Le roi est mort, vive le roi!
JIRA is dead, long live Rally
-er, Agile Central!
In an email sent on 2/10, my employer announced (belatedly) that there would be a changing of the guard. For those of us in software development and/or project management it has become a common practice to use some type of tool to track requests and issues and to chart progress towards goals. Without such tools, the logic goes, code would never get moved into production environments in a timely manner. Projects would consistently run late and over budget. "These tools are a must!", the vendors of such tools tell us.
Well, as a crusty old hacker with over a decade in the biz, I can recall the days when all project management was done with Word, Excel, Visio (if you were lucky), and Outlook. I can sum up the era thusly:
But as our modern day Psalmist (and Nobel laureate) Bob Dylan was written, the times they are a changing. Like it or not, the means to have much greater control, insight and feel for projects large and small is upon us, and JIRA, made by Atlassian and used extensively by my company for years, was just good enough to make this cynical old guy a believer. Long live JIRA!
When I was managing a team of talented developers, our mission was to automate automate automate whenever possible. We were to automate testing, automate workflows, automate the extraction of reporting. It was a lot to handle, and being one of those absent-minded professor types who can never find his glasses (on top of your head, sir) or remember anything (yes, we finished that last week, sir), JIRA just made it so easy to keep tabs on many things at once. I could see what my team was doing, they could see what I was doing. We knew if we were on track or falling behind. We could reallocate resources with aplomb, we could shift priorities on a dime. In short, we were agile. We were actually embracing the spirit of the Agile Manifesto, and delivering value more rapidly and with higher quality.
The genius of JIRA, IMHO, was its simplicity. In Agile, one of the core ideas is the concept of the information radiator. Check out this link here. JIRA deftly managed to craft a UI that showed a team everything that was being done, had been done, and what still needed to be done all in one place without overwhelming the viewer with too much data. You could drag and drop tasks and issue from one state to the other and continue on with your work. It was pretty slick, I have to say.
Of course, this is the part in the movie where something goes wrong. There has to be some tension in any good story, right? Well, in their infinite wisdom, the powers that be decided to move away from JIRA and to start using a rival tool called Rally. Cue the clouds of Mordor blocking out the JIRA sun. I went through the training. I didn't like the tool. The UI was not as intuitive, packed with more options than I can ever need, and most damning of all, required me to... change. Not cool. I accept that my projects will change, requirements change, priorities change, political landscapes change -but don't mess with my process once I've got it to where it is working just right! I resisted the move to Rally for as long as I could, a modern day Luddite. Even when I went from Informatics to IT, and everyone on my new team was using Rally, I clung to the dream that we might go back to my beloved JIRA. Not happening. Rally (which recently changed its name to Agile Central) is not a bad tool. I can still manage my projects well. I can still be transparent with my team. But the tool is simply not to my liking. I will climb its learning curve, and may come to appreciate its strengths at some point, but please, indulge me in my grief for a moment. After about a year of supporting both, JIRA is officially being sunsetted. It will go into read only mode on April 3 and decommissioned altogether after a sufficient period of mourning has passed. I'll miss you JIRA. No good thing lasts forever.
In an email sent on 2/10, my employer announced (belatedly) that there would be a changing of the guard. For those of us in software development and/or project management it has become a common practice to use some type of tool to track requests and issues and to chart progress towards goals. Without such tools, the logic goes, code would never get moved into production environments in a timely manner. Projects would consistently run late and over budget. "These tools are a must!", the vendors of such tools tell us.
Well, as a crusty old hacker with over a decade in the biz, I can recall the days when all project management was done with Word, Excel, Visio (if you were lucky), and Outlook. I can sum up the era thusly:
But as our modern day Psalmist (and Nobel laureate) Bob Dylan was written, the times they are a changing. Like it or not, the means to have much greater control, insight and feel for projects large and small is upon us, and JIRA, made by Atlassian and used extensively by my company for years, was just good enough to make this cynical old guy a believer. Long live JIRA!
When I was managing a team of talented developers, our mission was to automate automate automate whenever possible. We were to automate testing, automate workflows, automate the extraction of reporting. It was a lot to handle, and being one of those absent-minded professor types who can never find his glasses (on top of your head, sir) or remember anything (yes, we finished that last week, sir), JIRA just made it so easy to keep tabs on many things at once. I could see what my team was doing, they could see what I was doing. We knew if we were on track or falling behind. We could reallocate resources with aplomb, we could shift priorities on a dime. In short, we were agile. We were actually embracing the spirit of the Agile Manifesto, and delivering value more rapidly and with higher quality.
The genius of JIRA, IMHO, was its simplicity. In Agile, one of the core ideas is the concept of the information radiator. Check out this link here. JIRA deftly managed to craft a UI that showed a team everything that was being done, had been done, and what still needed to be done all in one place without overwhelming the viewer with too much data. You could drag and drop tasks and issue from one state to the other and continue on with your work. It was pretty slick, I have to say.
Of course, this is the part in the movie where something goes wrong. There has to be some tension in any good story, right? Well, in their infinite wisdom, the powers that be decided to move away from JIRA and to start using a rival tool called Rally. Cue the clouds of Mordor blocking out the JIRA sun. I went through the training. I didn't like the tool. The UI was not as intuitive, packed with more options than I can ever need, and most damning of all, required me to... change. Not cool. I accept that my projects will change, requirements change, priorities change, political landscapes change -but don't mess with my process once I've got it to where it is working just right! I resisted the move to Rally for as long as I could, a modern day Luddite. Even when I went from Informatics to IT, and everyone on my new team was using Rally, I clung to the dream that we might go back to my beloved JIRA. Not happening. Rally (which recently changed its name to Agile Central) is not a bad tool. I can still manage my projects well. I can still be transparent with my team. But the tool is simply not to my liking. I will climb its learning curve, and may come to appreciate its strengths at some point, but please, indulge me in my grief for a moment. After about a year of supporting both, JIRA is officially being sunsetted. It will go into read only mode on April 3 and decommissioned altogether after a sufficient period of mourning has passed. I'll miss you JIRA. No good thing lasts forever.
posted by Jahan at 7:00 AM
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