Why I don’t use Jira and Confluence at all for my software development?
Jira and Confluence have no value to me.
A repost of my article on Medium (2022)
It seems that Jira and Confluence are used everywhere within the software industry. As an owner of several commercial software products, I don’t use Jira or Confluence, have never had the need and do not see any benefits from them.
On 2022–11–10, DHH posted an insightful comment on LinkedIn based on the public financial figures (“losing boatloads of money”):
“These companies (Asana, Monday, Smartsheet, and ClickUp) can’t even make their own businesses work, yet they’re trying to sell you software to run yours.” — DHH
Some of the above software, such as ClickUp, marketed themselves as a “Jira Replacement”. By the way, Atlassian’s share was doing very poorly last year as well.
As an Australian, I naturally have a feeling of closeness to Atlassian, an Australian-originated company, and I have witnessed its growth. My first contact with Atlassian engineers was at CITCON 2009. Atlassian, as the sponsor, gave some marketing talks, of course. It was a really good marketing strategy to go directly to programmers. Later, I received an invitation to join Atlassian, but I declined because I never liked the idea of digital versions of user stories.
Table of Contents:
· Manage user stories in Jira is Wrong!
· Jira ≠ Agile
· Without Jira, how can I do …?
· Solid evidence of “Jira and its alike is non-essential for Agile Software Development”
· Why Jira this kind of digital management tool is spreading so fast as a virus?
· What about Confluence then?Manage user stories in Jira is Wrong!
Jira was much better (and cheaper) than the infamous Rational United Process (RUP) as a digital project management tool. Jira’s rapid growth in replacing over-complicated RUP comes as no surprise to me, However, after mastering test automation and continuous testing, I realised that this kind of digital project management tool is of no use and can even make things worse.
As you know, the essence of Jira is managing user stories. Let’s see what Kent Beck, Father of Agile, wrote in his classic book.
According to Kent Beck, “the computerised version of stories” never worked. I know that many readers who are using Jira daily would strongly disagree. Kent Beck is correct (frankly, you compared to Kent, …) because most people did not understand the version of “working (well)” in Kent’s view. I agree with Kent Beck, but only after I mastered test automation. Therefore, I don’t use Jira (and confluence) at all for my own software development.
Jira ≠ Agile
There is no doubt that Jira has been extremely successful in the agile space. In my last test consulting project, I found the team’s ~50% time was spent using Jira/Confluence, rather than working on their own product. It sounds mad, doesn’t it?
A fake agile coach might spend the majority of their work time on Jira, which is vastly different from the first (real) agile coach I met in 2005. He, a world-renowned programmer, spent most of his time on test automation.
You might have seen the below slide by Andy Hunt, a co-author of the Agile Manifesto.
Common sense: Jira ≠ Agile. Jira is Atlassian’s commercial software, not yours.
Over the years, Jira added more terms such as “Epic” and more features such as “burn charts”. Do they really matter to real SDLC? Programmers introduce regression issues all the time, and one issue might offset your perfect plan (in Jira) by days or weeks.
Without Jira, how can I do …?
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