Posted by okovooo 2 days ago
Simple kanban is great! It’s simple! Okay, new users, new feature requests. Wow now I’ve got a really robust product but still it only solves problems for maybe 30% of people. Let’s add more! Eventually we have converged to Jira and instead of doing a few things really well we now do everything poorly. At this point you’ve probably got enough cargo culted corporate bureaucrats using your product to survive for quite awhile as you ride the wave of revenue into the slow tide of mediocrity. Then the death and rebirth as the new starry eyed project management tool begins as YetAnotherTrelloClone
Is a system that does everything within its scope well not conceivable? If it is, does systems ending up like Jira come as a result of scope creep and gradual evolution (not designing the whole thing up front with its admittedly huge scope), not enough development effort or just wanting to ship things soon instead of spending 5 years making the damn thing be good? And then, how do we get there - a Jira killer, that’d be as good as Linux (or maybe BSD) is to OSes? It’s weird that project management has either small focused tools or big ones that are also bad in a variety of ways.
The combinatorial of interactions between many features will inevitably create unresolvable edge-cases that need to be patched over, either hidden away or by tacking on more complexity so the user can control how these edge-cases should be solved for their own workflow.
There is no way to do such design upfront, you can only upfront what you can think and reason about. That's how all projects start, and their demise is exactly from realising "oh, we don't cover this flow, maybe we should have a feature for that". Taking all these learnings and applying to a new system that has more design upfront starts to verge on Second System problem.
Linux is also full of cruft, it's good enough but I don't think you should live with the impression that is a benchmark of software quality. It's still impressive but as any complex system it has many issues from legacy.
That’s a feature, not a bug.
Unfortunately, so many people have been doing cargo-cult agile for so long that now the word "kanban" means 'task board with columns' to most people.
It should not be possible to put 200 items into a column on a Kanban board unless the team is actually shown to have the capacity to work on them without causing a bottleneck.
I’m still in the lookout for a great kanban software though.
I would say this is some sort of joke if I weren't familiar with this kind of mindset, but I don't understand what causes this.
My lesson: Boards can be awful and useless even without managers running them! :)
I've been using a simple, standalone kanban to manage my own tasks, though.
I understand his account as releasing daily frustration in a constructive way. We all hate/love Jira, Excel whatever but the alternatives are worse and instead of one bad solution 20 different perfect apps to use as a substitute won’t cut it.
We all are or have been there.
I like the guy. It is funny.