Comment by mikehollinger 10 months ago
I am fascinated by how complex JIRA is. We evaluated it in 2008. It seemed fine enough.
Looking at it 16 years later, and… what is this nonsense? It’s so customizable that it’s loaded with footguns.
In fact, the name “Jira” is a reference to Bugzilla. Atlassian says:
https://confluence.atlassian.com/plugins/servlet/mobile?cont...
> We originally used Bugzilla for bug tracking and the developers in the office started calling it by the Japanese name for Godzilla, Gojira (the original black-and-white Japanese Godzilla films are also office favourites). As we developed our own bug tracker, and then it became an issue tracker, the name stuck, but the Go got dropped - hence JIRA.
I had some thoughts on Jira: https://honeypot.net/2021/10/01/jira-is-a.html
TL;DR it's so completely customizable that it's more like a DIY project management toolkit. Pivotal and Linear have/had a more opinionated approach: "here's how you manage projects. Good luck and have fun!" Jira almost seems to push otherwise rational people to build the most baroque processes imaginable.
> Jira almost seems to push otherwise rational people to build the most baroque processes imaginable.
PM's gotta justify their jobs somehow.
I love a good PM. Trust me, you don't want to be responsible for all the reporting and status updates and all that they have to deal with daily.
It's just that I've never worked with someone I considered a good PM who loved Jira. The great ones wouldn't care if we did all the planning on papyrus because they were more concerned with getting things done than documenting them in excruciating detail.
I have a theory: Back in 1996 Bugzilla worked very well. It had been designed, and honed, by a bunch of senior developers who also wrote the bug management system. So lots of dog food eaten. iirc it was written in Perl.
Then, someone I believe decided to make a "Bugzilla in Java", because they didn't like Perl (reasonable).
But whoever that was didn't have the deep knowledge of how the thing was supposed to be used. Lacking that insight, they created a "Swiss Army Chainsaw", implementing simultaneously everything, and nothing.
Next, some MBAs got hold of the thing, and made everything 10X worse.
Meanwhile, Bugzilla is still the same and still the best software project management tool, if you know how it's intended to be used.