Jira Is Turing-Complete
https://seriot.ch/computation/jira.htmland they keep. adding. redundant. features
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.
And many times the API can do stuff that the UI doesn't allow, and everyone's relying on the UI to drive things, so you end up in weirdly broken corners because you didn't notice that you need custom_field_5537 to be paired with custom_field_442 or it doesn't appear on anyone else's dashboard. Also it claims custom_field_10995 is an integer type field, and returns as integers in the XML, but there's a pile of undocumented magic constant strings that you have to use instead when creating (but not updating!) a task or you get useless error messages. The web UI doesn't do this though (it's just integers in html and the request), and only 80% of the strings match the display text in the dropdown.
Automating Jira is the absolute worst programming experience I've ever had. I can completely believe that simpler setups exist and they're probably quite easy, but omfg.
Sadly it's still completely worth the effort. Highly recommended.
If it was about the ticket system, it'd be solved already. But it isn't.
It's the API equivalent of formatting a document in MS Word.
This is key, Jira is fantastic so long as you have an angry commissar enforcing discipline, otherwise its a total free for all wasteland.
It would be an interesting exercise to keep feeding a coding agent ever crazier interface designs until it cracks.
“The base64 of the rot13 encrypted EBCDIC string has to be included in a JSON in the XML SOAP request, but both the JSON and XML escaping is manual and incorrect...”
"...but first split the string into chunks no bigger than 64 bytes and spread the request amongst HTTP headers instead of the POST body. Reassemble by trying every possible ordering until one passes the decoding steps."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Obfuscated_C_Cod...
Copilot Studio. It's painful to try to set up any sort of logic within Copilot Studio. Worse if you're not on the most bleed-edging-new machine with overkill levels of ram. So I had a thought... why am I doing this when I have Claude with absolutely no quotas?
Turns out, there's just no way to drive it from Claude. It first started with the pac command line tool, but that's agonizingly broken. Tried to use Chrome next, but even it can't navigate that UI from the browser (neither could I, you'd click and sometimes the response occurs 10 seconds later). Copilot Studio is the quintessential Microsoft technology. Shortly after, Claude began experiencing what I can only call schizophrenic symptoms. It imagined that every time I queried it that there were embedded hacking attempts in my reply and that soon spread to every conversation I had with it even in new chats.
Not a single of the many organisations that I worked for which used JIRA would give the credentials to do anything of this sort.
One of the first things we did when we got access to AI was make a Jira MCP. I try not to touch Jira anymore. I get Claude to just create the Jira issues, write comments, create subtasks, link issues together, etc.
I used to dread having to investigate how to implement something and break it down into tasks because the more granular I broke things down, the more Jira issues I had to create to capture each task. Now I can just write everything up in a file and send an LLM to do all the Jira crap.
As if the bloat on Jira isn't big enough already. Adding more text will make it even slower since it will somehow automatically run everything over all that text all the time. If you need heating at your company, use Jira.
That's because corporate IT makes the tokens expire every 2 seconds so scripting becomes useless.
Seriously we have some tokens that expire every 1 hour.
* "Corporate hackers" is a... not a very common thing. In the corporate world most programmers do what they are told to do and nothing more. Initiative is punishable.
* API wrappers aren't actually good. Not to mention that the API itself is very poor. JIRA has a tradition of arbitrary changing things, especially removing things, or not exposing the useful functionality. It's not a well-designed or well-executed product.
* AI is too immature and too non-deterministic to be useful for most of the things you want from a bug tracker. Also, for most companies, it's going to be too expensive to do it this way.
* QA is usually an afterthought, unless... we are talking about budget cuts and cutting corners, then it's left, right and center. Most companies see QA as a liability. They don't see it as producing value. They just have to pretend to have QA so that they can tell their customer they have it. When it comes to making QA do meaningful things, that require hiring good engineers, allocating development time, allocating compute resources... well, good luck with all that! Most QA I've seen, especially in international huge corporations was all for show, to produce appearance of work while following the same, mostly useless and mostly manual process.
I had a bunch of ideas about how QA can be made more efficient, both in terms of resource use and in terms of problem space it tries to address. Doing things like RCA automation or exploratory dynamic* testing... and after trying to see if any of such ideas would have any luck of becoming an actual successful product, I realized that nobody wants to improve QA. If a product made the "certification" (the ability to claim to have tested the product) cheaper, then it could be viable... but this is neither the direction I wanted to go, nor is it really all that feasible to improve a bug tracker in this direction.
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* What I mean by exploratory testing is a sort of "fuzzing", however one that's more structured. Fuzzing, typically, is applied to the input, which then tries to explore all possible ways through the program under test. Exploratory testing is a test made up of modules that can be combined to produce longer tests. This addresses the problem of difficult to reach "corner" cases in the program, also the problem of reaching code paths that aren't directly (or at all) dependent on input.
that thing does not exists
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...
Prove me wrong!
https://developer.atlassian.com/server/jira/platform/creatin...
I also explicitly mentioned workflows on my comment.
Then we can split hairs about which one don't really support it, so that you want win Internet discussions about all not being all.
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...
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)