I’ve worked with some pretty rotten software, but management software is easily the most user unfriendly, so my vote goes to HPSM.
I’ve worked with some pretty rotten software, but management software is easily the most user unfriendly, so my vote goes to HPSM.
Jira. In the Software-as-a-Service world, it’s often the tool of choice by Product teams to track issues, by breaking everything down into stories.
It’s a horrible, slow, janky mess. The interface is confusing and poorly laid out, you can easily have too many options all over the place, and how its even used can vary dramatically from one company to another.
Salesforce is also trash for very similar reasons. How Sales people around the world all vouched for this thing is beyond me.
Can confirm JIRA is an unusable mess. Submitting IT tickets was probably the worst thing about my last job. So much time wasted filling out irrelevant fields of information.
Of course, while I’ll agree about Jira being unfortunate, I’ll say from experience it’s the “committee” of people that end up making up tons of fields imagining that they have some utility. Jira is complicit by saying “sure thing, as many required and cross-linked fields as you like!”
We have “Priority”, “Severity”, “Importance” on top of the sort order having some other indication of relative importance, all must be filled. Opening an item in one place requires you to have an item already opened in another place and that one requires a project id from some other tool to know who to charge, in theory. In practice it’s not hooked into any charging system, but they imagine one day departments can charge each other for fixing items. We also have about 4 additional “describe the ticket” fields and in addition to the title, there’s a ‘One line summary’. All required.
I guess we just use a very stripped down version of jira, because it’s really just enter an issue, brief explanation, and further documentation to help whoever comes to fix it solve it faster. If it takes me longer than 5 minutes to create a ticket that means I’ve spent way longer than usual.
I think of it as a good place to keep a record of know issues or desired improvements, so they don’t get forgotten.
what do you consider a good alternative?
What would you recommend instead?
Fwiw their zephyr plugin is pretty good imo
The sole purpose of jira is to create a shiny thing to distract PMs so they don’t bother the engineers too much.
Jira doesn’t suck, your management does