Jon Evans:

Let me reiterate: to write elegant software, you must keep both the macro and the micro vision in your mind simultaneously while working. JIRA is good at managing micro pieces. But you need something else for the macro. (And no, a clickable prototype isn’t enough; those are important, but they too require descriptive context.)

He goes on to talk about writing a ten pager about what you are trying to create. I like the idea of writing out some prose, but hate the idea of a ten page document. That’s absurd.

If you can’t describe what your software needs to do in one sentence, you don’t yet understand what you are building. Once you get that once sentence figured out, then write a page or two about how you are going to accomplish that.

Either way, JIRA has by in large has become JIRA for JIRA’s sake. And more worryingly, I’ve often seen it become a place to point fingers to blame for errors or delays, or features not coming out right. And the frustrating part is that this finger pointing is done completely unintentionally and ends up frustrating and confusing everyone, so the end result is usually doubling down on JIRA for the next week or so.