I have never used Jira, could you say more about your feelings towards it? Currently we use an old in-house solution and are thinking of shifting.

The biggest issue by far is how slow it is. I don't mean bubble sort slow, I mean deliberately engineered quantum bogosort. A cache-less refresh for me on a blazing fast dev machine takes between 3-10 minutes on a normal day, though it might only take 1m if the internet gods are feeling particularly merciful. That leads to all sorts of avoidance because using it for anything takes long enough to be worth documenting as a ticket in its own right.

Compounding this issue is how many clicks even "simple" tasks take because of their bizarre choices. Basic necessities like changing ticket status can't be done without opening separate pages, etc.

One you've actually managed to create a ticket and assign status, good luck finding it later. Backlogs inevitably evolve into infinite swamps that no one knows the full contents of. Not helping is the fact that the search is terrible. I often vaguely recollect some detail or test procedure that someone helpfully mentioned/documented in a ticket somewhere before closing. I successfully find maybe a third or less of those.

Also it's highly customizable, so any skills or knowledge from one company don't apply to the installation at any other.

I don't like Jira that much, but this is just blatantly false.

> A cache-less refresh for me on a blazing fast dev machine takes between 3-10 minutes on a normal day, though it might only take 1m if the internet gods are feeling particularly merciful

I use Jira daily, it's nowhere near this bad. It's not fast, but pages load in about 5 seconds.

> changing ticket status can't be done without opening separate pages

You select the new state from the drop-down and set it. This is available through a few different routes/views.

> good luck finding it later

Their search looks through title and description, what else do you want?

> Backlogs inevitably evolve into infinite swamps that no one knows the full contents of.

If you let them, of course. If you don't close the tickets, what did you expect to happen?

They probably meant seconds. A website that takes seconds to open is unusable.

I wish I was mistaken, but I do literally mean minutes. I've measured it with a stopwatch before.

Your internet or Jira server is at fault. I've worked in some places that had really dystopian Jira installations, but never seen stuff quite that bad.

Better tell your Jira admin that something is terribly borked with your company's install, then.

I assume your workplace is using the cloud solution? Our huge-enterprise in-house install is blazing fast, as long as nobody misconfigures some automation tool to overload the database.

Edit: I did have the bad luck to discover it performs pretty horribly if you’re on a high-latency connection to the office. I think it makes a lot of round-trip requests.

Yes, JIRA Cloud is unusably slow and their "nextgen" rewrite only compounds problems by adding workflows no one asked for and by removing workflows everyone depends on.

Properly configured on-premise installations are usually quite fast.

> I think it makes a lot of round-trip requests.

It does, and that's the main issue

I don't know how you have it configured, but I have to say, we dont have these problems.

The configurations can supposedly make a huge difference. However, I've yet to see a company where these weren't serious issues and I can only speak to my experience. If you're lucky enough to have a decent installation I'd recommend buying IT a nice lunch or something. A bad Jira setup is truly awful.

Cloud JIRA itself is slow, for what it’s worth. Seconds long RTTs — which make using a CLI to bypass the web UI pointless in my experience

Thanks for replying, I think I get it now. We use SharePoint which has very similar issues.

Jira is very sensitive to the configuration you build for it, and the hardware it is running on. The full configuration for Jira would make an Encyclopedia look small. Get that wrong (as many places do), and it is hard to use and dead-dog slow, at the best of times. But if you have a real Jira wizard who can configure things correctly, then it can easily be the fastest and easiest way to organize your development and operational support tasks.

I’ve seen both good and bad Jira configurations. And I’ve seen them run on both good and bad hardware solutions.

There is a reason why Atlassian is getting rid of Enterprise Jira, because it’s really hard to build a good hardware solution for running Jira properly.

I submit that anyone who hates Jira probably has not seen a good Jira configuration. And anyone who loves Jira probably has seen a good configuration and doesn’t understand what everyone else is complaining about.

Jira is a real Jekyll vs. Hyde type of tool. In my experience, how you feel about Jira says much more about the type of configuration you’ve seen than anything else.

> There is a reason why Atlassian is getting rid of Enterprise Jira, because it’s really hard to build a good hardware solution for running Jira properly.

This has been done wrong by Atlassian.

I’m sometimes really jealous when I see fast self hosted public JIRAs and by the meantime, the instance I have to work everyday on atlassian cloud is both snail-slow and airplane-heavy.

On the one hand, I actually do agree with you. On the other hand, if nobody can use the tool right, then it's not the user at fault.

The GP's point was precisely that some can use the tool right.

> There is a reason why Atlassian is getting rid of Enterprise Jira, because it’s really hard to build a good hardware solution for running Jira properly

And they are replacing it with JIRA Cloud that cannot be configured at all, and is unbearably slow.

Thanks! I hadn't heard about this before!

Even when JIRA isn't slow: it has an absolutely horrid implementation of search that basically gives you a bunch of random issues in addition to what you are looking for (your search term appears nowhere in them). The exact set will randomly change. And it'll keep insisting on being helpful and turning your search into "smart" query and then failing because it is not valid.

I agree with both of the others who replied. Jira has infinite knobs, and they all get turned, and you build this massive, complex system when what you really need is a textbox and some tags.

I am not normally a "less features is more" kind of person. But with issue tracking, I am.

Maybe the thing to do is what Slack did with IRC and slap a (better, as the case may be) GUI on rt or Trac.