alt Hacker NewsJira Is Turing-Complete
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Jira is popular and has good API wrappers for your favorite language. I'm surprised corporate programmers with the hacker spirit haven't automated most of the things they are asked to do in Jira with Python command line scripts or whatever.
If you can make Jira an order of magnitude easier to use for yourself than for the people pushing it, suddenly the script flips and Jira is something you push to protect yourself. I've used Jira to almost a malicious extent at times, and it's a great tool to cover your ass. If you ever get in trouble for something you just point out "this was all made clear in the hundreds of Jira updates I've written, you've been reading those, right?". What are they going to do? Ask you to use Jira less?
We have AI now. Hook it all together with a custom script and have the AI do all the Jira crap for you.
I came back to a workplace, that still used JIRA. Obviously during the interview I was like oh JIRA yeah yeah yeah you still use that? I can use that.
Anyway yes, I can use JIRA. But it was a real shock to see the latest version of JIRA. It has a thousand papercuts, one of the worst is double clicking on text select stuff suddenly kicks fields into editor mode.
What I was remembering was JIRA Server 4.0, you can walk down memory lane here* - zoom in enough and you'll see each issue has a title, type, fix version, affects version, and so on, and then you end up going straight to the comments. Very straightforward.
* https://www.jirastrategy.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/depl...
Try Azure Boards instead and you will love JIRA.
Because there is no software in the world that Microsoft can't make worse.
Woof. JIRA is so slow, and managers never seemed to set it up correctly. I have trauma from using it!
That explains why it's impossible to tell whether any given Jira operation is going to halt or not.
All workflow and orchestration engines are Turing complete, the whole purpose is to automate execution flows.
I love Jira automations. Whenever I start on a new team using Jira, I go in and set up automations that do things like auto-count the subtask story points to fill the parent task's story points, or automatically move tickets to backlog if they don't have fully refined properties (missing user assignment, missing story points, missing priority, missing description, etc). In one sprint the team has a more organized board. Dunno why they're not the defaults, but easy enough to fix with automations.
This appears bugged:
> A Minsky program that adds register A into register B looks like:
> 1. DEC A; if A == 0 goto 3 else goto 2
> 2. INC B; goto 1
> 3. HALT
If A initially equals 1 it will be decremented and hit zero; the conditional triggers, and the program halts without ever incrementing B.
...which suggests that Jira is a Turing tarpit in which even the simplest programs are immensely difficult to implement correctly. Who knew?
Any software that breeds a consultancy culture around it is a software that has become too complex and should probably be broken up into or replaced by smaller, more manageable parts.
I'm saying that as a former ACE-certified Atlassian Consultant from a Platinum Partner. I'm much happier now.
I think at least 60% companies that use Jira could do better with just Trello. I dont know how it is possible to create such a horrible mess with task manager and some reports. But it probably keeps the managers and POs bussy so :D
Not surprising if you've worked with their automation flows in-depth before. What's surprising is how awful their automation flow tools are to work with. Feels like programming in assembly to accomplish what you want.
Any good alternatives to Jira, locally hosted without a huge licence cost?
in before every project manager on planet earth makes a "guess we don't need you devs anymore haha" joke during morning standup
What annoys me about Atlassian products (Jira, Confluence) is the long load times and terrible layout shifts:
you never know if the layout is about to shift ever so slightly more causing another in a series of misclicks.
Oh how many times I've accidentally assigned a newly created ticket to some poor fella I'd never even seen before...
Even more nauseating than https://brainfuck.org
Can't wait to run DOOM on it
it's actually easy to be turing complete. it's a feat for a system to be non-turing complete and be "complex".
please reply to this comment with a link once they implement Doom in Jira
Jira is the best way to destroy morale.
When would it be better to write software as Jira state transitions, instead of using python (with its large software ecosystem) or Rust or Go (type safety, etc)?
But can it?
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It can’t be because in order to administer Turing test the system has to be usable straight away. This system requires extensive training and specific knowledge and steps for that.
Jira is the one product I feel needs to be AI native.
AI native in the sense that it papers over the pain points.
New JIRA admin? AI will set it up to do what you want (after all, Atlassian has a great training set as they can see which Cloud installs work well)
Need to set up a workflow? Bam, AI to do that.
Need to onboard a user or manage permissions? Again, have a chatbot to do it (as a time-to-time Jira standin Admin, changing permissions always needs doing in 2+ places and devolves into a "Can you see this yet?" round of questions)
Jira is completely awful and thus has the potential to take on any other form of awfulness.