I started tolerating it after discovering it has keyboard shortcuts. Try pressing <shift>+? to see what's available in given context.
+ Make sure you have it bookmarked as search engine. Also makes it so much nicer when you can jump to specific ticket by using 'j FOO-123' from address bar. Or 'j whatever keywords' to do regular search.
I spend hours per day in Jira. Half as a PM, and the other half as an IC.
I've never used Jira Classic, so can't comment there.
But Jira Next Gen projects have been great to work with. So much functionality and bloat is stripped out of Next Gen, sometimes too much was removed I think.
I hear people hating on Jira very often, but at least the way our company uses it, it's great.
The only thing I'd really want to change is (1) performance, page load times are frustrating, and (2) ability to easily move a ticket from 1 project to another project without clicking through a 6 step process.
Edit: Regarding Jira's slowness, I'd highly recommend trying the Mac app which is dramatically faster than the web ui.
Having used classic for years before the NG switch I'd say classic was more stable and faster. Now I have extra clicks and broken JS features to work around.
Still both are huge and so configurable that saying one is familiar with JIRA is like saying one is familiar with C++ or Microsoft Word. Which begs the question, familiar with which parts and what versions?
By Atlassian’s ToS, you are not allowed to « comment on the performance of the products ». I know no-one thinks this would be enforced here, but I just want to highlight that it doesn’t help a company to improve if they know they can just lawyer-up a problem away and avoid benchmarks and being compared on that topic.
If they ever terminated services for me because I commented on performance I would be the most loud person on the internet about it.
I would go to every review site, every comment board, and filter every title on every news aggregator and post as much statistics as I could about performance and issues that I had with it. Then I would state that they had terminated my services for commenting about it, with the proof.
I would be totally radicalised against them, it's absolutely insane that they even have this as a ToS, but if they ever enforced it I'm sure many people would salt the fucking earth.
(d) incorporate any Cloud Products into a product or service you provide to a third party;
does this mean that I can't integrate JIRA into a ticket tracking workflow that I build for my product with IFTTT that creates a new ticket when someone sends an email to a support alias?
(e) interfere with or otherwise circumvent mechanisms in the Cloud Products intended to limit your use;
(f) reverse engineer, disassemble, decompile, translate or otherwise seek to obtain or derive the source code, underlying ideas, algorithms, file formats or non-public APIs to any Cloud Products, except to the extent expressly permitted by applicable law (and then only upon advance notice to us);
(g) remove or obscure any proprietary or other notices contained in any Cloud Product;
Fair enough.
(h) use the Cloud Products for competitive analysis or to build competitive products;
Sure, I mean this is hard to enforce but if the team at Trello was using JIRA while making Trello, Atlassian could just say "hey - stop, no like".
(i) publicly disseminate information regarding the performance of the Cloud Products;
Seriously? I really didn't believe when I saw parent say you are not allowed to comment on performance of the product but I stand corrected. I will not comment on performance of any Atlassian product ever, ever ever. You got me Atlassian, this is what I get for not reading ToS before clicking Accept.
(j) encourage or assist any third party to do any of the foregoing.
I'll try to get the legal team on it. It's a landmine as even a casual discussion of performance voids the license. Any discussion of outage may or may not involve this point.
> even a casual discussion of performance voids the license
Of course, that assumes such terms are enforceable. But, even if not, just having them in there is just so odious as to make one seek out other solutions.
Do they define performance? This suggests you aren't supposed to discuss the Cloud Products with anyone. Can imagine if everyone follows this it won't be good for Word of mouth
These "Oracle clauses" really, really put me off using a product, or indeed anything from an organisation.
I totally understand that benchmarking is hard, but using legal means to silence anyone from talking about aspects of your product is just downright scummy.
Ha, this just reminded me that back in... 2009 or 2010, I tweeted something about being frustrated with JIRA and within an hour I had a message from someone at Atlassian warning me that I was in violation. I think I deleted the tweet, I wish I could go back and revisit it.
Haha, in addition to all the BS in their terms of service, I had a delightful experience the other day where they argued tooth and nail that they aren't subject to CCPA deletion requests if they give your username away, and at this point I've just been stonewalled.
Just speculating, I bet they've decided a lawsuit would be cheaper than figuring out how their spaghetti code works to be able to safely delete a few fields.
I've never agree to Atlassians terms of service, so I feel free to comment all I want. (Edit: I guess I don't use their cloud product, my employers stuff is all self-hosted, so maybe those terms don't even apply?)
The JIRA hate is well deserved. I don’t think I can get past how slow it is compared to other offerings in the market (eg clubhouse). It’s UI is horrible and unintuitive. Search is difficult. Using it to track work is manual, it adds too much overhead.
I ask that you try clubhouse or another tool that has more modern UIs. You feel that JIRA next gen is great only compared to JIRA classic. Next gen is still years behind in UX.
I think that implementing a tool "like Jira, only fast" would be a quite interesting engineering challenge. With the amount of configurability which Jira allows, it is not easy to come up with something performant. Maybe a compilation-like approach would work.
At my new job, the combination of Jira+Slack+Github is the most productive development support I've ever had. Of course, a company-level investment in process and a great PM and TPM help a lot :)
Jira is a workflow tool, which also means that most of the issues mentioned here, can be sorted out between the PM and devs on who the workflow should be, and what the rituals for updates should/could be. Jira is flexible enough to accomodate it (mostly). From a developer perspective, some of the points maybe valid, but not from PM perspective.
It would also help if we could get an idea of what the alternatives are, that are better
Edit: Also looks like marketing for the product, than a valid article on Jira pitfalls.
I'm using Jira, not a huge fan (mostly because it's slow, the cloud version at least) and there's some clunkyness BUT every time I looked for alternatives it was either too opiniated (like SCRUM or nothing) or had really poor integration with dev tools.
The big advantage of Jira is that you can customise it quite a bit and it has a good set of integrations and APIs.
I'm still thinking of moving away at some point but haven't found any alternative...
haven't used any so wouldn't endorse, but the general category is 'roadmap' tools or what used to be called 'idea management'
there are some 'release management' or 'launch management' plugins for JIRA that address the other side of the pipeline, but solve similar problems -- also haven't used, but friends who are big-company PMs talk about them
IMO many saas products are inflexible, their strength ('we automate workflows') is also a weakness ('better not deviate from these workflows')
The only project management tool I've heard people rave about is airtable, which is basically an improved spreadsheet UX and not purpose-built for project management.
I suspect the future of project management saas is tools / plugins that provide summary views, but the tickets / specs exist in freeform spreadsheets like airtable. This 'view plugin' ecosystem is alread starting to exist for notion and roam.
Cloud or Server? It seems a lot of companies’ reputation were broken by clients installing their software on 2GB/1.5GHz servers with HDD, and Cloud will help at least getting a consistent measurable experience of the same product for everyone.
My personal pet peeve is the very short session time, after which you literally cannot use the form you filled, because someone was too lazy to implement a full session system to hold content or background relogin to not lose it.
Does anyone else find it pretty obnoxious that this site changes the window title back and forth between "Jira is a microcosm of what’s broken in software development" and "(1) New Message!"?
They're using Drift, the little chat widget in the bottom.
I've had to build out tracking on marketing sites and we had to add a redundant, canonical page title to every page since 3rd party tools like drift change the <title> tag in the HTML to say New Message!!!!!
They do it so if you migrate to a new tab it tries to annoy you into going back.
Learning Jira and accepting Jira both classic and NG has made me so much money, as a team leader, architect and program manager.
Jira is the user plane for interacting with project items, however like others here said, everything else must be solved with clear communication, frequent ACKs with team members and so on.
Yes, Jira Next Gen is nicer. But classic works fine too!
Also Jira can be a lot of other things. It's really flexible.
But at what expense? Does Jira ever frustrate you? Imagine how it frustrates developers that hate working with overly complex time-sink software. I can change my email client. I can change my text editor to my liking. I can change nearly any other tool I use, but when a company uses Jira, I'm trapped using something that mostly gets in my way.
Generally subtasks are good when it's a single well defined feature or problem and then they are few.
To be used sparingly. They're best used like keynotes.
Epics are for broad developments, looser defined. Best used as "bags" of tasks.
Sometimes epics might be disabled altogether and then you have only subtasks, and labels get to be misused as the bags of tasks. I personally consider that a pathological setup. It is much harder to work with and JIRA query tools don't work as well with it.
"Though I think of Jira more like a spreadsheet. Very useful once upon a time. Outdated now. Static. Manual."
This statement is so blatantly wrong that it actually put me off even reading the rest. Spreadsheets are stronger than they've ever been and are never going away, let alone being "outdated." Sure there are products that claim to be "the next spreadsheet" but most of those actually serve a different purpose: no-code app dev.
I read this as talking about a specific spreadsheet, not the general concept of spreadsheets. Like a specific excel file someone made long ago but it hasn't been updated in a long time and it's difficult to figure out if its up to date or not. It could be worded better.
I assumed the author really meant that using a spreadsheet for project tracking is outdated, static, and manual. Which I agree with. But spreadsheets in general of course are tremendously useful!
I've seen spreadsheets used for project tracking and in general I think they're versatile enough that they're useful tools. What's a better alternative? Jira and other proprietary solutions sound good in theory but I feel like in practice they're just expensive and time consuming since developers and managers need to learn a new tool that might not even have the features you're looking for.
Funny, from non-dev roles I'd probably put spreadsheets as the the platform for "no-code app dev".
Or rather, the platform for "this is the only b*d tool IT have allowed me to run, and no, I don't have a spare year for them to scope out what could be bodged by a couple of VBA scripts, and doing so would very obviously make my job better. So, for good or evil, it's going to be bodged with a couple of VBA scripts."
I feel like there's a lesson there, though I could be wrong. (Also not sure if that counts as "no-code")
Oh, and seconding the general consensus that websites that flash irrelevant notifications at me are pretty much an instant, hard "no".
I think he means a spreadsheet for the purposes of tracking software project progress. Although honestly, if you have a spreadsheet that's longer-lived than a few hours, you should probably evaluate whether you're adopting the best approach.
If you are not a developer, spreadsheets are a tool that lets you get similar capability in many cases. It is basically no-code for accountants, portfolio managers, and non software engineers.
Cool. If you have a spreadsheet that's longer-lived than a few hours, you should probably evaluate whether you're adopting the best approach. You can replace a blown fuse with a penny, too, but you should probably call an electrician instead.
Building/buying a new tool for a job that a spreadsheet can do just as easily because of your hard rule on long-lived spreadsheets feels like a huge waste of company resources.
Your penny analogy is contrived because a penny isn't remotely close to working like a fuse and a mistake can be deadly. No one is going to die if you use a spreadsheet instead of Jira for project tracking.
Excel + VBA is insanely powerful, and except for the IDE a surprisingly good dev experience. I would have never thought if I my client hadn't insisted..
> Cool. If you have a spreadsheet that's longer-lived than a few hours, you should probably evaluate whether you're adopting the best approach. You can replace a blown fuse with a penny, too, but you should probably call an electrician instead.
or just replace the fuse with a fuse? If you have a spreadsheet and it works for you, why spend time getting a programmer to "do it properly"?
one of the largest Finnish waste disposal companies has a no-code product that runs in excel basically and rakes them millions a year.
I agree. Spreadsheets are an incredible tool that have stood the test of time. Taking that declaration one sentence farther, they are one of the greatest success stories regarding bringing functional programming into the business world in a way that emphasizes simplicity.
I recently used it to find out how much a certain company owes me based on a monthly guarantee obligation they have continuously fallen short of . I've also used it to do comparisons and find out the maximum I can save on a refinance from different lenders etc, whether I should lease or purchase a car etc.. Very useful!
I'm convinced that every single business out there eventually gets run from an Excel spreadsheet.
At the end of the day, they're just rolling up rollups all the way to the top, where some guy is looking at Scenario A vs Scenario B in Excel
Depends. I worked using Fogbugz and Trello on different projects and it was a blast in comparison.
And another unnamed homebrew which had warts but was still better than overloaded JIRA in some other projects.
Then again I've worked on the project where the source of truth was a set of Excel documents shadowing 5 different ticket systems. Very briefly.
That said if you're lucky, JIRA can be set up to work relatively well. Especially if you keep it simple.
Of course it does. For a while, external people could even log the issues themselves.
Having used it, I don’t understand all the hate. I love the Sprint boards, the drag and drop and the JQL. Of course I deactivate everything that tries to help me, it’s kind of like Clippy: they « make it easier for you » by hiding all the fields, or opening an issue by hiding the search table. Would be easier to understand if Jira only had 3 screens: Issue view, Search and Sprint board...
I'm definitely feeling this today. I'm effectively locked out of jira today because the new versions of Chrome and FF block cookies that are "SameSite=None" without "Secure", and all of Jira's cookies appear to have this problem.
I hate plenty of things about JIRA, but I'm flagging this post because it's incredibly biased (written by a direct competitor to JIRA), and their site is also extremely hostile to users with their messaging notifications.
Yeah it almost reads like a comparison piece. Pretty much all of the points relate back to the fact developers are adding manual updates and how the competitor solves it by integrating Git PRs and commits. However that's easily possible in JIRA now via the integrations (e.g. GitHub) and automations to close tickets depending on the status.
Still, even then with the automations in any of this software to show VCS updates you're going to get managers asking for updates depending on your environment.
I like jira. Our installation is pretty fast and I need something to track what is outstanding. The query interface is quite powerful, and I can use it to gather evidence that something needs more attention. It's got too many fields but you can turn these off, unfortunately for my org that requires IT so I live with its current configuration.
Usually Jira sucks because it's not setup correctly to support teams' workflows, instead it's used to impose workflows on teams.
Jira can be as heavy or lightweight as you make it, but most of the suffering I see is because the way teams work isn't being supported by the Jira owners/admins.
exactly. if the process is broken, jira makes an easy scapegoat but that's misplaced. i've joined several teams (as PM) that hated jira until we were able to talk through the preferred workflow, and then reconfigure jira to support that workflow. then it was embraced, especially with automations that advanced tickets through the process where possible.
Agreed. I guess what make tickles my brain about it is that you can have a rather complex set of automation, integration etc. under the hood, while keeping the surface somewhat clean.
Hm. To me it sounds like they are ranting about micro controlling by too much detail in the jira. Sure, if you have to close 6 tickets for the same line of thought, it's annoying. So don't do that.
And on top of that, the new jira automation + smart commits make stuff much smoother. Assign yourself a ticket, push some stuff with the ticket ID to auto-progress to <in progress>, commit something with "EXA-042 #close" and it auto-closes. Took us some time to get there, but now it's a smooth todo-list for the team.
Every single project I've been on in the past 15 years (public/private sector, many verticals, different companies), when push comes to shove, people resort to tracking everything on simple spreadsheets or punch lists. And it works just fine (although this results in more communication which is anyway true when things go wrong or overdue, regardless of tools).
So I'm really wondering how much utility a lot of these tools bring (I LOVED Jira in 2006 when it was a glorified table with powerful filters, but I was using it roughly like a smart spreadsheet). I feel a lot of what they add is just busy work that you have the luxury to play with in normal times, but when you don't have the luxury to do busy work, it just slows you down without much benefit.
What have other people's experiences been? An emergency can be a great filter to show you what matters and what doesn't.
> So why do companies use a tool that works for a few PMs and business leaders when dozens or hundreds of engineers hate it?
In fact, Jira is so infinitely configurable it reflects the org chart and culture of the company using it. Most Jira complaints I hear are more about that person's company than the tool. That said, the tool definitely doesn't help as much as it should (largely because engineers don't make purchase decisions).
OP sounds like someone who's unhappy working on big software projects. That's understandable. But once you're on a big project, you can't keep it all in your head. You can't make your own clever adjustments when problems arise without documenting everything and then taking it through channels.
For what it's worth, sales people have the exact same complaint. They can get testy, too, about executives using software-oversight tools to take away the soul of what they really do. Allow me to change 15% of the words in this piece, and it could become a rebuke of Salesforce and its siblings, as applied to large sales organizations. So the brief allusion to sales seemed way off base.
Process can be exasperating, until you've worked in a big place where there's no coherent process.
181 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 226 ms ] thread+ Make sure you have it bookmarked as search engine. Also makes it so much nicer when you can jump to specific ticket by using 'j FOO-123' from address bar. Or 'j whatever keywords' to do regular search.
I've never used Jira Classic, so can't comment there.
But Jira Next Gen projects have been great to work with. So much functionality and bloat is stripped out of Next Gen, sometimes too much was removed I think.
I hear people hating on Jira very often, but at least the way our company uses it, it's great.
The only thing I'd really want to change is (1) performance, page load times are frustrating, and (2) ability to easily move a ticket from 1 project to another project without clicking through a 6 step process.
Edit: Regarding Jira's slowness, I'd highly recommend trying the Mac app which is dramatically faster than the web ui.
Still both are huge and so configurable that saying one is familiar with JIRA is like saying one is familiar with C++ or Microsoft Word. Which begs the question, familiar with which parts and what versions?
By Atlassian’s ToS, you are not allowed to « comment on the performance of the products ». I know no-one thinks this would be enforced here, but I just want to highlight that it doesn’t help a company to improve if they know they can just lawyer-up a problem away and avoid benchmarks and being compared on that topic.
If they ever terminated services for me because I commented on performance I would be the most loud person on the internet about it.
I would go to every review site, every comment board, and filter every title on every news aggregator and post as much statistics as I could about performance and issues that I had with it. Then I would state that they had terminated my services for commenting about it, with the proof.
I would be totally radicalised against them, it's absolutely insane that they even have this as a ToS, but if they ever enforced it I'm sure many people would salt the fucking earth.
(d) incorporate any Cloud Products into a product or service you provide to a third party;
does this mean that I can't integrate JIRA into a ticket tracking workflow that I build for my product with IFTTT that creates a new ticket when someone sends an email to a support alias?
(e) interfere with or otherwise circumvent mechanisms in the Cloud Products intended to limit your use;
(f) reverse engineer, disassemble, decompile, translate or otherwise seek to obtain or derive the source code, underlying ideas, algorithms, file formats or non-public APIs to any Cloud Products, except to the extent expressly permitted by applicable law (and then only upon advance notice to us);
(g) remove or obscure any proprietary or other notices contained in any Cloud Product;
Fair enough.
(h) use the Cloud Products for competitive analysis or to build competitive products;
Sure, I mean this is hard to enforce but if the team at Trello was using JIRA while making Trello, Atlassian could just say "hey - stop, no like".
(i) publicly disseminate information regarding the performance of the Cloud Products;
Seriously? I really didn't believe when I saw parent say you are not allowed to comment on performance of the product but I stand corrected. I will not comment on performance of any Atlassian product ever, ever ever. You got me Atlassian, this is what I get for not reading ToS before clicking Accept.
(j) encourage or assist any third party to do any of the foregoing.
Ok.
[0] https://www.atlassian.com/legal/cloud-terms-of-service
I'll try to get the legal team on it. It's a landmine as even a casual discussion of performance voids the license. Any discussion of outage may or may not involve this point.
It is a devops prevention clause.
Of course, that assumes such terms are enforceable. But, even if not, just having them in there is just so odious as to make one seek out other solutions.
I totally understand that benchmarking is hard, but using legal means to silence anyone from talking about aspects of your product is just downright scummy.
Just speculating, I bet they've decided a lawsuit would be cheaper than figuring out how their spaghetti code works to be able to safely delete a few fields.
I ask that you try clubhouse or another tool that has more modern UIs. You feel that JIRA next gen is great only compared to JIRA classic. Next gen is still years behind in UX.
It would also help if we could get an idea of what the alternatives are, that are better
Edit: Also looks like marketing for the product, than a valid article on Jira pitfalls.
I'm still thinking of moving away at some point but haven't found any alternative...
hard problems like spec, estimation of work, and assignment of work to people are conflated in a ticketing-only universe
there are some 'release management' or 'launch management' plugins for JIRA that address the other side of the pipeline, but solve similar problems -- also haven't used, but friends who are big-company PMs talk about them
IMO many saas products are inflexible, their strength ('we automate workflows') is also a weakness ('better not deviate from these workflows')
The only project management tool I've heard people rave about is airtable, which is basically an improved spreadsheet UX and not purpose-built for project management.
I suspect the future of project management saas is tools / plugins that provide summary views, but the tickets / specs exist in freeform spreadsheets like airtable. This 'view plugin' ecosystem is alread starting to exist for notion and roam.
They have a MacOS app now, which I've been meaning to try.
Is this a bug? Who thought this was a good idea?
Here is that content without that: https://beta.trimread.com/articles/32605
It's seriously obnoxious!
Also, as a side note, the whole article is written by a JIRA competitor. Totally not biased at all!
I've had to build out tracking on marketing sites and we had to add a redundant, canonical page title to every page since 3rd party tools like drift change the <title> tag in the HTML to say New Message!!!!!
They do it so if you migrate to a new tab it tries to annoy you into going back.
Jira is the user plane for interacting with project items, however like others here said, everything else must be solved with clear communication, frequent ACKs with team members and so on.
Yes, Jira Next Gen is nicer. But classic works fine too!
Also Jira can be a lot of other things. It's really flexible.
It's not really in the way, if that's the case it sounds like your processes or workflows are messed up.
I've had days where I don't want to see it, but that's because I'm tired of working. In those times it quick to blame Jira.
Really? Not to me, although I’m not clear when to make a subtask or start using an epic.
Epics are for broad developments, looser defined. Best used as "bags" of tasks.
Sometimes epics might be disabled altogether and then you have only subtasks, and labels get to be misused as the bags of tasks. I personally consider that a pathological setup. It is much harder to work with and JIRA query tools don't work as well with it.
"Though I think of Jira more like a spreadsheet. Very useful once upon a time. Outdated now. Static. Manual."
Are spreadsheets really outdated now?
This statement is so blatantly wrong that it actually put me off even reading the rest. Spreadsheets are stronger than they've ever been and are never going away, let alone being "outdated." Sure there are products that claim to be "the next spreadsheet" but most of those actually serve a different purpose: no-code app dev.
Or rather, the platform for "this is the only b*d tool IT have allowed me to run, and no, I don't have a spare year for them to scope out what could be bodged by a couple of VBA scripts, and doing so would very obviously make my job better. So, for good or evil, it's going to be bodged with a couple of VBA scripts."
I feel like there's a lesson there, though I could be wrong. (Also not sure if that counts as "no-code")
Oh, and seconding the general consensus that websites that flash irrelevant notifications at me are pretty much an instant, hard "no".
I saw a good talk on it from Tom Scott some time ago[0] which I think is relevant.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIFE7h3m40U
Your penny analogy is contrived because a penny isn't remotely close to working like a fuse and a mistake can be deadly. No one is going to die if you use a spreadsheet instead of Jira for project tracking.
or just replace the fuse with a fuse? If you have a spreadsheet and it works for you, why spend time getting a programmer to "do it properly"?
one of the largest Finnish waste disposal companies has a no-code product that runs in excel basically and rakes them millions a year.
I recently used it to find out how much a certain company owes me based on a monthly guarantee obligation they have continuously fallen short of . I've also used it to do comparisons and find out the maximum I can save on a refinance from different lenders etc, whether I should lease or purchase a car etc.. Very useful!
Then again I've worked on the project where the source of truth was a set of Excel documents shadowing 5 different ticket systems. Very briefly.
That said if you're lucky, JIRA can be set up to work relatively well. Especially if you keep it simple.
Having used it, I don’t understand all the hate. I love the Sprint boards, the drag and drop and the JQL. Of course I deactivate everything that tries to help me, it’s kind of like Clippy: they « make it easier for you » by hiding all the fields, or opening an issue by hiding the search table. Would be easier to understand if Jira only had 3 screens: Issue view, Search and Sprint board...
Still, even then with the automations in any of this software to show VCS updates you're going to get managers asking for updates depending on your environment.
As a bug tracker, JIRA seems to be OK. As a development system, not clear.
Jira can be as heavy or lightweight as you make it, but most of the suffering I see is because the way teams work isn't being supported by the Jira owners/admins.
And on top of that, the new jira automation + smart commits make stuff much smoother. Assign yourself a ticket, push some stuff with the ticket ID to auto-progress to <in progress>, commit something with "EXA-042 #close" and it auto-closes. Took us some time to get there, but now it's a smooth todo-list for the team.
So I'm really wondering how much utility a lot of these tools bring (I LOVED Jira in 2006 when it was a glorified table with powerful filters, but I was using it roughly like a smart spreadsheet). I feel a lot of what they add is just busy work that you have the luxury to play with in normal times, but when you don't have the luxury to do busy work, it just slows you down without much benefit.
What have other people's experiences been? An emergency can be a great filter to show you what matters and what doesn't.
In fact, Jira is so infinitely configurable it reflects the org chart and culture of the company using it. Most Jira complaints I hear are more about that person's company than the tool. That said, the tool definitely doesn't help as much as it should (largely because engineers don't make purchase decisions).
For what it's worth, sales people have the exact same complaint. They can get testy, too, about executives using software-oversight tools to take away the soul of what they really do. Allow me to change 15% of the words in this piece, and it could become a rebuke of Salesforce and its siblings, as applied to large sales organizations. So the brief allusion to sales seemed way off base.
Process can be exasperating, until you've worked in a big place where there's no coherent process.
Is not the process, it's the broken tool. Broken file uploads, general wonkiness and all the minor irritations that just don't get fixed.
Managers choose jira. Developers will create a process but will choose tools that work.
I hope more alternative frontends will eventually come up to address the UI issues, to streamline particular kinds of usage, etc.
This can't address the API speed, though.