Bamboo).
