JIRA is fine as a organizational tool, the problem how it’s applied and abused by management. The second you get some project manager sharing their screen with the entire dev team to go over “burndown” and talk about “velocity” you can safely zone out, unless there is a serious effort by management to couple metrics like “JIRA ticket points completed” to individual (or even team) performance.
Especially if that last point becomes true, consider this a good opportunity to apply this handy guide. Bouncing back requests with “please create a ticket” or “please make sure this ticket is assigned to the right epic” or whatever hairs you can split is a great way to get nothing done while also giving the appearance that you’re somehow actually doing work. Most managers are already just pushing virtual papers around, so they are often completely blind to devs doing the same with systems like JIRA.
That’s not even sabotage; that’s just CYA so your workload is documented. If it isn’t visible in your issue tracking system, your manager has no way of quantifying that you’re getting dragged into that work above and beyond your normal “day” job. In a perfect world (read: after capitalism is dragged out back and beaten to death with a baseball bat covered in rusty nails), this would affect budgeting and staffing requirements estimates. In late-stage capitalist hellworld, it’s more of a measure of how over-exploited you are, but can work in your favor for at least not getting dinged on performance reviews.
JIRA is fine as a organizational tool, the problem how it’s applied and abused by management. The second you get some project manager sharing their screen with the entire dev team to go over “burndown” and talk about “velocity” you can safely zone out, unless there is a serious effort by management to couple metrics like “JIRA ticket points completed” to individual (or even team) performance.
Especially if that last point becomes true, consider this a good opportunity to apply this handy guide. Bouncing back requests with “please create a ticket” or “please make sure this ticket is assigned to the right epic” or whatever hairs you can split is a great way to get nothing done while also giving the appearance that you’re somehow actually doing work. Most managers are already just pushing virtual papers around, so they are often completely blind to devs doing the same with systems like JIRA.
That’s not even sabotage; that’s just CYA so your workload is documented. If it isn’t visible in your issue tracking system, your manager has no way of quantifying that you’re getting dragged into that work above and beyond your normal “day” job. In a perfect world (read: after capitalism is dragged out back and beaten to death with a baseball bat covered in rusty nails), this would affect budgeting and staffing requirements estimates. In late-stage capitalist hellworld, it’s more of a measure of how over-exploited you are, but can work in your favor for at least not getting dinged on performance reviews.