“Any tool that has attempted to be ‘everything for everyone’ has failed miserably” – Dr. Mik Kersten, CEO and founder, Tasktop
In the fable ‘The Man and The Wooden God’, the protagonist spends most of their life praying to a wooden idol for wealth and fortune to no avail. One day, in a fit of rage, they smash the idol on the floor and an immense number of coins spill out. The moral of the story? There’s a few: that you should beware false gods, that faith alone won’t bring you success, and that sometimes it’s up to you to get things moving.
Which brings us to the ‘One Tool Fallacy’; organizations continue to be led astray by the misguided notion that all stages of the software delivery value stream, from ideation to production, can still be successfully migrated into one system, despite no evidence to support this theory.
First, we overloaded very promising tools like Rational Team Concert (RTC) by adding every feature for every stakeholder and process. Now some organizations are trying to do the same with Jira; a reaction to the growing complexity and feature set. We keep making false gods.
Having ‘one tool to rule them all’ is naturally appealing in terms of perceived simplicity and cost benefits. The idea, however, is inherently flawed. History speaks for itself; any tool that has attempted to be ‘everything for everyone’ has failed miserably. There’s just too many nuances within the different workflows across the various specialty teams that plan, build and deliver software at scale.
When you plug too much workflow into Jira (or any one tool), you will inevitably flood the tool and hit a wall, undoing all the productivity achievements that Jira and other leading development and delivery tools have brought to the software delivery process
The key, then, is to find where that wall is, helping you to leverage Jira to the best of its abilities, and ensure the tool becomes an effective development hub within your software value stream.
Download our new white paper to better understand why the ‘One Tool Fallacy’ is dead, and why you need to embrace an integrated best-of-breed toolchain to optimize the value of Jira and all the other tools you use to deliver the right software products faster.
