Wow. I hate JIRA but this article gets it completely backwards. Having small-scale tickets that you actually finish is the very essence of agile - limiting work in progress, defining "what done looks like" in a customer-facing way for tasks that each last at most two weeks. Ignoring the "wider vision" is the best way to produce software that actually solves people's problems instead of beautiful n-tier architecture that doesn't do anything anyone wanted.
JIRA is heavy and slow - it's model of limited transitions is fundamentally flawed, encouraging micromanagement and making mistakes hard to undo. But a lightweight board that you push tickets through - the famous "kanban" - is a great way to develop software (I've had a lot of success with Trello, though I fear it's only a matter of time before Atlassian bloats it into JIRAness).
JIRA is heavy and slow - it's model of limited transitions is fundamentally flawed, encouraging micromanagement and making mistakes hard to undo. But a lightweight board that you push tickets through - the famous "kanban" - is a great way to develop software (I've had a lot of success with Trello, though I fear it's only a matter of time before Atlassian bloats it into JIRAness).