On Jira

Recent discussions at work made me reflect over Jira and more generally team processes. Potentially hot take 🌶️ I've used Jira for over eight years now. I have yet to see significant benefit using it for anything other than a backlog of things we really intend to do, can't do right now, and that are more than just ideas (ideas are cheap — we'll have better ones next month). That list is fairly short.

I'm sure it has great use cases like coordinating with external stakeholders or managing work in teams spread across different offices or even timezones.

But what really unlocked a new mental model for me and clarified my discomfort with Jira and similar tools was Tim Ottinger's (well, I heard it from him) framing of "Solo Ticket Processing." Jira is often used to split work into small tasks, which can then be spread across a team. The idea is to parallelize and thus improve velocity, but software engineers don't really work like that. Un-teaming a group of developers and assigning them solo tickets for parallel execution isn’t a silver bullet for unlocking extra potential—more often, it has the opposite effect.

I could keep going on this, but I think you're better off checking out some of Tim's blog posts like this one: Individual Work Assignments: Neither Agile Nor Team