Freebie tier coming to issue-tracking Jira, but you'll have to cough up to unlock the good stuff Recent entrant to the billion-dollar collaboration club Atlassian is to unleash a free version of the Jira issue-tracking system amid a shake-up of its cloud pricing plans. After price hikes left customers a little lighter in the pocket, the introduction of a free tier for Jira Software, Confluence, Jira Service Desk and Jira …
The last time I criticised Jira I was told that it was good for project lifecycle management (I think that means the pretty dashboard for PMs) and Bugzilla wasn't. Oh, and any tickets struck in the wrong status are apparently a site problem, not a Jira problem. So all we need now are excuses for the crappy search, no easy way to get a list of tickets you've contributed to previously, and it continually forgetting the login session.
I just checked now (after logging in again, natch). I want just my tickets in one specific project, the profile page shows every change in reverse date order (so each ticket could appear several times) from all projects and then I have to keep clicking show more.
I'm sure there's a magic query one can write on the issues page, but I can't find it. And as for the output, it doesn't help that Order By dropdown field name search doesn't search by substring and there are 140-odd field names.
> tickets struck in the wrong status are apparently a site problem, not a Jira problem
Technically that's true.
JIRA let's you amend/modify workflows, including what statuses a ticket of a given type is allowed to transition to from other statuses.
So, if someone's set up
In Progress -> Fuck it can't be arsed
And not allowed
In Progress -> Done
Then you're going to get a bunch of tickets in "Fuck it can't be arsed" rather than "Done". Technically that's the fault of whoever set it up, not JIRA itself.
The wisdom of JIRA letting you shoot yourself in the foot in that manner, though is something else.
My JIRA's install's always worked well for me, but the crucial bit is, I do not change the default flows/settings. I've been places where JIRA's been a nightmare, though, and without fail someone's always "improved" the workflows in some way and made life hell for all the other users.
It's using the right tool for the right job though, sometimes JIRA just isn't the right tool
Why should a ticket in the wrong state be such a trauma for Jira? It should be possible to just let some user have admin permission to put it in whatever state it needs to be in, instead what usually happens is someone high-up who doesn't need to be bothered by this ends up cloning the ticket and messing round with it to get it in the right state.
If your requirement is for an issue-tracker facility, use Bugzilla for sure.
If you want plan and manage Agile sprints and run KANBAN/SCRUM boards, use Jira, or better - LEANKit. Also if you're using Confluence for your Wiki, the ability to insert Jira card links and Jira reports in Confluence pages is nice.
Mind you we use on-site instances of Jira and Confluence - the experience of Cloud-based versions is probably rather different.
I gave up on ticket management software long ago. Nothing works, really.
I now run my teams on a manual system: CRMs, support personnel, integrators and the upper elite of the user-base feed "issues" in via the usual dodgy means -- usually a badly scanned, upside-down monochrome photocopy of an iPhone displaying a photograph of the screen, half obscured by a shadow, with half a word edited on in hotpink mouse-hand via MS Paint -- and some poor sod collates those and manually curates a backlog of issues in the form of a good ol' spreadsheet.
The team survives. Every few months, someone wants graphs and numbers for some management presentation or meeting or drumming circle or whatever and we make those up -- also in a spreadsheet. The team performs well enough that nobody ever challenges them anyway.
Find and fix your own bugs before release -- it's quicker than fighting with Jira's bugs after.
Isn't it ironic that, after decades of work as an "architect", all that knowledge of frameworks and libraries and languages and platforms and "paradigms" and next-new-things has gone as quickly as I picked them up and dropped them and, in the end, the only thing I've really become better at is testing?
"Why build it this way?" they always ask. "Because, if it's broken, it'll explode in spectacular style and we'll know about it," I always answer. "There's a package that will save us these 60 lines, can't we use that?" "No. Those 60 lines are trivial and can be 100% covered by tests with a `for`-loop and some randomised data. That package does everything under the sun and has 2000 open issues on their github page. Which do YOU want to debug?"
This will work... right up until you get hit by a bus. The (only) real usefulness of systems used by lots of people... is that lots of people use them, so you become replacable. Jira, for all its faults (and it has SO so many) is used by a lot of software teams, so onboarding PMs is easy. Depends on your business, of course.
currently in the process of migrating to a self hosted solution rather than sticking with bit bucket. Our org makes it so difficult to pay with credit cards, the overhead of raising requests monthly to get a card to pay the bill means we are going back to hosting the repos ourselves. If Jira et al go the same way, it will be good bye from us.
It wont be missed, so slow
For bugs, Jira can work well, if you can customize to fit your needs, like automatic assignment at different steps of the workflow and screens to show only the fields we need. And this change is only for our team (and another where I duplicated the change), so it's doesn't impact other people. I feel like it's saving us some time and avoid having to ask QA for missing info. At least it's our current situation and we are lucky to have a) QA and dev leads who agree on what they want b) necessary admin access to make the changes.
Speed is an issue, sometimes it just crawls.
2 different types of project Old and Next gen, but you can't have the features of both, so no best of both worlds (I use both daily and it's annoying not to have the same features depending on the project.
The lack of searching/filtering in some views are annoying too, like in the backlog I can't filter stuff by status
+ points, links well with bitbucket, tickets can show commits, prs branches etc, can trigger ticket status updates etc, it's quite powerful if used properly, and it doesn't look too bad
I pay for the 10 user license now, I'll be glad to get it for free :)
If you think you'll ever create anything in
any way interesting in jira successfully, You're mistaken . Please for the love of 5 guys Think outside agile as 2019 comes close to an end and welcome in a new area where PMs find their own job to do and let developers reach their potential . Planning poker as fun as it was is so 2018.
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