Jira is popular and has good API wrappers for your favorite language. I'm surprised corporate programmers with the hacker spirit haven't automated most of the things they are asked to do in Jira with Python command line scripts or whatever.

If you can make Jira an order of magnitude easier to use for yourself than for the people pushing it, suddenly the script flips and Jira is something you push to protect yourself. I've used Jira to almost a malicious extent at times, and it's a great tool to cover your ass. If you ever get in trouble for something you just point out "this was all made clear in the hundreds of Jira updates I've written, you've been reading those, right?". What are they going to do? Ask you to use Jira less?

We have AI now. Hook it all together with a custom script and have the AI do all the Jira crap for you.

Quite a few have, the issue is that every Jira instance is a fractal shit snowflake of custom properties several layers deep through old failed migrations to new organization strategies.

And many times the API can do stuff that the UI doesn't allow, and everyone's relying on the UI to drive things, so you end up in weirdly broken corners because you didn't notice that you need custom_field_5537 to be paired with custom_field_442 or it doesn't appear on anyone else's dashboard. Also it claims custom_field_10995 is an integer type field, and returns as integers in the XML, but there's a pile of undocumented magic constant strings that you have to use instead when creating (but not updating!) a task or you get useless error messages. The web UI doesn't do this though (it's just integers in html and the request), and only 80% of the strings match the display text in the dropdown.

Automating Jira is the absolute worst programming experience I've ever had. I can completely believe that simpler setups exist and they're probably quite easy, but omfg.

Sadly it's still completely worth the effort. Highly recommended.

Yep, at a place I used to do work for I used their API to build a number of time saving things, all of which were tiny shell scripts.

Like adding a custom text field to each ticket with a human description of what a ticket did which someone would fill out along with a timestamp that got auto-filled out when a release shipped (deploy script). We'd release 1 ticket at a time as a line of work (many tickets per day). This combined with custom filters resulted in Jira providing us a human readable changelog for each board and the whole company. These messages were Slacked to the business so everyone had a pulse on what was going live. It was also a searchable audit log of all releases, tying back to a code change.

The deploy process also transitioned Jira tickets so a developer never had to do anything more than merge a ticket to main to have it get deployed and completed on Jira.

Lots of little scripts that automatically created tickets for routine tasks, etc..

It was super solid for years and I'm going to guess it's still running today. The naming conventions of the custom fields were lame but if your team is in control of setting up Jira, it wasn't hard to keep everything on the same page.

I started off not liking Jira and it had a lot of issues many years ago but it's actually not that bad nowadays once you set it up. I wouldn't choose it for my own company but as a developer and someone who has administrated it, used it as an end user and developed against it for internal tools, it mostly gets out of your way once it's configured and working.

> Hook it all together with a custom script and have the AI do all the Jira crap for you.

As if the bloat on Jira isn't big enough already. Adding more text will make it even slower since it will somehow automatically run everything over all that text all the time. If you need heating at your company, use Jira.

moved to Jetbrains YouTrack many many years ago, and this is what we do via its APIs. It's quite versatile. With AI, it unlocked it even more.

Our main problem is only that they are hijacking the prices incredibly.. Lately we had to cut the number of licences and users, since it was incredibly expensive.

Our entire company is basically ran through Jira. Most processes rely on Jira and certain transitions fire of webhooks for automation.

One of the first things we did when we got access to AI was make a Jira MCP. I try not to touch Jira anymore. I get Claude to just create the Jira issues, write comments, create subtasks, link issues together, etc.

I used to dread having to investigate how to implement something and break it down into tasks because the more granular I broke things down, the more Jira issues I had to create to capture each task. Now I can just write everything up in a file and send an LLM to do all the Jira crap.

> I'm surprised corporate programmers with the hacker spirit haven't automated most of the things they are asked to do in Jira with Python command line scripts or whatever.

Not a single of the many organisations that I worked for which used JIRA would give the credentials to do anything of this sort.

I can see very naive points here:

* "Corporate hackers" is a... not a very common thing. In the corporate world most programmers do what they are told to do and nothing more. Initiative is punishable.

* API wrappers aren't actually good. Not to mention that the API itself is very poor. JIRA has a tradition of arbitrary changing things, especially removing things, or not exposing the useful functionality. It's not a well-designed or well-executed product.

* AI is too immature and too non-deterministic to be useful for most of the things you want from a bug tracker. Also, for most companies, it's going to be too expensive to do it this way.

* QA is usually an afterthought, unless... we are talking about budget cuts and cutting corners, then it's left, right and center. Most companies see QA as a liability. They don't see it as producing value. They just have to pretend to have QA so that they can tell their customer they have it. When it comes to making QA do meaningful things, that require hiring good engineers, allocating development time, allocating compute resources... well, good luck with all that! Most QA I've seen, especially in international huge corporations was all for show, to produce appearance of work while following the same, mostly useless and mostly manual process.

I had a bunch of ideas about how QA can be made more efficient, both in terms of resource use and in terms of problem space it tries to address. Doing things like RCA automation or exploratory dynamic* testing... and after trying to see if any of such ideas would have any luck of becoming an actual successful product, I realized that nobody wants to improve QA. If a product made the "certification" (the ability to claim to have tested the product) cheaper, then it could be viable... but this is neither the direction I wanted to go, nor is it really all that feasible to improve a bug tracker in this direction.

----

* What I mean by exploratory testing is a sort of "fuzzing", however one that's more structured. Fuzzing, typically, is applied to the input, which then tries to explore all possible ways through the program under test. Exploratory testing is a test made up of modules that can be combined to produce longer tests. This addresses the problem of difficult to reach "corner" cases in the program, also the problem of reaching code paths that aren't directly (or at all) dependent on input.

> I'm surprised corporate programmers with the hacker spirit haven't automated most of the things they are asked to do in Jira with Python command line scripts or whatever.

That's because corporate IT makes the tokens expire every 2 seconds so scripting becomes useless.

Seriously we have some tokens that expire every 1 hour.

> corporate programmers with the hacker spirit

that thing does not exists