Is Software Development Just a Side Quest? A Jira Story

How much time did you spend this week moving tickets in Jira (or other tracking tool) instead of actually coding?

I sometimes have this feeling that my main job is not development anymore — it’s just moving things between columns.

I always say that a software developer, by nature, is lazy. That’s why we became developers in the first place — to automate everything. So maybe expecting us to not only do our actual work, but also carefully maintain every single detail in Jira… is a bit optimistic.

Quick “what’s up with me” section. My recent article
Most Apps are Slower Than They Need To Be
ended up going way beyond DEV — different newsletters, and it even got me invited to a podcast at WeAreDevelopers 🎤 First podcast in my life. Chaos, tangents… pretty much 100% me 😅

And here’s a fun part: the technical article that opened those doors had almost 6x fewer views than this one:
You're a Real Software Developer Only If... Well, turns out we all enjoy a good laugh more than GPU acceleration demos. Can’t argue with reality 😄

Anyway, back to the topic.

I’m a senior developer. Not officially a tech lead in my current company, but in practice I do a lot of that work, next to coding. Coordinating developers' work, answering questions, helping unblock people. And it’s not just the team — there are stakeholders, testers, other teams.

And the app? It’s a government system. So if something breaks, it’s not “oh no, someone couldn’t watch a show” (haha yes, I'm refering to @adamthedeveloper and his famous You're Not Building Netflix post 😁). The consequences can be very real.

After a day like that, the last thing I feel like doing is carefully updating every field in Jira.

Don’t get me wrong — I actually like having a tracking tool. I can’t imagine working without one, especially in a bigger team. Tasks need to exist somewhere, priorities need to be visible, things shouldn’t disappear into Slack threads.

I also create tickets myself all the time, or ask for them to be created. I want things tracked. I want a history. I want clarity.

But for me, a ticket should have three states: todo, in progress, done.

Everything else is… negotiable.

Stories? Epics? Fine. If it helps someone manage the process, I can live with that.

But then come the extra fields. The additional statuses. The “just one more thing” because it will make the report nicer. Because the burn-down chart will look better. Because someone somewhere wants a cleaner dashboard.

And slowly, without really noticing, we turn Jira into something that requires more mental effort than the actual development.

We’re basically the boiling frog at this point. One more field. One more status. One more small tweak. Until suddenly nobody really knows what goes where anymore, what needs to be updated, and why.

And then, of course, developers get blamed for “not keeping Jira up to date”.

At some point it starts feeling like development itself is just a side quest. If we didn’t have to deal with code at all, imagine how perfect our Jira boards could be. Beautiful burn-down charts. Perfectly filled tickets. Absolute harmony 😄

The funny thing is — the best developers I know are often the ones who engage with this the least. Not because they don’t care, but because their focus is somewhere else. On solving real problems.

I’m still managing it somehow. But I definitely feel the friction.

So I’m curious — is it just me?

Do you also feel this kind of frustration sometimes? Or did you actually manage to find a system that works without turning Jira into a full-time job?