Jira is an interesting product everyone loves to hate.
It has the do-whatever-you-want configurability to fit anyones SDLC. Really its a software product that allows you to mirror your organizational structure.
That said, 99% of software projects I have been on could be managed with a simple Kanban board like Trello (which they now own).
Unless your firm has staff who are full time Jira jockeys in the form of project managers, you'll never be able to leverage the more complicated workflows/linkages/planning features.
It's kind of amusing: I've seen a few times developers rebelling and moving to whatever other random tool (Atlassian's own Trello, Pivotal Tracker, Github's thing, stickers on the wall) as soon as a hardline PO/PM left the job. Only for JIRA to return when another PO/PM that "really really needs the reporting features" (but didn't really use them) was hired.
heh, I was once on a dev team that some how got moved into the project management section of a company. The thought was we'd help out and fix the little stuff that the PMs needed done that they couldn't get other teams to prioritize.
Obviously a bonkers idea, but they went for it. It was just jira all the way down. They wanted us to create separate tracking jiras for pages, before we worked the issue in the middle of the night. Nobody was actually doing anything, especially the devs I lasted a couple months before I moved. At the end of the year, everyone that stayed got promoted a level as a dev. I went back though git and couldn't find a single commit from any of them. Just bananas, they all got promoted to a higher level as devs for busy work, but jiras don't lie, right?
My fave thing about Jira is how between the tool & it's plugins, you can roll up all sorts of views for management reporting purposes.
Despite this, exactly zero shops I have worked do management believe their managers will understand those views.
Therefore at a weekly/monthly/quarterly cadence, "someone" (dev leads) have to spend hours hand updating some horrific excel view of project statuses for big management to understand.
All I really see managers using is the burnup or burndown chart. They seem to choose between up/down based on their current mood. But it doesn't matter which one they choose, it always seem to bring everyone's mood down anyway.
And yet when you ask if we can change from JIRA to something else they say "but my reporting".
Twice now I've worked at places that used Jira, and all it takes is one corner of the company to leverage it for some random oddball purpose to make it painfully slow.
One place started using it for managing thousands of assets, and eventually they were paying contractors tens of thousands to optimize their JIRA instance and untangle the mess.
Same thing is happening at my current company, where even in the last few months it's gotten painfully slower.
Wow. I had erased this from my memory, but: in a company I worked previously, every single string that had to be localised had to go into a JIRA task, after going into an internal localisation tool. Eventually they needed a separate JIRA instance with different logins because there were hundreds of new "strings" being created daily, some of those coming from user content.
> Therefore at a weekly/monthly/quarterly cadence, "someone" (dev leads) have to spend hours hand updating some horrific excel view of project statuses for big management to understand.
You're spot on about that. I've been the "someone" dev lead doing this so often I decided that someone should build a system that does this. You can see my progress so far at fixed.pm
Why is it always on the Dev team to completely uplift whatever is working for them, and never that the PM/PO/DPO/Scrumwhatever has to do the heavy lifting themselves? Is it because they would actually have to do work instead of just attending meetings, slacking other people for updates, and sending out progress reports? (Sorry to all you good PMs out there, I am talking about the median case)
If you are a PM and you come on a team that isn't using JIRA, and you want JIRA with all it's fancy bells and whistles, that's fine. Set up a board yourself, write all the tickets, capture all the work that's happening based on the dev's tool they are currently using, and update all the knobs and buttons to your heart's content.
My guess is the infatuation with JIRA would quickly diminish if this was so.
One of the best PMs I have had used to be a dev. The company we were working with used a terrible Jira like piece of software I don't remember the name of, but he had the devs just use Trello. He would go through and update the other thing for stakeholders. Worked great
JIRA is the case of a product made for buyers/deciders rather than for final users, like the dreaded enterprise ERP.
Atlassian's Product Managers believe their product is mostly used by other product managers, but they're dead wrong. Not that it matters, anyway. Atlassian could probably fire all PMs tomorrow and it would be the same, as long as the software ticks all the necessary boxes it will still sell the same. Just hire more marketing, sales and evangelists.
> full time Jira jockeys in the form of project managers
I find that a funny description because I've worked with many many different full time project managers who always took the view that putting data in Jira or equivalents and pulling reports before the project meetings were entirely a technician's job.
This stuff blows my mind but tends to occur everywhere
What is the value add of an engineer doing project management work in an environment where project managers exist
Should the project managers need to do a little coding then?
Also the quiet part out loud - project managers tend to be vastly cheaper (often 2:1) than engineers. Any and every task that an engineering team can offload to a project manager is big dollars saved by the firm.
I frequently find myself in engineering roles where I am doing most stakeholder comms, requirements gathering, JIRA ticket entry/management, project planning, user documentation, support runbooks, PR reviewing, a bit of dev, occasionally testing, deployments, and sit on the support escalation pager rotation. Any of the above tasks you can offload to a non-engineer saves the firm money.
Jira almost has too many hierarchy options / flexibility.
Epics, Milestones, Initiatives.
No two firms, and often within a firm.. no two teams has a similar definition / system in how they are used.
My last manager it was like a sniff test / definition of art thing. Constant arguments about epics being too granular or not granular enough. Bumping tickets up or down the hierarchy was hell and lead to many many hours of wasted efforts.
That said, 99% of software projects I have been on could be managed with a simple Kanban board like Trello (which they now own).
Unless your firm has staff who are full time Jira jockeys in the form of project managers, you'll never be able to leverage the more complicated workflows/linkages/planning features.