Has anyone used JIRA on a laptop, you only have about 1/2 the screen to actually work with.
My team does a simple Kanban with sticky notes on a white wall, like in Silicon Valley TV show.
This blog post is just strawmanning for a tool that rightfully deserves to be criticized.
We used JIRA effectively at my last job, the things that made it work for us:
- stop adding shitloads of required fields. Title, description, branch, priority (defaulted), status (defaulted), type (bug/feature). We might have had some others, but that was all I remember being required.
- stop writing shitty descriptions: spend more time writing something that your co-worker can use. Respect their time enough to try to include enough detail for them to actually use the ticket. Be available to answer questions when they are assigned a ticket you wrote.
- you don’t need extremely granular statuses: the functional role of the assignee is enough to determine what “state” it’s in, trying to codify a unidirectional flow of tickets is maddening and overly complicated. Work is messy, it flows back and forth, you do not need a “rejected by qa” status. Just leave it open and reassign to the developer with a comment. Managers find out when individuals are submitting half-assed work on a regular basis, you don’t need JIRA for that (unless you need metrics to fire them… different problem).
I agree with the premise of the article, JIRA is a communication tool, not a management tool.
Nope, I absolutely hate Jira and everything that I needed to do in it at my old job. Luckily for most stuff we had other issue trackers (multiple, but that’s another issue), but whenever I had to touch Jira or any other Atlassian tool, it was a bad time.