Up until I snapped a few minutes ago, I wasn’t sure anything could be more annoying than having to eat every day. After all, I’ve been told by close friends that I’d be a happier entity if I was simply a brain in a jar, left entirely to its own thoughts. I don’t disagree.
Tonight started out normally enough:
- I fired up JIRA for the thousandth time.
- I dug through the ever-shifting, free-for-all, trivial-showstopper, dupe-a-thon of a roadmap for the thousandth time.
- I wracked my brain trying to sort out the new bugs and wishlist items from ‘Unassigned‘ purgatory, which contains over a hundred tasks that aren’t either outright reject-worthy or important enough to schedule.
Except tonight, something cried out in my mind and asked Why are you reading every single thing AGAIN?
It’s pretty embarrassing when you don’t have a good answer for your own internal teleprompter. It must be something like catching yourself with your pants down. There really is no explanation.
I don’t think it’s entirely JIRA’s fault — but I do think I’ve realized we aren’t their target audience. We’d rather just play bouncer at the door of Club Development and decide which tasks are on the guest list, are too damn sexy to turn away, or have a $100 bill cleverly folded into their handshake. Instead, we have tasks sneaking in the side door, cloning themselves, and all simultaneously proclaiming themselves the most interesting thing in the room.
There’s no reason that a user of our software, clutching a precious scrap of feedback, should arrive at Fort JIRA and be put through the Mensa screening program before they can share. We should be rolling out the red carpet and carrying them to the suggestion box in a golden litter.
Perhaps JIRA wasn’t meant to be customer-facing – and that would explain quite a lot. But if I was going to adopt something for my own neurotic use I’d just keep writing out my ideas in magic marker on rolls of toilet paper (or as I like to call them, perforated Post-Its).
Simply stated, we need something that:
- Doesn’t require a customer login of any kind (but may test for humanness).
- Doesn’t feel the need to ask the customer for more than a block of textual feedback.
- Will bother looking for possible duplication when submitting bugs or ideas.
- Allows our developers to quickly tag, categorize, assign and prioritize suggestions on acceptance without requiring us to open each task’s freaking FaceBook profile.
- Lets us simply pile accepted tasks into “Doing now”, “Will do later”, “Probably will never do, but we don’t have the brass pendulums to say so”.
- Provides simple RSS for everything (e.g., new submissions, current assignments).
Maybe I’ll write it. (Then someone can rant about all the things it can’t do that JIRA can.)
Can anyone save me from the compulsive desire to write things from scratch? Let me know in the comments.
9 responses so far ↓
1
Darren
// Dec 12, 2007 at 12:27 pm
“Can anyone save me from the compulsive desire to write things from scratch? Let me know in the comments.”
Unfortunately no, cause we still need you to develop food pills as well.
2 Cerberus Helpdesk - Blog » Blog Archive » Cerb4 Progress Report: The Blog is Back! // Dec 13, 2007 at 1:52 am
[...] the project roadmap end of things, I recently wrote a (fairly tongue-in-cheek) post over on my personal blog about the things that have been nagging me about the project portal, where we accept feature [...]
3
Jon Silvers
// Dec 13, 2007 at 9:36 am
Hm, there are lot of people who want to eat three times per day, even some that would be happy with one meal. thehungersite.com or a local food bank would be happy to take those excess scraps! :)
Sorry to hear you’re having a bad JIRA day. My other first thought after reading this is whether you’re using filters to find only the issues relevant to you? http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/latest/issue_filters.html
JIRA was developed first as a bug tracker for software developers that we developed five years ago as a better alternative to Bugzilla. It’s not consumer software, it was never meant to be.
We are working interface improvements, with the knowledge that (A) lots of people really like JIRA as it is today and don’t want many changes and (B) others like you want to see change.
You might also want to discuss your pain points on our forums (forums.atlassian.com) or if you can stomach (pun intended) another JIRA, you can log issues and feature requests, and vote on features, here http://tinyurl.com/32mk3r.
Jon Silvers
Atlassian
4 Atlassian Responds to “JIRA is Annoying” // Dec 13, 2007 at 9:41 pm
[...] JIRA is More Annoying Than Having to Eat Three Times a Day [...]
5
Jeff Standen
// Dec 13, 2007 at 9:55 pm
I started to draft a quick reply here, but it ended up evolving into a follow-up post:
http://urltea.com/2d4o
Thanks again for taking the time to stop by!
6
Idetrorce
// Dec 15, 2007 at 9:30 pm
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce
7 Impressive Customer Service » Jeremy Johnstone Blog // Dec 16, 2007 at 6:58 am
[...] among web company’s lately or something? Just last week a colleague of mine (Jeff Standen) posted about his experiences with Jira (and follow up post to their reply) and promptly got a reply from an employee of Atlassian. If it [...]
8
Daniel
// Oct 2, 2008 at 8:45 pm
I’ve been a regular user of two Jiras: the in-house Jira for the small software company that pays my bills, and Second Life’s.
The first Jira only about twenty people (who know what they’re doing) see.
The second is available to any of 20 million game users with a pulse.
From experience with both extremes I have to tell you you’re right: it’s an nice little tool for those on the back end.
As a customer feedback system it’s the L.A. riots.
9
Mike
// Jul 28, 2009 at 3:21 am
“Allows our developers to quickly tag, categorize, assign and prioritize suggestions on acceptance without requiring us to open each task’s freaking FaceBook profile.”
You can try a desktop JIRA client to quickly do such kind of things and more, like offline access:
http://www.jiraclient.com/
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