I mostly agree. It does depend who set up Jira and why. I’m a developer and have full admin access. I know exactly the kinds of tooling required for smooth integration with the rest of the business. Jira is the one product everyone involved agrees on. (If reluctantly.)
It is a fuck-ton of work to set Jira up so it gets out of the way, but it has all of the customization I need to serve most of everyone’s needs.
If anyone so much as thinks about enforcing workflows on our scrum board, they are going to hear my polite, but firm, rejection of such meddling. It’s our board and we let other people see it so they don’t have to bug us with requests for status updates.
Jira isn’t a hard no for me because I’ve been an admin for it at both this job and my previous one. Let my team manage our stuff, and I’ll happily set up Jira to keep everyone else’s grimy paws off my team.
Seriously, though, having your software enforce too much prescriptive workflow on you is dramatically worse than having it enforce too little. Historically it was common for every software team to write their own bug tracker for this reason.
I have found it to be a great heuristic for companies which focus on process for the sake of it and usually treat engineering as a cost center instead of there reason of being.
