If you've never used this godawful piece of shit software before, Jira is trying to be everything to everyone for software development. It's a bug tracker. It's task management. You can put your documentation in it, and it has burn-down charts, and oh me, oh my. And my AAA games company clients fucking love it.
The problem with Jira is that it has so many features that nobody knows how to use it effectively. And because it is so customizable, no two workflows are the same, even within the same company. Trying to use it as a task manager is a nightmare because each task is basically a form you have to fill out. And doing so incorrectly means your ticket has now been cast to The Void, never to be seen again.
These are the fields I have to enter or leave blank when trying to create a new task for myself:
- Project (pre-filled)
- Issue type
- Status
- Summary
- Description
- Assignee
- Epic Link
- Labels
- Team
- Fix versions
- Original estimate
- Priority
- Attachment
- Components
- Sprint
- Strategic Goals Label
- How to test
- Linked Issues
- Platform
- Milestone
So instead of doing all that, again, for every task, I just write stuff down in my notebook or a Notion dashboard. And that's how I get assigned a Jira task that is just "do the minimap." This is how AAA games are made, folks. ✨