To me, what sucks about JIRA (and would suck about any well-designed tool that replaces it) is not “feature x” but the entire JIRA mentality. All of it. It encourages micro-management. It encourages more and more process. It is the enemy of getting better at the DORA metrics, which requires streamlining process.

Tickets in JIRA are not the work itself, never was and never will be, it is a LARP of the work, but it gets taken for the central thing. This is an illusion. Fixing a bug without filing a JIRA ticket is in itself progress. Moving a JIRA card without any other change is not. Yet the second is what’s visible and therefor what’s rewarded.

Any problem gets solved with “more JIRA” which stops working when the remaining problems are caused by too much JIRA. And yet they keep trying, because it gives “control”. JIRA is a like metastatic tumour that will grow until it kills the host.

In case the cancer metaphor didn’t make it very clear, I don’t like JIRA much. Yet if JIRA were to die today, the middle management who live by JIRA would replace it with something else equally bad, if not worse.

Filling in missing features won’t and can’t fix that.