Photo by bocavermelha

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.