Committing to Software Trials

As you will be able to see if you go back a few posts in my Blog I have an unhealthy dislike for TFS. Most of it comes from a belief, that rubbed off on me in a previous position, that if a product is not easy and enjoyable to use people will not use it. TFS issue tracking is not easy to use. It is really little more than a single database table that you can define custom queries against. I am pretty sure that you could achieve 90% of the functionality using Microsoft Access. So imagine my joy when I finally managed to get my boss to give JIRA a try.

JIRA is both fun and easy to use provided you use their workflows. With the GreenHopper plugin you can move things around in the backlog just by dragging them (you can do this in TFS 2012 but that's not what we're using), drag tasks around the workflow to indicate progress, drag issues from one release to another and so on and so forth. All the charts you really need are also bundled in with the Green Hopper plugin including a real-time burn down (not just a daily summary like TFS), cumulative flow and more. There are also easy prioritisation and voting tools to help project managers prioritise work.

Despite the awesomeness of JIRA I am not enjoying our trial. Unfortunately for Atlassian it is not their fault and there is not a lot they can do about it. You see the original plan for the trial was to switch our small team from TFS to JIRA for a sprint so that everyone could marvel at it's wonder. Being an eager beaver I was on it from the start and had the next sprint of items from the backlog into JIRA in no time. But then things went wrong. Product Management were not aware we were using the new tool and there was a hold up getting usernames out to the other developers. This lead to the abysmal  situation of me, and the other developers as they joined, having to keep both JIRA and TFS up-to-date with progress. It also meant that there were 2 places to look for activity feeds (my twitter like group and the feeds in JIRA) and that if a PM made a change it was in TFS not in JIRA. So now the development team are left disliking JIRA because it is just more work for them to do, project management are still oblivious to it's existence and the whole thing has really been a waste of time.

This is actually a common mistake with trialling new procedures and software. If you are trying something new you should just go for it. Don't try out a new system while maintaining and old one because even if you spend 90% of the effort maintaining the old system you will dislike the new one for giving you more work. I see this a lot when I recommend ReSharper to people too. They don't trust the quick fixes and hints so they don't use them. If they don't use them they just see them as cluttering up their environment and completely miss the point of the product!