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People in tech are sure to have come across Atlassian’s Jira, the popular project management tool. Though helpful in bug tracking and project management, it is sometimes considered as a “grumbling bug”. A simple web search on “hate jira” would throw up a flood of links and posts on X and Reddit, and a website dedicated to just hating the tool.
On the contrary, if you veer towards the Stack Overflow Developer Survey, Jira has been ranked one of most uncomplicated and asked for asynchronous tools consistently for the past two years. Though the critics are aplenty, there are many fans too. The problem is – developers hate it, managers love it.
Jira’s bad, but it’s best at what it does
What can be regarded as a feature by many, developers hate the fact that Jira offers a plethora of options, causing frustration. As a Reddit user said, “it’s too flexible”, making it unintuitive and a mess.
While it may seem advantageous theoretically, opponents argue that Jira deployments often transform into cumbersome and confusing configurations filled with numerous fields, dropdown menus, and toggles, making the user experience less intuitive. Particularly when compared to newer, more efficient alternatives such as Trello, ClickUp, and Notion, Jira seems sluggish and slow.
“Jira is just clunky as hell and enables focusing on things that aren’t the core product. It’s a high maintenance tool,” said a user on X. Just like Jira, similar thoughts have been expressed about Agile in a thread.
“Whose bright idea was it to measure productivity by how many complexity or story points you complete? That’s like measuring a truck driver by how much diesel they use, instead of how much deliveries they make,” expressed a user on X. “You end up spending more time managing the process instead of getting the work done,” said another.
Jira as a tool was developed mostly for larger enterprises and that comes at the cost of gearing it for smaller organisations, which in the end makes it bad for developers. It is more of a tool for the decision makers in the company and such teams.
“That means they [Jira creators] focus on satisfying the managers, and management consultants, and some class of Jira-specialised consultants, who benefit from their trade of coming into businesses to help fix their Jira setups being protected by it, not being particularly easy for organisations to use. They can get away with piss-poor experience for the devs,” explained a user on X.
To further illustrate the user experience, another developer said that Jira’s UI is not that friendly. “I feel like it’s gaslighting me,” the user added. It is often termed as a bloated and slow software which was developed by scrum enthusiasts.
Is Jira just a scapegoat?
Even with its problems, Jira is also admired by many when it comes to organising their workflows, but all of that comes at the cost of performance. On the other hand, several people claim that the blame on Jira is merely the blame on the management.
A user on Hacker News said that he has never heard anyone say ‘Jira is brilliant’, but at the same time it is just a good culprit when it comes to blaming someone for the mishaps in the corporate theatre. Another use points out that the mentality of developers to sit and just work in silos and code is not something that is viable for a lot of organisations.
“I’m a developer, and while I don’t love it, I certainly don’t hate it, and I don’t see it as worse than any other task-tracking tool,” said a user. The developers who hate Jira are the ones that have to work with bloated setups and poorly managed frameworks. This makes it more of an organisation fault than the actual tool.
Atlassian has been accepting these feedbacks, positive and negative, and making changes to Jira. In an interview, Megan Cook, head of product for Jira Software, Agile Solutions, said that they are constantly working on improving Jira.
Cook also proposes that Atlassian’s ecosystem will provide a competitive advantage in the age of generative AI. She emphasises that the abundance of data circulating within and around Jira can and will be leveraged to enhance the software’s functionality and utility.
