jira jockeys

2023-09-11

I've noticed a tendency on some software engineering teams to resort to "jira jockeying".

I've heard this term at a couple of places I've worked. In short, this is treating moving jira tickets across the board as the primary motivation/focus of your job. Don't get me wrong, I also love the hit of dopamine I get when I move a ticket to "done", but this is not why I do what I do.

Jira is not:

• the product

• a measure of your worth as an engineer

• scrum

• agile

Jira is:

• a tool (an over-complicated one I think, but I'll save that for another time)

Recently I noticed that my team was spending nearly the whole standup staring at a screenshare of Jira and talking about who's working which ticket and should we move it to this column or that column. A clean Jira board is great, but that's not where we should be spending our precious 15 minutes together. We should be talking about the product, which bugs still exist, who needs help with the tricky code they're stuck on, etc. If anything should be screenshared, it should be pulling up the product and discussing whether that latest PR solved the issue correctly or not.

We switched up our standup format to be more focused on the product and less on the tickets. Time will tell if this is a good change, but so far it's at least been a nice break from the status-quo and I've been seeing some good things happening.