Agree 100%. JIRA is supposed to be a means, not an end itself. Half of my organization believes they are generating value by adding new issues into JIRA. JIRA helps reinforce a dogmatic attitude that the “hows” are more important than the “whys”, and thus issues that could be succinctly described in 20 words get expanded into templated “given/when/then” verbiage.

One of the core Agile principles is “individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. JIRA is more-or-less value neutral, but the management caste, possibly fearful of the sort of healthy conflict that comes with negotiating the priority of features and fixes, tends to resort to inputing all their information into JIRA believing that it’s a substitute for actual communication.

Every Agile resource I’ve read has emphasized the point that nothing is equal to actual conversation between stakeholders. Whether it’s JIRA or one of its competitors, when you have a tool that discourages conversations or pretends to act as a proxy for collaboration between stakeholders, you’re going to court failure. Easy to blame JIRA, but it’s this whole tool-based mindset.