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Or is it Awfully-Complete? :)

Jira is the ultimate example of the concept of alienation. If Marx knew about Atlassian the Grundrisse would have been insanely lit.

The worst part is that every company with a tasks product works right towards Jira. Compare what GitHub issues were in 2014 to what they are today: https://github.com/features/issues

and they keep. adding. redundant. features

Quite a few have, the issue is that every Jira instance is a fractal shit snowflake of custom properties several layers deep through old failed migrations to new organization strategies.

And many times the API can do stuff that the UI doesn't allow, and everyone's relying on the UI to drive things, so you end up in weirdly broken corners because you didn't notice that you need custom_field_5537 to be paired with custom_field_442 or it doesn't appear on anyone else's dashboard. Also it claims custom_field_10995 is an integer type field, and returns as integers in the XML, but there's a pile of undocumented magic constant strings that you have to use instead when creating (but not updating!) a task or you get useless error messages. The web UI doesn't do this though (it's just integers in html and the request), and only 80% of the strings match the display text in the dropdown.

Automating Jira is the absolute worst programming experience I've ever had. I can completely believe that simpler setups exist and they're probably quite easy, but omfg.

Sadly it's still completely worth the effort. Highly recommended.

AI is the only way to reasonable interact with my employer's Jira board. The form for ticket creation had 206 fields across the tabs last time I checked. 10 are mandatory, including freetext that isn't really free, as the ticket goes to the shadow realm if you didn't match your team's valid values.

So it's a world where it's not just that one wants simple automation for ticket creation, but you might want to ask an LLM to update it. Dear Claude, I need to put a request with team X. I know John Doe works there. Please figure out what the hell their intake looks like, and what we have to fill out for the last few sprints and write it down, because I sure don't have time for this.

> Hook it all together with a custom script and have the AI do all the Jira crap for you.

As if the bloat on Jira isn't big enough already. Adding more text will make it even slower since it will somehow automatically run everything over all that text all the time. If you need heating at your company, use Jira.

Yep, at a place I used to do work for I used their API to build a number of time saving things, all of which were tiny shell scripts.

Like adding a custom text field to each ticket with a human description of what a ticket did which someone would fill out along with a timestamp that got auto-filled out when a release shipped (deploy script). We'd release 1 ticket at a time as a line of work (many tickets per day). This combined with custom filters resulted in Jira providing us a human readable changelog for each board and the whole company. These messages were Slacked to the business so everyone had a pulse on what was going live. It was also a searchable audit log of all releases, tying back to a code change.

The deploy process also transitioned Jira tickets so a developer never had to do anything more than merge a ticket to main to have it get deployed and completed on Jira.

Lots of little scripts that automatically created tickets for routine tasks, etc..

It was super solid for years and I'm going to guess it's still running today. The naming conventions of the custom fields were lame but if your team is in control of setting up Jira, it wasn't hard to keep everything on the same page.

I started off not liking Jira and it had a lot of issues many years ago but it's actually not that bad nowadays once you set it up. I wouldn't choose it for my own company but as a developer and someone who has administrated it, used it as an end user and developed against it for internal tools, it mostly gets out of your way once it's configured and working.

Our entire company is basically ran through Jira. Most processes rely on Jira and certain transitions fire of webhooks for automation.

One of the first things we did when we got access to AI was make a Jira MCP. I try not to touch Jira anymore. I get Claude to just create the Jira issues, write comments, create subtasks, link issues together, etc.

I used to dread having to investigate how to implement something and break it down into tasks because the more granular I broke things down, the more Jira issues I had to create to capture each task. Now I can just write everything up in a file and send an LLM to do all the Jira crap.

moved to Jetbrains YouTrack many many years ago, and this is what we do via its APIs. It's quite versatile. With AI, it unlocked it even more.

Our main problem is only that they are hijacking the prices incredibly.. Lately we had to cut the number of licences and users, since it was incredibly expensive.

> I'm surprised corporate programmers with the hacker spirit haven't automated most of the things they are asked to do in Jira with Python command line scripts or whatever.

Not a single of the many organisations that I worked for which used JIRA would give the credentials to do anything of this sort.

> I'm surprised corporate programmers with the hacker spirit haven't automated most of the things they are asked to do in Jira with Python command line scripts or whatever.

That's because corporate IT makes the tokens expire every 2 seconds so scripting becomes useless.

Seriously we have some tokens that expire every 1 hour.

I can see very naive points here:

* "Corporate hackers" is a... not a very common thing. In the corporate world most programmers do what they are told to do and nothing more. Initiative is punishable.

* API wrappers aren't actually good. Not to mention that the API itself is very poor. JIRA has a tradition of arbitrary changing things, especially removing things, or not exposing the useful functionality. It's not a well-designed or well-executed product.

* AI is too immature and too non-deterministic to be useful for most of the things you want from a bug tracker. Also, for most companies, it's going to be too expensive to do it this way.

* QA is usually an afterthought, unless... we are talking about budget cuts and cutting corners, then it's left, right and center. Most companies see QA as a liability. They don't see it as producing value. They just have to pretend to have QA so that they can tell their customer they have it. When it comes to making QA do meaningful things, that require hiring good engineers, allocating development time, allocating compute resources... well, good luck with all that! Most QA I've seen, especially in international huge corporations was all for show, to produce appearance of work while following the same, mostly useless and mostly manual process.

I had a bunch of ideas about how QA can be made more efficient, both in terms of resource use and in terms of problem space it tries to address. Doing things like RCA automation or exploratory dynamic* testing... and after trying to see if any of such ideas would have any luck of becoming an actual successful product, I realized that nobody wants to improve QA. If a product made the "certification" (the ability to claim to have tested the product) cheaper, then it could be viable... but this is neither the direction I wanted to go, nor is it really all that feasible to improve a bug tracker in this direction.

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* What I mean by exploratory testing is a sort of "fuzzing", however one that's more structured. Fuzzing, typically, is applied to the input, which then tries to explore all possible ways through the program under test. Exploratory testing is a test made up of modules that can be combined to produce longer tests. This addresses the problem of difficult to reach "corner" cases in the program, also the problem of reaching code paths that aren't directly (or at all) dependent on input.

> corporate programmers with the hacker spirit

that thing does not exists

You can find correlations with stock price and positive user perception that were held up in product.

It came with its share of paper cuts too, like going from 4.x to 6.x or literally anything challenging to the rickety boxes of OFBiz and wholly-different products skinned for looks-maxxing.

Those engineers dipped out a while back and took their $280 shares with them.

About the double click into edit mode: Yes!! So much this! So annoying. Even basic text stuff they get wrong! But you know what a project manager told me ... They _like_ that, because they never use double click drag to select whole words ... ugh. Like always more proficient computer users are dragged down by the convenience for people barely able to use a computer.

> Obviously during the interview I was like oh JIRA yeah yeah yeah you still use that? I can use that.

Hold up, did I miss something? Fall into a time hole? Why are we talking about Jira like it’s Visicalc? Not currently working for an IT company, so maybe I missed something cataclysmic in the past two years…

My day job doesn't require using Jira or similar tools any more, so from a perspective of genuine curiosity: what's the consensus among entire project teams (not just the nerds) for a better alternative?

That version of JIRA could still easily be configured to be awful. That's the main problem with JIRA - the power to actually configure it to be sane is always reserved by a few people who don't want to bother, don't have time and don't care because they aren't really using it every day.

Well one of the problems anyway. It's also unimaginably slow, and has weird limitations like issues can't be parents of other issues.

Yes. Quake 3 Arena Multiplayer too.

I've always hated Gmail. I still do. But I switched jobs last year, and the new place uses Outlook instead. I struggle to find a word that adequately describes my disdain for Outlook; hate doesn't even begin to cover it. It struggles at the most basic of tasks: receiving and sending email. I'll get a notification on my phone about an email. I open the app and there's nothing. Pull down to refresh does nothing. It takes about 1-15 minutes to appear usually. Everything I do in Outlook is tedious as fuck.

Many moons ago, in like Office 2003 times, I used Outlook as well, and I don't remember it being this bad. How did it regress so badly?

Don't even get me started on Teams - I don't really know what problem that program is supposed to solve. Also our shared files are in OneDrive. But they're also in Teams. And they're also in Outlook for some reason. I had to transfer a bunch of computer backups (CloneZilla images) to OneDrive/Teams/Outlook. About 30 or so GB. It took forever, and my 6-core Ryzen laptop with Win11 was spinning its fans like mad the entire time. How? Why?

You see, it's not the tool's fault. There is simply no one on this planet, who can set up the tool correctly... Surely we cannot hold the tool responsible for human incompetence. For whom it is built then, you ask? Well, that's an entirely different question, that shall not be discussed at this point.

Yeah the slowness is what always gets me. Like in essence a ticketing system isn't more than just a database of tickets and relations between tickets and states. And okay you can kinda make it explode by having tons of interconnected tickets and custom fields and plugins. But I will never understand how something that just works with simple textual data and attachments can be so unbearably slow.

Underrated comment this !

Does that count as "you can play Doom on Jira"? Does Jira supply the pump action shotgun required to kill the resulting demons?

How many of them can run infinitely? Or be re-triggered by humans to continue where they left off?

I don't think so. First, JIRA is not orchestration. Second, all workflow needs to do is associate some status with external information, and make it easy to manipulate those. You need triggers and rules, some thing like infinite counters, two stacks, a bidirectional tape, etc.

Prove me wrong!

Why would tickets need to have a user assignment to be considered refined? It should be up to whomever picks it to work to get assigned to, not a part of the refinement.

I'm sure Atlassian knows this as well. When you setup a basic Kanban board in Jira, it is basically a Trello board. It is offered as one of the default options.

I was actually surprised they offered such simple options. Of course the complexity is there, the moment you start wanting an extra column, you're in the rabbit hole.

Probably true, but Trello just had a major multi-day outage that prevented commenting on or moving cards, so I would be hard pressed to recommended it to anyone at this point.

This is true because Trello uses simplicity as a constraint, so users can't make quite as big a mess. They can still make a mess though and as a source of truth it still requires people to move things properly, so it isn't really any better. All project tracking applications suffer from the same ultimate root cause of problems: users.

Bugzilla. Seriously.

Can be easily extended and unneeded fields can be disabled via template.

We use it since 20 years at a 6000 heads company and it's totally fine.

You can try Ekso:

https://ekso.app

Fully self-hosted, dockerized.

We made the pricing reasonable -- YMMV.

https://www.openproject.org/blog/open-source-jira-alternativ...

I haven‘t used it myself, though

Honestly the best issue tracker I've used so far is Phabricator (now Phorge). It would be a bit weird to use it just for issues though, and tbh I'm not sure I would recommend it as a forge because it has approximately no CI support.

Redmine, maybe? With or without Redmine X.

I already did. Quake 3 Arena also, but that’s not in the Marketplace (yet).

We are going to chat about it on June 9 in an online Developer Event

The Turing test is to test whether a programme exhibits intelligence.

Turning complete is a measure of whether something can be used as a programming language to run as a universal Turing machine.

Jira has an AI feature called Rovo. It's terrible.

Giving an API key to Claude however gets you exactly what you need. Albeit in quite a risky way though.