JIRA is an Antipattern via techcrunch

One thing that writing elegant software has in common with art: its crafters should remain cognizant of the overall macro vision of the project, at the same time they are working on its smallest micro details. JIRA, alas, implicitly teaches everyone to ignore the larger vision while focusing on details. There is no whole...JIRA encourages the disintegration of the macro vision.

A scathing assessment of how Jira is commonly used. Personally, I like the author’s conclusion: Jira can be great for issue tracking, but for anything larger it works against you. I also like the suggestion of prose as a description of the project. If we all had to write out – in natural language – what we were doing in software, I think we’d discover a lot more holes in our thinking which we’d then be forced to patch up. Jira makes it easy for you to bypass all of that and just write simple, vague depictions of what you’re trying to do.