Jira Is a Database of Work You Perform For

Jira is a database of work you perform for. The record is the ticket: fields, transitions, a workflow someone configured in 2019.¹ The job becomes keeping the record true. I have been a Jira user on other people’s projects. Dark Heart Labs does not run Jira. Studio work lives in GitHub Issues and, when a collaboration already had it, Linear. I have never been an Atlassian admin for this shop.

JQL is SQL for guilt. Custom fields are a schema. Sprint is a partition. The board is a query with swimlanes. You learn the workflow because the org cannot see work that is not in a status. Updating Jira is labor. It can be useful labor. It can also be a second job: the comments, the time logs, the required field that exists because a PMO needed a report. The database is not wrong. Databases need writes. The failure is treating the write as the craft.

Use Jira when the org already standardized on it and you will not win a tool fight this quarter. Do not import it into a two-person studio because it looks like process. I write essays. The proof is the file in git, not a ticket in Done.

— JV · Dark Heart Labs.

References

Atlassian Support, “What is Jira?” https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/what-is-jira-software/. Issues, projects, and workflows as the database of work the org can see. ↩