Where Jira and Confluence Workflows Create Friction
Jira and Confluence are core to Agile collaboration, helping team members sync up and stay aligned. But over time, they can start feeling more like a labyrinth and not a launchpad.
If configured without care, these tools can cause friction that worsens DevEx.
Jira’s Issue Mayhem
Most of the time, people use Jira for Agile collaboration among dev teams because it can track issues, plan sprints, and automate workflows.
But teams who crave agility and collaboration usually find the developer experience in Jira is less than ideal.
- Micromanagement
The biggest selling point of Jira is that you can track issues. But if teams only look at a certain metric, then tracking becomes more about tasks and deadlines instead of encouraging people to work together creatively.
The team sometimes ends up spending more time on updating tickets instead of solving real problems, worsening the developer experience in Jira.
- Process over Progress
Jira’s ticket-centric approach prioritizes task completion instead of collaborative outcomes. As a result, people start aiming to move cards instead of delivering value.
Sometimes workflows end up being 22 steps when only 10 would have been enough.
- Rigidity and Complexity
Jira is commonly used, but it isn’t the easiest to use. It has a pretty steep learning curve.
Nobody can hit the ground running, and that prevents teams from doing actual work because people spend more time configuring and maintaining Jira instead of using it to deliver value.
Confluence
Teams use Confluence to document and share knowledge because it can centralize information, support collaboration, and integrate with Jira.
But the very fact that it’s used to store knowledge can become a problem that needs to be solved.
- Information Chaos and Poor Organization
Like a library without a librarian, Confluence can quickly turn into a hoard of information. Pages devolve into spaces packed with irrelevant, outdated, poorly organized piles of data with no clear owner and zero lifecycle management.
The main issue is the fact that there’s no way to create nested spaces, so information ends up scattered across independent spaces or pages. This kind of fragmentation makes it impossible to maintain a proper source or to manage it.
- Knowledge Management Failures
The way the platform is set up enables information silos—different versions of documents with different owners. Team members create multiple versions of important documents, leading to a lot of confusion and inconsistency.
This slows down the whole team, results in double the amount of work, and undermines the agile principle of transparent shared knowledge.
- Maintenance Overhead
Unfortunately, there’s a significant amount of maintenance required to ensure Confluence remains useful. You need to dedicate time to deleting old information and organizing pages.
Although it’s tedious, it’s necessary and consumes precious time. The constant audits and updates usually end up creating more friction in agile teams that want to just get things done.
