16 ms·

Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

312 points by pdeva1 11y ago

JimDabell 11y ago
There's an interesting discussion happening on Reddit involving ex-employees of both companies: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3n2sc1/why_fogbugz_lost_to_jira/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3n2sc1/why_fog...
- outworlder 11y ago
  An interesting point from that, since everyone likes to bash Wasabi: > "If we hadn't done Wasabi, then we'd have had to rewrite all of FogBugz, and that would've killed the company. Wasabi also gave us stuff that developers are only now rediscovering, like code that executes on both client and server (e.g. via server-side/client-side React), that even gave us a development edge. I've written about this at length (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9779133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9779133) and won't revisit it, but while I think that Wasabi targeting .NET may have been a mistake, Wasabi itself was not a mistake."
  - sixothree 11y ago
    Hanselminutes podcast recently had an interview with Jacob Krall about the history of wasabi. I found it quite interesting. http://hanselminutes.com/493/killing-off-wasabi-a-20yr-old-vbscript-problem-solved-with-2015-roslyn-tech http://hanselminutes.com/493/killing-off-wasabi-a-20yr-old-v...
    - mey 11y ago
      An aside: Any other podcasts to recommend?
      - sixothree 11y ago
        As far as technology related, I listen to Coding Blocks, RunAs Radio, Hanselminutes, Software Engineering Radio, Herding Code, .Net Rocks. Always looking for more though.
  - glass- 11y ago
    This blog post about Wasabi is worth a read (another perspective from someone who worked there): http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/technical-debt-and-tacking-into-the-wind http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/technical-debt-and-tacki...
    - caf 11y ago
      Worth it for the concept of technical debt refinancing.
    - SonicSoul 11y ago
      great post and it changed my perspective on what wasabi was. This part makes complete sense: Working on FogBugz changed my perspective on technical debt. I used to believe, as I suspect many do, that it was strictly a bad thing. You took a shortcut because you’re lazy, and then it comes back later to bite you. Count how many times that Wikipedia article uses the word “lack”. As the originator of the term Ward Cunningham explains, that’s off the mark. Buying something with credit doesn’t automatically imply you’re not going to pay your bills. Instead of thinking of technical debt as yesterday’s work that I failed to do, I think of it as tomorrow’s feature I can have today. You have to pay interest, but in the mean time you’re shipping a product, have a roof over your head, and are keeping the lights on. A much hipper programmer might say something like “you ain’t gonna need it.” In one sense, Wasabi was a rather substantial payment on the debt we had accumulated. FogBugz was written in a now dead language. Building a compiler extended the life of the product, though of course now we had to pay for the compiler, too. So maybe it was more like a bridge loan, or refinancing. The financial wellbeing of Fog Creek at the time depended on FogBugz, so a total rewrite would have been a terribly risky investment. Even if it costs more in the long run, spreading those payments out over time gets you a lot of stability. while I also enjoyed Coding Horrors: Has Joel Spolsky Jumped the Shark?[0], Jeff either missed this point or ignored it on purpose to support the shark-jump theory [0] http://blog.codinghorror.com/has-joel-spolsky-jumped-the-shark/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/has-joel-spolsky-jumped-the-sha...
  - zem 11y ago
    i thought wasabi was an excellent idea when i first read spolsky's post about it, and nothing i've heard since has changed my mind. these days, when i see it blamed for any of fogcreek's problems, i simply see it as a sign that the commenter is unfamiliar with the issues involved.
  - derefr 11y ago
    What I always fail to understand about Wasabi: why did they keep the code in the source language and compile to CLR object code, instead of running the same parser with a different codegen target, to transform the PHP wholesale into valid C# once, and then overwrite the codebase with that?
    - nchelluri 11y ago
      Do you really want to inherit autogenerated code? I doubt the autogenerated C# would be nearly as easy to understand or read as the original Wasabi code. I also think writing CLR object code, if it's anything like writing assembly, would be much easier to generate than C#.
      - derefr 11y ago
        Well, it is what they eventually did, after ten years. With tons of tweaks to make it spit out natural-looking outputs. I just don't understand why they didn't go that way from the start.
        nchelluri 11y ago
        I was unaware of that. I'm still betting they didn't go that way initially because of the inherent difficulties of autogenerating C# code.
    - taspeotis 11y ago
      From the linked HN comment: > the C# code was not human-readable
    - thedufer 11y ago
      > to transform the PHP wholesale into valid C# once I'm not quite sure what you mean; PHP was only ever a target; there was no source in PHP. It was something VBScript-esque being compiled to both ASP (later C#) for Windows and PHP for Linux. This started, of course, long before Mono.
  - olavk 11y ago
    They could have achieved the same (same code on client and server) if they had just written in JavaScript/JScript though. I bet JavaScript is also easier to translate to PHP and C# than VBScript. They also claim that Wasabi made it possible for them to add closures to VBScript. Cool, but again, using JavaScript from the beginning would have been a lot easier.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- scott_s 11y ago
  Very interesting. More insightful than the submitted piece, as the participants have inside knowledge and understanding of what went on.
curiousjorge 11y ago
I think the last bit about what didn't matter has a huge take away home value. It's ironic that so much crap we read today drives home these two things that we focus so much on: 1. Content Marketing 2. Sales Team
- grossvogel 11y ago
  Joel on Software has 6 posts over the last 3 years. I'm not sure how long Jira has been winning (whatever that means), but it doesn't seem fair to say that Content Marketing doesn't work when the blog in question isn't actively updated.
  - benologist 11y ago
    They're actively marketing their blog on HN - https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=fogcreek.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=fogcreek.com
    - grossvogel 11y ago
      You're right, I hadn't even considered the Fog Creek blog, but the article specifically talks about Joel on Software. And Atlassian's blog seems to be in the same ballpark as Fog Creek's: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=atlassian.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=atlassian.com
- gmarx 11y ago
  I would argue that FogCreek's early success was the result of Joel's blog. Around that time he had said most of what he had to say and posting frequency declined. I haven't looked at his site more than a couple times in the past 10 years. So I think it did matter tremendously and momentum declined after that factor was removed
ohitsdom 11y ago
> Fogcreek invented their own language. This meant they couldn't use all of the ecosystem and amazing tooling around Java Java? I believe that should be .NET.
- afsina 11y ago
  Op means unlike Atlassian, which is mostly a java shop.
- sixothree 11y ago
  Also, I don't think .NET existed or was very mature when they created wasabi.
MichaelGG 11y ago
Yet FogBugz still feels way easier to use. Every time I'm in an Atlassian product, mainly Stash and JIRA, the UI sucks. I use them several times a week and still get lost. Maybe I'm dumb, but I don't seem to have this problem on other systems. But hey, at least JIRA isn't the craptastic laggy pos that is Podio. Certainly right that I've never seen FogBugz outside of myself or customers. Also, I think the name must hurt them. It feels dumb bringing up "FogBugz yeah with a z". As silly as a reason that is, I think it carries some weight. Content marketing may have helped them with SEO, no? Not that it SEO alone would close large enterprise deals. Oh and the plugins on FogBugz did suck. I remember setting up a hosted account, and wanted to plugin to Github. Support sorta mentioned being able to custom hack something up, but IIRC, didn't actually give us any simple way to achieve it. (This was several years ago so perhaps I'm mis-remembering.)
- rabid_fish 11y ago
  I've used both, and I can only imagine your complaints about JIRA's UI are due to how it's been configured for your use. The out of the box user experience is the best I've seen for a web application. A robust yet easy to use 'search' feature is at the heart of many things, like the scrum and kanban boards, as well as widgets that can be put on your own personalize dashboard. You get a nice visual designer for setting up workflows, and you can easily create new fields for issue types and have workflow depend on those fields. I also find Stash to be well thought out and easy to use if your use-case is a pull-request workflow tied to JIRA. Sometimes it's not intuitive how to navigate around if you're just trying to view source, but that's not the selling point. If you're trying to navigate source history, use your local source control client, that's what it's built for.
  - outworlder 11y ago
    > I've used both, and I can only imagine your complaints about JIRA's UI are due to how it's been configured for your use. Exactly. There are some companies that go so overboard with Jira customizations that a single "create new issue" requires hitting page down three times to get to the end. And they arrive at that by adding a field here for the QA team, a field there for the Sales team... In the end, you get a monster. New users will be exposed to that monster, not the vanilla Jira installation.
afsina 11y ago
Also Atlassian products are multi platform. Whereas fogbugz is windows only for the server side. That is a deal breaker for many.Additionally unlike Fogbugz Atlassian products are DB agnostic.
- julianz 11y ago
  Huh? We've been running Fogbugz on a Debian server with a MySQL database for years and years. Fog Creek may encourage Windows now but it still runs on Linux just fine.
  - afsina 11y ago
    They are no longer selling Linux versions. Also only MySQL and mssql are supported. MySQL is not recommended. http://help.fogcreek.com/7389/fogbugz-system-requirements http://help.fogcreek.com/7389/fogbugz-system-requirements
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
mariusmg 11y ago
Seems to me Atlassian "won" because they had a actual sales team not because of "technology".
- SandersAK 11y ago
  People really seem to downplay this, but Atlassian's partner network of integrators and consultants is actually really powerful.
- anthonys 11y ago
  Atlassian make a big point of saying they don't have a sales team[1] so I am not sure where this is coming from? [1] https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/purchase-licensing https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/purchase-licensing
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
    From sour grapes?
  - brazzledazzle 11y ago
    Their sales team is their partner network. VARs.
  - thedufer 11y ago
    Atlassian could just as well title all of their engineers as "developers" and claim not to have an engineering team; the claim they're making is only true in a very narrow and ultimately meaningless sense. They pay people to convince other companies to buy their product. The claim of "no sales people" stems from the fact that they only talk to people who contact them, rather than cold-calling. This is, interestingly, also what the sales team at my company does. They are pretty sure they're doing sales, though, so we call them that.
- omouse 11y ago
  They won because they allow managers to be in control and authoritarians. I've seen more than 2 managers who take over JIRA and lock down permissions and create custom workflows and all of them insist on having swim lanes and 5+ columns. So to move one little ticket across the board took 4+ drags. If you have a heavy-weight process where people are actually signing off on things, then yes it makes sense. But otherwise it just irritates everyone. They won because they appealed to the true buyer in the office; the CTO or VP of engineering, but they really appeal to the control-freak and micro-manager. When I used Fogbugz in one office, it was the devs that pushed for its use and the project managers and other execs weren't able to screw it up; there was no obvious way of creating custom workflows or locking things down too much. Fogbugz let us get work done. JIRA in the hands of a micromanager makes me want to chew glass.
mrweasel 11y ago
Jira certainly is more popular, but I never viewed the two products as being in direct competition. I don't know about the inner working and finances of Fogcreek, but given that Fogbugz is still around they've may have lost anything. Pricing would certainly be a knob Fogcreek could tweak, if they believed that they where losing to Jira in some shape or form. Given that they haven't lowered prices or expanded their free tier sales of Fogbugz could be on the precise path that Fogcreek want for the product. Maybe their selling extremely well in a marked that most HN readers just aren't in contact with. A marked that doesn't mind the added cost. It's different approaches to sales, make a little money from a large pool of customers, or sell a more expensive product/service to a smaller market. Both strategies are completely valid, but due to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Uber and whatnot many will falsely assume that more customer is always better.
yaur 11y ago
A big thing with the pricing... If I'm an individual contributor and want a bug tracker, I can drop 10 bucks on a JIRA license (out of pocket) or convince someone from management that I need it and that they need to pay for it.
command_tab 11y ago
And yet, "Creating a JIRA task is like going to the fucking DMV." https://twitter.com/jesseherlitz/status/648557144845910016 https://twitter.com/jesseherlitz/status/648557144845910016
- shill 11y ago
  Does the opposite kind of user exist? Has anyone ever met a fanatical JIRA lover? In my experience there are only people that tolerate JIRA on one side of the spectrum and a bunch of people that hate JIRA on the other side.
  - morgante 11y ago
    I love JIRA and would absolutely advocate for using it over any other tracker. With just a little tweaking (30 minutes or so on a fresh install), I can have it perfectly configured to match my ideal workflow.
    - gaius 11y ago
      Have you considered the possibility that your cow-orkers hate it, and by extension, you?
      - morgante 11y ago
        Yes, I regularly contemplate the possibility that they all secretly hate me for using software which you don't like. All their appreciation and thanks for moving us over to Jira is surely a facade for their secret plot of hate.
      - dang 11y ago
        > your cow-orkers hate it, and by extension, you I'm guessing you meant this as a joke, but such jokes come across as personal attacks, which are not ok here.
    - jackhack 11y ago
      Can you please elaborate on this configuration? What is the general nature of the configuration changes you're making? Or, how is your workflow affecting the product. I ask as I am in an organization right on the cusp of implementing JIRA, and I would love to steer the implementation team toward a more useful configuration than the clunky defaults, with which I've had prior experience.
mixmastamyk 11y ago
On the other hand, I wish bitbucket were more popular compared to github. It doesn't seem like they invest much into bitbucket, as some silly issues have persisted for years. Have they given up?
- jordigh 11y ago
  Asking around on IRC, it just seems like bitbucket doesn't bring Atlassian a lot of money. It seems that they just see it as marketing for their other offerings, so accordingly bitbucket does not get a lot development. I wish they improved their Mercurial support. I believe they have only one guy handling all of the Mercurial issues.
  - grossvogel 11y ago
    That makes sense. I'd guess the main reason people use Bitbucket over Github is "free private repos," with "we already use other Atlassian products" a close second.
    - ISL 11y ago
      The only reason I looked outside of GitHub was Bitbucket's free private repos. Now, for our academic lab, we're working entirely with Bitbucket (for the UI), and repositoryhosting (for low-cost repo archival with many users). In an academic setting, where private repos are created for each small collaborative project, then left idle but accessible, GitHub's per-private-repo pricing model is prohibitive.
      - vacri 11y ago
        BitBucket has better user and permissions management for businesses, although github is slowly improving.
- rajksarkar 11y ago
  Nor true - we have been investing quite a lot on Bitbucket. Check out our most recent blog post: http://blog.bitbucket.org/2015/09/22/1-in-3-fortune-500-companies-agree-bitbucket-is-the-git-solution-for-professional-teams/ http://blog.bitbucket.org/2015/09/22/1-in-3-fortune-500-comp...
fideloper 11y ago
Who is Prashant Deva and should I care about their opinion? Did Fogbugz actually lose? Do they even have the same market (enterprise vs smaller)? Perhaps they just fine operating at a smaller volume. Isn't the product being "too basic" a sign of focus? Perhaps the author needs/wants more features, but that can't be generalized for all of Fogbugz's audience. I've heard just as many owners say "I don't want as many features as competitor X". That all being said, there are some good things in there - perhaps Fogbugz could look into a partner ecosystem. Making your own language is probably a bad long-run choice. However I get the feeling this is comparing apples to oranges.
skrebbel 11y ago
A bit off topic, and I know I'm sounding like a condescending jerk here but I mean it: but why do people love bugs so much that they want to purchase an entire database program to track them? I mean, if you have more than 10 bugs that are highly important to keep track of, it seems to me that you have much larger problem than whether to purchase JIRA or FogBugz. I mean, either a bug is important to you so prioritize fixing it, or it isn't important to you so you can just ignore it and see if it surfaces again. Every single team I've seen that used a bug tracker ended up with hundreds of issues, status of 90% of which was unknown, maybe already fixed, maybe not relevant anymore because the entire component got overhauled the other day by Joe. What's the use of this stuff? I got this from a blog post (by Ron Jeffries I believe, but I forgot), but basically his idea was that the moment you turn something that you don't want to have into a formalized process, people tend to bias towards getting more of it. If you are forced to choose between fixing a bug or forgetting about it, you're urged to fix it fast. If you can just "file the bug and go on with your work", the bug stays.
- peterdkovacs 11y ago
  You've got more than 10 bugs. You just don't know it yet. But really, "bug tracker" is just a colloquial expression for the more accurate "issue tracker" which can definitely include things like improvements, new features, A/B tests you want to run, etc.
  - nobleach 11y ago
    It is possible that their software isn't large enough to have 10 bugs... they could be implementing FizzBuzz.
    - itsybitsycoder 11y ago
      Where can one get a job as a professional FizzBuzz developer? I think if a program is big enough to devote a software developer to it full-time, it's going to have at least 10 bugs. Maybe they are small or unimportant or so obscure that none of the users actually run into it, but they're in there somewhere.
solutionyogi 11y ago
Having mainly done line of business applications my entire life, I have a slightly different take. Jira won because it was not opinionated. You can use it however you want. FogBugz had the philosophy to make bug entry super easy above anything else. Jira will let a manager define new custom fields and make them all compulsory. It perfectly fits how manager at big companies think. FogBugz provides Completion Date Probability Distribution chart and Burn Down Chart [2]. Anyone who has worked for big companies knows that these two are USELESS for them. They set a project delivery date and you just have to hit it. At my current company, we are going for SOC1 compliance. This forces an amazingly complicated issue workflow and they implemented it very easily in Jira. I am looking at FogBugz documentation on workflows [1], and I don't see how we could have implemented the same in FogBugz. I also feel that Jira has a better ecosystem for plugins and integrations then FogBugz. [1] http://help.fogcreek.com/7483/statuses-categories-and-workflows http://help.fogcreek.com/7483/statuses-categories-and-workfl... [2] http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/features/project-management/ http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/features/project-management/
- omouse 11y ago
  I don't see how we could have implemented the same in FogBugz. How would you implement the compliance without technology in place? I'm being serious, how do you think compliance happened in the days of 486s, TRS-80s, punchcards or no computers at all? There isn't always a technical solution to a social problem, and JIRA's customizations are a micromanagers dreams. I'm sure there are good cases where that level of control is needed (your compliance case) but generally you don't need it.
  - smackfu 11y ago
    Reminds me of the time we cleaned out a back storage room at an old job, and there were binders full of mainframe PL/I source code from the early 80's that had gone through paper code reviews, with the reviewers signature on every page.
    - caf 11y ago
      I was at a job where we did that in the early 2000s.
eikenberry 11y ago
> This meant they couldn't use all of the ecosystem and amazing tooling around Java [...] Does anyone else get the same confused feeling whenever they read things like this? Every experience I've had with the Java/JVM ecosystem has been anything but amazing to the point where I now avoid it like the plague. I can't believe I'm that much different than everyone else, but I see this often enough that it makes me wonder.
- ZeroBugBounce 11y ago
  Well, I can see it compared to writing and maintaining your own language + all associated tools. I feel like Java is a "choose your own adventure" type thing. You can opt out of a lot of the bad, in my limited experience.
- mindcrime 11y ago
  Every experience I've had with the Java/JVM ecosystem has been anything but amazing to the point where I now avoid it like the plague. Nope, just the opposite here. The JVM ecosystem is hands-down my preferred environment for building / deploying pretty much anything. "Different strokes for different folks" and all that...
- vacri 11y ago
  In the context of the article, java is not being compared against the pool of all available languages, but specifically against the in-house language Wasabi.
robotnoises 11y ago
>> While most of these plugins didn't offer much in terms of functionality, for the person making a decision, it definitely helped to tip the scales in Jira's favor. For me, this kinda encapsulates the problem with Jira. Jira is extremely impressive in the number of features, plugins, and customization opportunities it offers, and yet, I can't honestly say even half of the stuff is in any way helpful to me as a developer.
- zem 11y ago
  as always, a different half is helpful to any particular user. add all the users together and you're back with the full feature set.
Grazester 11y ago
I not heard good things about Jira's ease of use
mostlystatic 11y ago
My guess is that Fogbugz is a cash cow without much new development effort. The focus of FogCreek's founders is on StackExchange and Trello now.
draw_down 11y ago
I still can't believe they invented their own language... but #1 seems like it would have been enough. I hate using JIRA, though, just like I hate using all Atlasssian products, so it would have been nice if FogBugz won.
- protomyth 11y ago
  Ericsson and Sun invented their own languages. If your a tool company, treating language as off-limits seems limiting.
  - draw_down 11y ago
    You have a point, I guess I'm more flabbergasted by the particular language they chose to invent. Also, Fog Creek ain't exactly Ericsson or Sun.
    - protomyth 11y ago
      Fog Creek probably had more resource than Yukihiro Matsumoto, Larry Wall, and Guido van Rossum did.
      - vacri 11y ago
        Ruby, Perl, and Python weren't meant to be in-house languages created to support a commercial product. Not to mention that in their infancies as hobby projects, they didn't have to hit sales deadlines.
osullivj 11y ago
I was working at a large British bank in 2005 when Jira started to get adoption by several teams. The approved bug tracking product was ClearCase ClearQuest. If you think the Jira GUI is ropey you should see ClearQuest. Absolute nightmare. By contrast Jira was free to get started, and much nicer than corporate approved incumbents. They called it land and expand!
chaitanya 11y ago
The one feature of Fogbugz that I really like (and the reason I use it) is evidence based scheduling: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html It takes away a lot of pain associated with giving estimates, especially from a manager's point of view. Devs need to break their tasks down to subtasks of sufficient granularity, and estimate the number of hours/days it would take them to complete each of these subtasks. Fogbugz does everything else, and gives a nice probability distribution chart of completion date that you can share with the stakeholders.
djur 11y ago
Couldn't disagree more on the integrated wiki point. Issue trackers with integrated documentation pages (wikis or otherwise) make it really straightforward to generate docs as a byproduct of working on tickets, or to resolve support requests by linking to the docs. Eventually you will want an external documentation tool, but Atlassian doesn't have one that's any good (Confluence is by far the worst wiki-like application I have ever used).
- vailripper 11y ago
  Really? Have you tried using the Fogbugz wiki? I will take Confluence any day over that slow bloated POS.
alexwebb2 11y ago
Slightly off topic here but since everyone's chiming in about their experiences with bug trackers, I figure somebody might find it useful. I did a pretty intensive search involving trials of a couple dozen trackers about two years ago when we decided to ditch Jira due to some serious performance and UI issues. I tested pretty much every serious contender on the market. I ended up going with YouTrack and it's been pretty fantastic. One of those by-developers, for-developers things with a lot of functionality out of the box and a decent API for more advanced stuff, and most importantly it has very good performance and a sane UI. It does what it's supposed to do and then gets out of the way, which is exactly what I wanted. I recommend taking it for a spin if you're looking for something along those lines.
protomyth 11y ago
Wasbi had nothing to do with it. JIRA caters to micro-managing mangers and FogBugz didn't. That is the simple lesson in enterprise. Trying to give a technical explanation isn't really telling the story.
PretzelFisch 11y ago
I would like he to define lost. Fogbugz is still around and profitable. I have always seen Fogbugz as a support tool first, bug tracking kindof it's what they built for Fogcreek's process(for Copilot support and development). If you did everything like them it probably was a great fit. Jira on the other hand I have always seen as bug tracker.
baus 11y ago
It could be argued that Trello will eventually be larger than either of these products, so I don't think the story has been completely told. I've used Jira as a manager in both a large and a small installation and hated it both times. It feels like 90s bug tracking system with huge forms and intractable workflows. With that said, Spolsky (although I think a lot of his writing is fantastic) rarely addresses his mistakes.
- __david__ 11y ago
  Trello doesn't really seem like a bug tracker. I haven't used it though—maybe I'm just missing something?
  - joncooper 11y ago
    Agreed. I kind of don't get Trello. Always thought of it as kind of a lightweight "stack of cards" analogue best used for simple high-level planning along the lines of a Kanban board. Is that how people use it?
    - perrylaj 11y ago
      We used it recently as a kanbanish/scrumish board for a recent development cycle and it worked out pretty well. We had separate boards for each sprint, and a backlog board that contained some broad-swipe categories. It would definitely be nice if it had better integrations with fogbugz (which our team also uses) or other bug tracking platforms, but I imagine it would be challenging to do that and maintain its extreme ease of use/simplicity.
meshko 11y ago
Never used Fogz, but Atlassian products are so astonishingly bad that it is hard to find anything about them inspiring.
- meshko 11y ago
  I think the fact that my useless inflammatory comment didn't get immediately downvoted to hell is proof that I'm right!
  - emmelaich 11y ago
    "bad" by itself doesn't mean much; the important thing is the relative goodness. What were open source projects going to us instead? RequestTracker? Scarab? Bugzilla? All of those were much worse than JIRA for development. RT is fine for helpdesks but ugly as hell and no integration with SCMs. Scarab never got to a satisfactory level of maturity. Bugzilla? Just say no. I've been a JIRA admin for 5 years now, and we seriously considered Fogbugz as well. I've never regretted our decision even though we've had plenty of issues() with JIRA. free pun included.
zkhalique 11y ago
I have a question about raising VC money earlier. If you want to grow fast and push some free platform out to change the world, what is main danger in raising VC? I'm talking about the VCs these days who invest in companies that make open source like NGiNX, MySQL etc. And you need resources to grow, if you want to beat competitor platforms. I mean logically, if they've already given you the money and there isn't any way they can take over governance of the company, then the only leverage I can think of is signaling in future rounds. And if you weren't even going to raise one VC round, then at that point you may as well raise exactly one and then signaling is irrelevant. Yes you've diluted yourself 20% and now you've got a board member that wants you to grow fast, but so do you. Of course, I'm assuming here that you failed to raise on Kickstarter, and you aren't making enough $ to hire people to do development/testing/security/evangelism/PR/marketing/operations/etc. anytime soon. Why waste years of your life when you can hand the project off eventually to a community you've built, and move on? If you want to retain control over the project forever, can always be BDFL of the community, at least until some better-funded company forks it. I just really want to understand, what is the reason that guys like DHH say VC can control you after you take their money?
- wpietri 11y ago
  Once you take money from investors, you have both a legal and a moral responsibility to them. It's important to remember that selling equity is really selling something, just like selling a product. You can't sell something, take somebody's money, and then just not deliver. What you are selling to investors, generally, is return on investment. The real problem comes in because founders and VCs have different understandings of "grow fast". There will come choices that have different levels of risk. VCs always want you to take the high-risk, high-reward path, because they have a portfolio company and are looking for the few really big winners. You, on the other hand, are trying to build something (team, community, product, etc), and so you will favor slower but safer growth. I guess in theory you could sell VCs on a high-growth approach and then turn around and say, "Ha ha, fuck you, we're going to keep your money and try to grow modestly." But a) VCs are way better at their game than you are, so they're hard to fool, and b) then you're an asshole, which is bad on its own and also has consequences for future relationships (and future funding). Plus, if you're in a VC-fundable space, you'll probably have competitors who are also taking money, and they'll be able to outspend you on future rounds.
deleted 11y ago
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lloydde 11y ago
This takes me back ten years to 2005. I was the QA lead at an open source company and we really wanted to use FogBugz. An operations engineer imported all of our bugzilla issues and we were starting to put FogBugz through its paces, but what we couldn't figure out was FogBugz licensing for all of our OSS community. In the en, I think Joel did get back to us and tell us their product was not a fit. Another adviser replied to the thread below (oldest at the bottom) that Apache also uses Jira. In the end we kept using Bugzilla. From: bizguy Subject: RE: [Staff] FW: Joel Spolsky intro? I second FogBugz being unreachable. Also, Jira has a MUCH more impressive client list: Cisco, Oracle, HP, NASA, JPL, CERN, MIT, CalTech, Cornell, HBO From: ceo Subject: RE: [Staff] FW: Joel Spolsky intro? in view of the FogCreek people being unresponsive, and advisor's instant "don't use them" response, I'd like for us to do a bit more due diligence on Jira. I notice that they have per-server licensing ($4800), with unlimited users. From: me Subject: Re: [Staff] FW: Joel Spolsky intro? jira is java based and requires running tomcat which can be a bit of a pig. It is supportive of open source communities. That is about all I know about it right now... I will look at it more tonight.  From: advisor To: ceo Subject: Re: Joel Spolsky intro? Avoid, use Jira...  ceo wrote: > > Dear friends, > > I'm trying to get a hold of Joel Spolsky so we can work out some  > arrangement for using their FogBugz bugtracking system. Please let me > know if you know Joel and can help with an intro, since my blind email > isn't getting a response.
pbreit 11y ago
This is a terribly uninformed perspective on the monumental achievement of large success. If anything, fog bugz "lost" to stack exchange which, imo, is a more profound achievement than the over crowded project management category that still hasn't put out a product that has broad appeal.
spolsky 11y ago
Sorry, Prashant, you lost track of the plot of the story somewhere along the way. (creator of FogBugz, here) FogBugz won and Jira won, but they were playing different games. I wanted to make software development better for programmers. When I started creating Fog Creek Software in 2000 programmers were treated like typists. They were not paid very well (my starting salary was $33,000). There was almost no thought around how software should be developed. Companies that scored high on the Joel Test[1] were almost unheard of. The LAST thing I wanted to do was make another tool of oppression for management to impose gantt charts and deadlines and strict rules about who has to sign off on things. I set out to make software development better for programmers by blogging[2] and by building a company that would be a great place to work[3]. In 2000 the only way to do that was to bootstrap it. With a team of four people we couldn't build anything complicated. We started with bug tracking software because at least we could touch one aspect of programmers' lives with our philosophy. FogBugz was designed for smaller collegial teams of people that wanted to work together effectively and needed a clean and simple way to track issues using the smart workflows that small, professional teams like to use. It was remarkably successful and profitable from 2000 to today. We've never stopped working on improving it, but we also have never abandoned the market of small collegial teams of smart people. By contrast, Jira was designed as "Enterprise Software" with features to help managers impose specific workflows on teams. Selling Enterprise software is a lovely, profitable business and Atlassian has great success selling to large organizations who ignore FogBugz, but it's the opposite of what I wanted to do. Anyway Atlassian is going public with this enterprise software, good for them, I'm sure they're going to enjoy their well-earned private jets. But FogBugz was the means, not the ends, and at Fog Creek our ambition was not to be the world's greatest bug tracker software company, it was to fix things for developers. So we kept plugging away at other ideas. Some of them were kinda dumb. Some were moderate successes. Two of them, Stack Overflow and Trello, were huge hits and spun off into separate companies. Stack Overflow, thanks to Jeff Atwood's inspired leadership, has had more impact on making software development better for programmers than any bug tracker ever will. Trello has grown as popular in three years as Jira grew in 15 years.[4] Neither of them would have been possible if we didn't have the cash cow of steady FogBugz profits. That's what bootstrapping is, folks! You build one thing and use it to build a bigger thing. In the meantime I think the world has figured out that programmers are writing the script for the future that everybody is going to live in, so conditions have gotten better. In big cities employers are falling over themselves to invent new ways to pamper and delight their programmer employees, with the massages and the sushis and the dog yoga. We programmers built ourselves hundreds of amazing tools, from github to npm to ci tools, build tools, IDEs, code refactorers, etc. etc. that make programming a million times better than it was in 2000, and bug tracking is just a slice of that pie and not a particularly important or interesting one. But that said, FogBugz is still very popular and very profitable and thousands of teams use it every day, and we're still reinvesting those profits in making it better and in developing new products to make the world better for developers, and even though it doesn't support pointy-haired micro-managers and doesn't allow you to create a custom workflow requiring that a VP-or-higher sign off on bug reports, there are still small, collegial teams of smart developers who have figured out that this is how they want to work. [1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html [2] http://joelonsoftware.com/ http://joelonsoftware.com/ [3] http://www.fogcreek.com/ http://www.fogcreek.com/ [4] https://goo.gl/hTXXPG https://goo.gl/hTXXPG
lmm 11y ago
I don't think it was Wasabi so much as Windows. You didn't have to use Wasabi to write plugins for FogBugz, but you did have to use .net. The kind of people who read Joel's blog run on *nix, and probably have some Java in their stack; if you give them a .war that runs on Tomcat then they know what to do, and if they don't know then there are plenty of open-source tutorials. If you're giving them a .net product to deploy on a windows machine, not so much. I think the final chapter is yet to be written though. Trello is a joy to use, much better than Jira. And AIUI it's on a much more developer-friendly stack.
- toyg 11y ago
  >"The kind of people who read Joel's blog run on nix, and probably have some Java in their stack"* I'm afraid you're really off-base there. Spolsky is a MS alumni and his core followers have always been people living in the MS ecosystem. The forums he kept for a while were overwhelmingly populated by people talking of VB and then .NET. StackOverflow was clearly dominated by .Net questions for the first few years. His choice of platform, when it came to developing his own software, was never really in doubt. Note that FogBugz was not even the actual product he started the company for; that was a proto-blogging publishing platform called CityDesk, which was Windows-only and meant for the general public. FogBugz was an internal tool that he pivoted on, thanks in great part to the cred he had built by blogging candidly on software development matters (at a time when this was very rare). If you now see his customers as "running on *nix", it's because the world has changed. Now the bugtracker is looked after by devops, people who started working after the wave of cheap Linux server that built the modern web had long settled.
  - lloydde 11y ago
    > I'm afraid you're really off-base there. Spolsky is a MS alumni and his core followers have always been people living in the MS ecosystem. What do you mean by core followers? You underestimate his influence. I haven't worked in the MS ecosystem in my 15 year career across six companies. I've regularly seen his book around and his writing is referenced from time to time. I'd go so far to say some of those environments I've worked in and some of the people championing his work have been somewhat anti-microsoft.
davidw 11y ago
Did Fogbugz really 'lose'? It's not as if bug tracking systems are a winner-take all market with strong network externalities. Granted, it did not 'win as much' as JIRA, but that's not necessarily a loss. One of the cool things about many businesses is that they are positive sum games. Maybe FogBugz works better in some niches and still generates a nice living for the people who work on it.
jeffmk 11y ago
Has anyone had experience with Redmine [1]? It's quite easy to use and extend via its plugin system, but I don't see many people who have encountered it in the wild. I think its horrendous out-of-the-box look-and-feel detract heavily from its appeal. Nowadays I'd probably lean toward Gitlab, which seems to offer much of the same but appears much more modern. [1] https://www.redmine.org/ https://www.redmine.org/
- xrstf 11y ago
  We used Redmine for a while, but never got the Ruby stack to perform good (we are a PHP shop, so..). I remember the insane version dependencies ("redmine revision x to y needs package P in revision a to b") and that it seemed to stagnate in its development. In the end I'm happy we ditched it in favor of Trello.
  - jeffmk 11y ago
    Love Trello. I'd like a locally installable version of that integrated with something like Gitlab (maybe this already exists, I haven't bothered to look). It always seemed a bit slow to me as well. The dependencies issue may be fixed with modern usage of rvm-/rbenv-type things, but I haven't messed with Redmine for a couple years. It's funny you mention the pace of development too; the community actually forked at once point [1], I believe due to frustration with how the development community was being handled. That fork is dead now though. [1] https://www.chiliproject.org/ https://www.chiliproject.org/
- nchelluri 11y ago
  Having used FogBugz, JIRA, and RedMine, as a developer, my order of preference is: 1 - fogbugz 2 - redmine 3 - jira I actually found myself pretty comfortable with Redmine's UI and its integrated wiki. Fogbugz was very easy for me to use, but I last used it ~7 years ago. It may be possible to get JIRA configured so it works nicely, but in general I find I am always running into some kind of workflow issues. It does work, it just seems to take more effort and sometimes me or my teammates come up with ways to work around things that are broken or just not smooth and that we don't have access rights to debug or fix.
martingordon 11y ago
My Jira experience was absolutely terrible. We were an 8 person team at time and looking for something more robust than Trello and ended up settling on Pivotal Tracker. I signed us up for an Atlassian Cloud trial and right away things weren't looking good. I was expecting to dive right in but instead had to wait 30 minutes until my instance was ready or whatever. They only offer a 7-day trial. How am I supposed to properly evaluate something as fundamental as an issue tracker in 7 days? That's not long enough to learn to use it and then get the team to try it out for a small project. Worst of all were the 5-10 second load times on each page. I contacted support to see what they could do but they weren't too helpful and I stopped using it 2 hours into the 7 day trial.
- xrstf 11y ago
  In my experience, most Atlassian products are slow as hell, with Bitbucket being among the faster ones. Confluence can maybe control a space shuttle with all its features, but it's slow to a point where it becomes unusable. We evaluated JIRA as well, but it didn't work well for people like who are in many different projects at once and don't want to spend days trying to build a view for all those issues (that encompasses swim lanes and such). Also, as you've mentioned, it's pretty slow. We settled with Trello and are relatively happy.
maxharris 11y ago
I had to use Jira at my last job. I could never figure out what it did that you couldn't do in github with less trouble and fuss. I can't say that I would absolutely refuse to work at a place that uses Jira, but it is definitely something that would make me lean towards another offer.
dannyrosen 11y ago
I brought Fogbugz into two organizations (100+ accounts) as a QA Engineer and it worked great -- when it came to bugs. When we started doing agile (and then "Agile" ... ugh) development the entire process broke down. There were no (good) plugins that could do kanban and moving features from state to state to state dramatically increased the size of an items log. That, along with the friendly, and then suddenly not so friendly filtering lead to our team dropping the product and moving to Jira. While Fogcreek's "Fastbugz" was a gallant effort in modernizing the application stack and speeding up page loading time, it fell short as it didn't functionality support feature _and_ bug management. I should note, we had reached out to Fogcreek with all of our requests and critiques but they weren't interested in hearing us out passed the usual account or customer service manager.
mijustin 11y ago
What metric are we using to determine who "won" here? Did Jira "win" just because OP likes it better? Because both companies are private, we don't really know how much profit either product has made.
- chris_hawk 11y ago
  In reality, it's a double-win relative to the goals each company was striving for - and acheived! In the author's mind, Jira wins because it's OMG ENTERPRISE and going public.
tbrock 11y ago
This meant they couldn't use all of the ecosystem and amazing tooling around Java I've never laughed so hard in my entire life.
rsobers 11y ago
Won based on what criteria? Atlassian has over 1,100 employees. When I was at Fog Creek we had ~30. So if we're talking about profit per employee, I can assure you the people who built FogBugz don't feel like they've lost anything.
dwd 11y ago
Surprised no mention of Kiln which was a really nice product when I first used it back in 2008. The ability to inline comments in a code review that then hooked back to the job in FB was fantastic. GitStash is getting there now, but the Jira integration is still a little lacking.
mangeletti 11y ago
What about the name? He could have potentially left out the most important mistake Spolsky ever made, which is to name a product Fog Buzz. He might as well have named it Rain Smelt, or Lamp Shade. It sounds terrific once you use and like the product, but it doesn't sound remnisent of any kind of successful brand ever. Even the use of 2 words is a departure from the norm. Most of the big brands have 1-word names, and this is not s coincidence. Even Facebook was changed from The Facebook. Brand matters, and names matter. To play devil's advocate with my own argument, 37 Signals is a bit different as well and people (perhaps more so in the tech community) loved the brand, but the thing is, they used "Basecamp" as their product name.
- julianz 11y ago
  Possibly your most important mistake is not reading the name correctly. It's Fogbugz. One word.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - mangeletti 11y ago
    Potatoemuffintrain. See what I did there. 3 words do not become 1 word, simply because the proper spaces are omitted. I will say though, for many years I have thought the company was called Fog Buzz, (not Bugz).
dragonsh 11y ago
I am still not sure if fogbugz lost. In general simple systems are always hard to built. In general while doing a project with fixed date approach Jira issue tracker is indeed not inline with the source code. So there is a discrepancy between what is in issue tracker and whats in the source tree. Moreover developers cutting corners to meet the fixed date is a technical debt for future and Jira promotes it. Fogbugz with its probabilistic approach is better matched with the actual source code, since even though developers over or under estimate, its probabilistic distribution analysis puts standard deviation and means put in front of their eyes to do better. So in general fogbugz approach results in better source tree and less technical debt.
atesti 11y ago
For me the main way in which FogBugz has "lost" is that they silently discontinued the "FogBugz for your Server" version. The plugin system was great and we have our own installation on our own systems (no cloud allowed). With the "performance upgrade" they seem to have forked FogBugz, thrown out all the plugins, Lucene search and redid the GUI. And stopped updates for the server version: http://help.fogcreek.com/fogbugz-release-notes http://help.fogcreek.com/fogbugz-release-notes And now just recently there was a little bit of activity, like that they now offer a VM of some kind with the new version. But I think we can't use that because it is the expensive, unlimited user license and they must install it somehow and plugins would still be gone, which we depend on. And for all of this there is little to no communication. The stop of "Kiln for your Server" was also done extremely quitely.
- atesti 11y ago
  Here is the FAQ which outlines that plugins and the old FogBugz for your server has been discontinued: http://help.fogcreek.com/10706/future-of-for-your-server-faq http://help.fogcreek.com/10706/future-of-for-your-server-faq Very sad
otabdeveloper 11y ago
Programmers hate being held accountable, yes. (This is logical given that they control so few of the risks.) But in the end, accountability is the reason why you're being paid that salary, not knowledge of framework APIs or algorithms. Embrace that responsibility and process, don't fight it.
lifeisstillgood 11y ago
1. Make a JIRA plug-in that turns JIRA into Fogbugz 2. Profit

312 points by pdeva1 11y ago

There's an interesting discussion happening on Reddit involving ex-employees of both companies: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3n2sc1/why_fogbugz_lost_to_jira/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3n2sc1/why_fog...

outworlder 11y ago
An interesting point from that, since everyone likes to bash Wasabi: > "If we hadn't done Wasabi, then we'd have had to rewrite all of FogBugz, and that would've killed the company. Wasabi also gave us stuff that developers are only now rediscovering, like code that executes on both client and server (e.g. via server-side/client-side React), that even gave us a development edge. I've written about this at length (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9779133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9779133) and won't revisit it, but while I think that Wasabi targeting .NET may have been a mistake, Wasabi itself was not a mistake."
- sixothree 11y ago
  Hanselminutes podcast recently had an interview with Jacob Krall about the history of wasabi. I found it quite interesting. http://hanselminutes.com/493/killing-off-wasabi-a-20yr-old-vbscript-problem-solved-with-2015-roslyn-tech http://hanselminutes.com/493/killing-off-wasabi-a-20yr-old-v...
  - mey 11y ago
    An aside: Any other podcasts to recommend?
    - sixothree 11y ago
      As far as technology related, I listen to Coding Blocks, RunAs Radio, Hanselminutes, Software Engineering Radio, Herding Code, .Net Rocks. Always looking for more though.
- glass- 11y ago
  This blog post about Wasabi is worth a read (another perspective from someone who worked there): http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/technical-debt-and-tacking-into-the-wind http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/technical-debt-and-tacki...
  - caf 11y ago
    Worth it for the concept of technical debt refinancing.
  - SonicSoul 11y ago
    great post and it changed my perspective on what wasabi was. This part makes complete sense: Working on FogBugz changed my perspective on technical debt. I used to believe, as I suspect many do, that it was strictly a bad thing. You took a shortcut because you’re lazy, and then it comes back later to bite you. Count how many times that Wikipedia article uses the word “lack”. As the originator of the term Ward Cunningham explains, that’s off the mark. Buying something with credit doesn’t automatically imply you’re not going to pay your bills. Instead of thinking of technical debt as yesterday’s work that I failed to do, I think of it as tomorrow’s feature I can have today. You have to pay interest, but in the mean time you’re shipping a product, have a roof over your head, and are keeping the lights on. A much hipper programmer might say something like “you ain’t gonna need it.” In one sense, Wasabi was a rather substantial payment on the debt we had accumulated. FogBugz was written in a now dead language. Building a compiler extended the life of the product, though of course now we had to pay for the compiler, too. So maybe it was more like a bridge loan, or refinancing. The financial wellbeing of Fog Creek at the time depended on FogBugz, so a total rewrite would have been a terribly risky investment. Even if it costs more in the long run, spreading those payments out over time gets you a lot of stability. while I also enjoyed Coding Horrors: Has Joel Spolsky Jumped the Shark?[0], Jeff either missed this point or ignored it on purpose to support the shark-jump theory [0] http://blog.codinghorror.com/has-joel-spolsky-jumped-the-shark/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/has-joel-spolsky-jumped-the-sha...
- zem 11y ago
  i thought wasabi was an excellent idea when i first read spolsky's post about it, and nothing i've heard since has changed my mind. these days, when i see it blamed for any of fogcreek's problems, i simply see it as a sign that the commenter is unfamiliar with the issues involved.
- derefr 11y ago
  What I always fail to understand about Wasabi: why did they keep the code in the source language and compile to CLR object code, instead of running the same parser with a different codegen target, to transform the PHP wholesale into valid C# once, and then overwrite the codebase with that?
  - nchelluri 11y ago
    Do you really want to inherit autogenerated code? I doubt the autogenerated C# would be nearly as easy to understand or read as the original Wasabi code. I also think writing CLR object code, if it's anything like writing assembly, would be much easier to generate than C#.
    - derefr 11y ago
      Well, it is what they eventually did, after ten years. With tons of tweaks to make it spit out natural-looking outputs. I just don't understand why they didn't go that way from the start.
      - nchelluri 11y ago
        I was unaware of that. I'm still betting they didn't go that way initially because of the inherent difficulties of autogenerating C# code.
  - taspeotis 11y ago
    From the linked HN comment: > the C# code was not human-readable
  - thedufer 11y ago
    > to transform the PHP wholesale into valid C# once I'm not quite sure what you mean; PHP was only ever a target; there was no source in PHP. It was something VBScript-esque being compiled to both ASP (later C#) for Windows and PHP for Linux. This started, of course, long before Mono.
- olavk 11y ago
  They could have achieved the same (same code on client and server) if they had just written in JavaScript/JScript though. I bet JavaScript is also easier to translate to PHP and C# than VBScript. They also claim that Wasabi made it possible for them to add closures to VBScript. Cool, but again, using JavaScript from the beginning would have been a lot easier.
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scott_s 11y ago
Very interesting. More insightful than the submitted piece, as the participants have inside knowledge and understanding of what went on.

curiousjorge 11y ago

I think the last bit about what didn't matter has a huge take away home value. It's ironic that so much crap we read today drives home these two things that we focus so much on: 1. Content Marketing 2. Sales Team

grossvogel 11y ago
Joel on Software has 6 posts over the last 3 years. I'm not sure how long Jira has been winning (whatever that means), but it doesn't seem fair to say that Content Marketing doesn't work when the blog in question isn't actively updated.
- benologist 11y ago
  They're actively marketing their blog on HN - https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=fogcreek.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=fogcreek.com
  - grossvogel 11y ago
    You're right, I hadn't even considered the Fog Creek blog, but the article specifically talks about Joel on Software. And Atlassian's blog seems to be in the same ballpark as Fog Creek's: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=atlassian.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=atlassian.com
gmarx 11y ago
I would argue that FogCreek's early success was the result of Joel's blog. Around that time he had said most of what he had to say and posting frequency declined. I haven't looked at his site more than a couple times in the past 10 years. So I think it did matter tremendously and momentum declined after that factor was removed

ohitsdom 11y ago

> Fogcreek invented their own language. This meant they couldn't use all of the ecosystem and amazing tooling around Java Java? I believe that should be .NET.

afsina 11y ago
Op means unlike Atlassian, which is mostly a java shop.
sixothree 11y ago
Also, I don't think .NET existed or was very mature when they created wasabi.

MichaelGG 11y ago

Yet FogBugz still feels way easier to use. Every time I'm in an Atlassian product, mainly Stash and JIRA, the UI sucks. I use them several times a week and still get lost. Maybe I'm dumb, but I don't seem to have this problem on other systems. But hey, at least JIRA isn't the craptastic laggy pos that is Podio. Certainly right that I've never seen FogBugz outside of myself or customers. Also, I think the name must hurt them. It feels dumb bringing up "FogBugz yeah with a z". As silly as a reason that is, I think it carries some weight. Content marketing may have helped them with SEO, no? Not that it SEO alone would close large enterprise deals. Oh and the plugins on FogBugz did suck. I remember setting up a hosted account, and wanted to plugin to Github. Support sorta mentioned being able to custom hack something up, but IIRC, didn't actually give us any simple way to achieve it. (This was several years ago so perhaps I'm mis-remembering.)

rabid_fish 11y ago
I've used both, and I can only imagine your complaints about JIRA's UI are due to how it's been configured for your use. The out of the box user experience is the best I've seen for a web application. A robust yet easy to use 'search' feature is at the heart of many things, like the scrum and kanban boards, as well as widgets that can be put on your own personalize dashboard. You get a nice visual designer for setting up workflows, and you can easily create new fields for issue types and have workflow depend on those fields. I also find Stash to be well thought out and easy to use if your use-case is a pull-request workflow tied to JIRA. Sometimes it's not intuitive how to navigate around if you're just trying to view source, but that's not the selling point. If you're trying to navigate source history, use your local source control client, that's what it's built for.
- outworlder 11y ago
  > I've used both, and I can only imagine your complaints about JIRA's UI are due to how it's been configured for your use. Exactly. There are some companies that go so overboard with Jira customizations that a single "create new issue" requires hitting page down three times to get to the end. And they arrive at that by adding a field here for the QA team, a field there for the Sales team... In the end, you get a monster. New users will be exposed to that monster, not the vanilla Jira installation.

afsina 11y ago

Also Atlassian products are multi platform. Whereas fogbugz is windows only for the server side. That is a deal breaker for many.Additionally unlike Fogbugz Atlassian products are DB agnostic.

julianz 11y ago
Huh? We've been running Fogbugz on a Debian server with a MySQL database for years and years. Fog Creek may encourage Windows now but it still runs on Linux just fine.
- afsina 11y ago
  They are no longer selling Linux versions. Also only MySQL and mssql are supported. MySQL is not recommended. http://help.fogcreek.com/7389/fogbugz-system-requirements http://help.fogcreek.com/7389/fogbugz-system-requirements
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

mariusmg 11y ago

Seems to me Atlassian "won" because they had a actual sales team not because of "technology".

SandersAK 11y ago
People really seem to downplay this, but Atlassian's partner network of integrators and consultants is actually really powerful.
anthonys 11y ago
Atlassian make a big point of saying they don't have a sales team[1] so I am not sure where this is coming from? [1] https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/purchase-licensing https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/purchase-licensing
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
  From sour grapes?
- brazzledazzle 11y ago
  Their sales team is their partner network. VARs.
- thedufer 11y ago
  Atlassian could just as well title all of their engineers as "developers" and claim not to have an engineering team; the claim they're making is only true in a very narrow and ultimately meaningless sense. They pay people to convince other companies to buy their product. The claim of "no sales people" stems from the fact that they only talk to people who contact them, rather than cold-calling. This is, interestingly, also what the sales team at my company does. They are pretty sure they're doing sales, though, so we call them that.
omouse 11y ago
They won because they allow managers to be in control and authoritarians. I've seen more than 2 managers who take over JIRA and lock down permissions and create custom workflows and all of them insist on having swim lanes and 5+ columns. So to move one little ticket across the board took 4+ drags. If you have a heavy-weight process where people are actually signing off on things, then yes it makes sense. But otherwise it just irritates everyone. They won because they appealed to the true buyer in the office; the CTO or VP of engineering, but they really appeal to the control-freak and micro-manager. When I used Fogbugz in one office, it was the devs that pushed for its use and the project managers and other execs weren't able to screw it up; there was no obvious way of creating custom workflows or locking things down too much. Fogbugz let us get work done. JIRA in the hands of a micromanager makes me want to chew glass.

mrweasel 11y ago

Jira certainly is more popular, but I never viewed the two products as being in direct competition. I don't know about the inner working and finances of Fogcreek, but given that Fogbugz is still around they've may have lost anything. Pricing would certainly be a knob Fogcreek could tweak, if they believed that they where losing to Jira in some shape or form. Given that they haven't lowered prices or expanded their free tier sales of Fogbugz could be on the precise path that Fogcreek want for the product. Maybe their selling extremely well in a marked that most HN readers just aren't in contact with. A marked that doesn't mind the added cost. It's different approaches to sales, make a little money from a large pool of customers, or sell a more expensive product/service to a smaller market. Both strategies are completely valid, but due to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Uber and whatnot many will falsely assume that more customer is always better.

yaur 11y ago

A big thing with the pricing... If I'm an individual contributor and want a bug tracker, I can drop 10 bucks on a JIRA license (out of pocket) or convince someone from management that I need it and that they need to pay for it.

command_tab 11y ago

And yet, "Creating a JIRA task is like going to the fucking DMV." https://twitter.com/jesseherlitz/status/648557144845910016 https://twitter.com/jesseherlitz/status/648557144845910016

shill 11y ago
Does the opposite kind of user exist? Has anyone ever met a fanatical JIRA lover? In my experience there are only people that tolerate JIRA on one side of the spectrum and a bunch of people that hate JIRA on the other side.
- morgante 11y ago
  I love JIRA and would absolutely advocate for using it over any other tracker. With just a little tweaking (30 minutes or so on a fresh install), I can have it perfectly configured to match my ideal workflow.
  - gaius 11y ago
    Have you considered the possibility that your cow-orkers hate it, and by extension, you?
    - morgante 11y ago
      Yes, I regularly contemplate the possibility that they all secretly hate me for using software which you don't like. All their appreciation and thanks for moving us over to Jira is surely a facade for their secret plot of hate.
    - dang 11y ago
      > your cow-orkers hate it, and by extension, you I'm guessing you meant this as a joke, but such jokes come across as personal attacks, which are not ok here.
  - jackhack 11y ago
    Can you please elaborate on this configuration? What is the general nature of the configuration changes you're making? Or, how is your workflow affecting the product. I ask as I am in an organization right on the cusp of implementing JIRA, and I would love to steer the implementation team toward a more useful configuration than the clunky defaults, with which I've had prior experience.

mixmastamyk 11y ago

On the other hand, I wish bitbucket were more popular compared to github. It doesn't seem like they invest much into bitbucket, as some silly issues have persisted for years. Have they given up?

jordigh 11y ago
Asking around on IRC, it just seems like bitbucket doesn't bring Atlassian a lot of money. It seems that they just see it as marketing for their other offerings, so accordingly bitbucket does not get a lot development. I wish they improved their Mercurial support. I believe they have only one guy handling all of the Mercurial issues.
- grossvogel 11y ago
  That makes sense. I'd guess the main reason people use Bitbucket over Github is "free private repos," with "we already use other Atlassian products" a close second.
  - ISL 11y ago
    The only reason I looked outside of GitHub was Bitbucket's free private repos. Now, for our academic lab, we're working entirely with Bitbucket (for the UI), and repositoryhosting (for low-cost repo archival with many users). In an academic setting, where private repos are created for each small collaborative project, then left idle but accessible, GitHub's per-private-repo pricing model is prohibitive.
    - vacri 11y ago
      BitBucket has better user and permissions management for businesses, although github is slowly improving.
rajksarkar 11y ago
Nor true - we have been investing quite a lot on Bitbucket. Check out our most recent blog post: http://blog.bitbucket.org/2015/09/22/1-in-3-fortune-500-companies-agree-bitbucket-is-the-git-solution-for-professional-teams/ http://blog.bitbucket.org/2015/09/22/1-in-3-fortune-500-comp...

fideloper 11y ago

Who is Prashant Deva and should I care about their opinion? Did Fogbugz actually lose? Do they even have the same market (enterprise vs smaller)? Perhaps they just fine operating at a smaller volume. Isn't the product being "too basic" a sign of focus? Perhaps the author needs/wants more features, but that can't be generalized for all of Fogbugz's audience. I've heard just as many owners say "I don't want as many features as competitor X". That all being said, there are some good things in there - perhaps Fogbugz could look into a partner ecosystem. Making your own language is probably a bad long-run choice. However I get the feeling this is comparing apples to oranges.

skrebbel 11y ago

A bit off topic, and I know I'm sounding like a condescending jerk here but I mean it: but why do people love bugs so much that they want to purchase an entire database program to track them? I mean, if you have more than 10 bugs that are highly important to keep track of, it seems to me that you have much larger problem than whether to purchase JIRA or FogBugz. I mean, either a bug is important to you so prioritize fixing it, or it isn't important to you so you can just ignore it and see if it surfaces again. Every single team I've seen that used a bug tracker ended up with hundreds of issues, status of 90% of which was unknown, maybe already fixed, maybe not relevant anymore because the entire component got overhauled the other day by Joe. What's the use of this stuff? I got this from a blog post (by Ron Jeffries I believe, but I forgot), but basically his idea was that the moment you turn something that you don't want to have into a formalized process, people tend to bias towards getting more of it. If you are forced to choose between fixing a bug or forgetting about it, you're urged to fix it fast. If you can just "file the bug and go on with your work", the bug stays.

peterdkovacs 11y ago
You've got more than 10 bugs. You just don't know it yet. But really, "bug tracker" is just a colloquial expression for the more accurate "issue tracker" which can definitely include things like improvements, new features, A/B tests you want to run, etc.
- nobleach 11y ago
  It is possible that their software isn't large enough to have 10 bugs... they could be implementing FizzBuzz.
  - itsybitsycoder 11y ago
    Where can one get a job as a professional FizzBuzz developer? I think if a program is big enough to devote a software developer to it full-time, it's going to have at least 10 bugs. Maybe they are small or unimportant or so obscure that none of the users actually run into it, but they're in there somewhere.

solutionyogi 11y ago

Having mainly done line of business applications my entire life, I have a slightly different take. Jira won because it was not opinionated. You can use it however you want. FogBugz had the philosophy to make bug entry super easy above anything else. Jira will let a manager define new custom fields and make them all compulsory. It perfectly fits how manager at big companies think. FogBugz provides Completion Date Probability Distribution chart and Burn Down Chart [2]. Anyone who has worked for big companies knows that these two are USELESS for them. They set a project delivery date and you just have to hit it. At my current company, we are going for SOC1 compliance. This forces an amazingly complicated issue workflow and they implemented it very easily in Jira. I am looking at FogBugz documentation on workflows [1], and I don't see how we could have implemented the same in FogBugz. I also feel that Jira has a better ecosystem for plugins and integrations then FogBugz. [1] http://help.fogcreek.com/7483/statuses-categories-and-workflows http://help.fogcreek.com/7483/statuses-categories-and-workfl... [2] http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/features/project-management/ http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/features/project-management/

omouse 11y ago
I don't see how we could have implemented the same in FogBugz. How would you implement the compliance without technology in place? I'm being serious, how do you think compliance happened in the days of 486s, TRS-80s, punchcards or no computers at all? There isn't always a technical solution to a social problem, and JIRA's customizations are a micromanagers dreams. I'm sure there are good cases where that level of control is needed (your compliance case) but generally you don't need it.
- smackfu 11y ago
  Reminds me of the time we cleaned out a back storage room at an old job, and there were binders full of mainframe PL/I source code from the early 80's that had gone through paper code reviews, with the reviewers signature on every page.
  - caf 11y ago
    I was at a job where we did that in the early 2000s.

eikenberry 11y ago

> This meant they couldn't use all of the ecosystem and amazing tooling around Java [...] Does anyone else get the same confused feeling whenever they read things like this? Every experience I've had with the Java/JVM ecosystem has been anything but amazing to the point where I now avoid it like the plague. I can't believe I'm that much different than everyone else, but I see this often enough that it makes me wonder.

ZeroBugBounce 11y ago
Well, I can see it compared to writing and maintaining your own language + all associated tools. I feel like Java is a "choose your own adventure" type thing. You can opt out of a lot of the bad, in my limited experience.
mindcrime 11y ago
Every experience I've had with the Java/JVM ecosystem has been anything but amazing to the point where I now avoid it like the plague. Nope, just the opposite here. The JVM ecosystem is hands-down my preferred environment for building / deploying pretty much anything. "Different strokes for different folks" and all that...
vacri 11y ago
In the context of the article, java is not being compared against the pool of all available languages, but specifically against the in-house language Wasabi.

robotnoises 11y ago

>> While most of these plugins didn't offer much in terms of functionality, for the person making a decision, it definitely helped to tip the scales in Jira's favor. For me, this kinda encapsulates the problem with Jira. Jira is extremely impressive in the number of features, plugins, and customization opportunities it offers, and yet, I can't honestly say even half of the stuff is in any way helpful to me as a developer.

zem 11y ago
as always, a different half is helpful to any particular user. add all the users together and you're back with the full feature set.

Grazester 11y ago

I not heard good things about Jira's ease of use

mostlystatic 11y ago

My guess is that Fogbugz is a cash cow without much new development effort. The focus of FogCreek's founders is on StackExchange and Trello now.

draw_down 11y ago

I still can't believe they invented their own language... but #1 seems like it would have been enough. I hate using JIRA, though, just like I hate using all Atlasssian products, so it would have been nice if FogBugz won.

protomyth 11y ago
Ericsson and Sun invented their own languages. If your a tool company, treating language as off-limits seems limiting.
- draw_down 11y ago
  You have a point, I guess I'm more flabbergasted by the particular language they chose to invent. Also, Fog Creek ain't exactly Ericsson or Sun.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    Fog Creek probably had more resource than Yukihiro Matsumoto, Larry Wall, and Guido van Rossum did.
    - vacri 11y ago
      Ruby, Perl, and Python weren't meant to be in-house languages created to support a commercial product. Not to mention that in their infancies as hobby projects, they didn't have to hit sales deadlines.

osullivj 11y ago

I was working at a large British bank in 2005 when Jira started to get adoption by several teams. The approved bug tracking product was ClearCase ClearQuest. If you think the Jira GUI is ropey you should see ClearQuest. Absolute nightmare. By contrast Jira was free to get started, and much nicer than corporate approved incumbents. They called it land and expand!

chaitanya 11y ago

The one feature of Fogbugz that I really like (and the reason I use it) is evidence based scheduling: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html It takes away a lot of pain associated with giving estimates, especially from a manager's point of view. Devs need to break their tasks down to subtasks of sufficient granularity, and estimate the number of hours/days it would take them to complete each of these subtasks. Fogbugz does everything else, and gives a nice probability distribution chart of completion date that you can share with the stakeholders.

djur 11y ago

Couldn't disagree more on the integrated wiki point. Issue trackers with integrated documentation pages (wikis or otherwise) make it really straightforward to generate docs as a byproduct of working on tickets, or to resolve support requests by linking to the docs. Eventually you will want an external documentation tool, but Atlassian doesn't have one that's any good (Confluence is by far the worst wiki-like application I have ever used).

vailripper 11y ago
Really? Have you tried using the Fogbugz wiki? I will take Confluence any day over that slow bloated POS.

alexwebb2 11y ago

Slightly off topic here but since everyone's chiming in about their experiences with bug trackers, I figure somebody might find it useful. I did a pretty intensive search involving trials of a couple dozen trackers about two years ago when we decided to ditch Jira due to some serious performance and UI issues. I tested pretty much every serious contender on the market. I ended up going with YouTrack and it's been pretty fantastic. One of those by-developers, for-developers things with a lot of functionality out of the box and a decent API for more advanced stuff, and most importantly it has very good performance and a sane UI. It does what it's supposed to do and then gets out of the way, which is exactly what I wanted. I recommend taking it for a spin if you're looking for something along those lines.

protomyth 11y ago

Wasbi had nothing to do with it. JIRA caters to micro-managing mangers and FogBugz didn't. That is the simple lesson in enterprise. Trying to give a technical explanation isn't really telling the story.

PretzelFisch 11y ago

I would like he to define lost. Fogbugz is still around and profitable. I have always seen Fogbugz as a support tool first, bug tracking kindof it's what they built for Fogcreek's process(for Copilot support and development). If you did everything like them it probably was a great fit. Jira on the other hand I have always seen as bug tracker.

baus 11y ago

It could be argued that Trello will eventually be larger than either of these products, so I don't think the story has been completely told. I've used Jira as a manager in both a large and a small installation and hated it both times. It feels like 90s bug tracking system with huge forms and intractable workflows. With that said, Spolsky (although I think a lot of his writing is fantastic) rarely addresses his mistakes.

__david__ 11y ago
Trello doesn't really seem like a bug tracker. I haven't used it though—maybe I'm just missing something?
- joncooper 11y ago
  Agreed. I kind of don't get Trello. Always thought of it as kind of a lightweight "stack of cards" analogue best used for simple high-level planning along the lines of a Kanban board. Is that how people use it?
  - perrylaj 11y ago
    We used it recently as a kanbanish/scrumish board for a recent development cycle and it worked out pretty well. We had separate boards for each sprint, and a backlog board that contained some broad-swipe categories. It would definitely be nice if it had better integrations with fogbugz (which our team also uses) or other bug tracking platforms, but I imagine it would be challenging to do that and maintain its extreme ease of use/simplicity.

meshko 11y ago

Never used Fogz, but Atlassian products are so astonishingly bad that it is hard to find anything about them inspiring.

meshko 11y ago
I think the fact that my useless inflammatory comment didn't get immediately downvoted to hell is proof that I'm right!
- emmelaich 11y ago
  "bad" by itself doesn't mean much; the important thing is the relative goodness. What were open source projects going to us instead? RequestTracker? Scarab? Bugzilla? All of those were much worse than JIRA for development. RT is fine for helpdesks but ugly as hell and no integration with SCMs. Scarab never got to a satisfactory level of maturity. Bugzilla? Just say no. I've been a JIRA admin for 5 years now, and we seriously considered Fogbugz as well. I've never regretted our decision even though we've had plenty of issues() with JIRA. free pun included.

zkhalique 11y ago

I have a question about raising VC money earlier. If you want to grow fast and push some free platform out to change the world, what is main danger in raising VC? I'm talking about the VCs these days who invest in companies that make open source like NGiNX, MySQL etc. And you need resources to grow, if you want to beat competitor platforms. I mean logically, if they've already given you the money and there isn't any way they can take over governance of the company, then the only leverage I can think of is signaling in future rounds. And if you weren't even going to raise one VC round, then at that point you may as well raise exactly one and then signaling is irrelevant. Yes you've diluted yourself 20% and now you've got a board member that wants you to grow fast, but so do you. Of course, I'm assuming here that you failed to raise on Kickstarter, and you aren't making enough $ to hire people to do development/testing/security/evangelism/PR/marketing/operations/etc. anytime soon. Why waste years of your life when you can hand the project off eventually to a community you've built, and move on? If you want to retain control over the project forever, can always be BDFL of the community, at least until some better-funded company forks it. I just really want to understand, what is the reason that guys like DHH say VC can control you after you take their money?

wpietri 11y ago
Once you take money from investors, you have both a legal and a moral responsibility to them. It's important to remember that selling equity is really selling something, just like selling a product. You can't sell something, take somebody's money, and then just not deliver. What you are selling to investors, generally, is return on investment. The real problem comes in because founders and VCs have different understandings of "grow fast". There will come choices that have different levels of risk. VCs always want you to take the high-risk, high-reward path, because they have a portfolio company and are looking for the few really big winners. You, on the other hand, are trying to build something (team, community, product, etc), and so you will favor slower but safer growth. I guess in theory you could sell VCs on a high-growth approach and then turn around and say, "Ha ha, fuck you, we're going to keep your money and try to grow modestly." But a) VCs are way better at their game than you are, so they're hard to fool, and b) then you're an asshole, which is bad on its own and also has consequences for future relationships (and future funding). Plus, if you're in a VC-fundable space, you'll probably have competitors who are also taking money, and they'll be able to outspend you on future rounds.

deleted 11y ago

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lloydde 11y ago

This takes me back ten years to 2005. I was the QA lead at an open source company and we really wanted to use FogBugz. An operations engineer imported all of our bugzilla issues and we were starting to put FogBugz through its paces, but what we couldn't figure out was FogBugz licensing for all of our OSS community. In the en, I think Joel did get back to us and tell us their product was not a fit. Another adviser replied to the thread below (oldest at the bottom) that Apache also uses Jira. In the end we kept using Bugzilla. From: bizguy Subject: RE: [Staff] FW: Joel Spolsky intro? I second FogBugz being unreachable. Also, Jira has a MUCH more impressive client list: Cisco, Oracle, HP, NASA, JPL, CERN, MIT, CalTech, Cornell, HBO From: ceo Subject: RE: [Staff] FW: Joel Spolsky intro? in view of the FogCreek people being unresponsive, and advisor's instant "don't use them" response, I'd like for us to do a bit more due diligence on Jira. I notice that they have per-server licensing ($4800), with unlimited users. From: me Subject: Re: [Staff] FW: Joel Spolsky intro? jira is java based and requires running tomcat which can be a bit of a pig. It is supportive of open source communities. That is about all I know about it right now... I will look at it more tonight.  From: advisor To: ceo Subject: Re: Joel Spolsky intro? Avoid, use Jira...  ceo wrote: > > Dear friends, > > I'm trying to get a hold of Joel Spolsky so we can work out some  > arrangement for using their FogBugz bugtracking system. Please let me > know if you know Joel and can help with an intro, since my blind email > isn't getting a response.

pbreit 11y ago

This is a terribly uninformed perspective on the monumental achievement of large success. If anything, fog bugz "lost" to stack exchange which, imo, is a more profound achievement than the over crowded project management category that still hasn't put out a product that has broad appeal.

spolsky 11y ago

Sorry, Prashant, you lost track of the plot of the story somewhere along the way. (creator of FogBugz, here) FogBugz won and Jira won, but they were playing different games. I wanted to make software development better for programmers. When I started creating Fog Creek Software in 2000 programmers were treated like typists. They were not paid very well (my starting salary was $33,000). There was almost no thought around how software should be developed. Companies that scored high on the Joel Test[1] were almost unheard of. The LAST thing I wanted to do was make another tool of oppression for management to impose gantt charts and deadlines and strict rules about who has to sign off on things. I set out to make software development better for programmers by blogging[2] and by building a company that would be a great place to work[3]. In 2000 the only way to do that was to bootstrap it. With a team of four people we couldn't build anything complicated. We started with bug tracking software because at least we could touch one aspect of programmers' lives with our philosophy. FogBugz was designed for smaller collegial teams of people that wanted to work together effectively and needed a clean and simple way to track issues using the smart workflows that small, professional teams like to use. It was remarkably successful and profitable from 2000 to today. We've never stopped working on improving it, but we also have never abandoned the market of small collegial teams of smart people. By contrast, Jira was designed as "Enterprise Software" with features to help managers impose specific workflows on teams. Selling Enterprise software is a lovely, profitable business and Atlassian has great success selling to large organizations who ignore FogBugz, but it's the opposite of what I wanted to do. Anyway Atlassian is going public with this enterprise software, good for them, I'm sure they're going to enjoy their well-earned private jets. But FogBugz was the means, not the ends, and at Fog Creek our ambition was not to be the world's greatest bug tracker software company, it was to fix things for developers. So we kept plugging away at other ideas. Some of them were kinda dumb. Some were moderate successes. Two of them, Stack Overflow and Trello, were huge hits and spun off into separate companies. Stack Overflow, thanks to Jeff Atwood's inspired leadership, has had more impact on making software development better for programmers than any bug tracker ever will. Trello has grown as popular in three years as Jira grew in 15 years.[4] Neither of them would have been possible if we didn't have the cash cow of steady FogBugz profits. That's what bootstrapping is, folks! You build one thing and use it to build a bigger thing. In the meantime I think the world has figured out that programmers are writing the script for the future that everybody is going to live in, so conditions have gotten better. In big cities employers are falling over themselves to invent new ways to pamper and delight their programmer employees, with the massages and the sushis and the dog yoga. We programmers built ourselves hundreds of amazing tools, from github to npm to ci tools, build tools, IDEs, code refactorers, etc. etc. that make programming a million times better than it was in 2000, and bug tracking is just a slice of that pie and not a particularly important or interesting one. But that said, FogBugz is still very popular and very profitable and thousands of teams use it every day, and we're still reinvesting those profits in making it better and in developing new products to make the world better for developers, and even though it doesn't support pointy-haired micro-managers and doesn't allow you to create a custom workflow requiring that a VP-or-higher sign off on bug reports, there are still small, collegial teams of smart developers who have figured out that this is how they want to work. [1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html [2] http://joelonsoftware.com/ http://joelonsoftware.com/ [3] http://www.fogcreek.com/ http://www.fogcreek.com/ [4] https://goo.gl/hTXXPG https://goo.gl/hTXXPG

lmm 11y ago

I don't think it was Wasabi so much as Windows. You didn't have to use Wasabi to write plugins for FogBugz, but you did have to use .net. The kind of people who read Joel's blog run on *nix, and probably have some Java in their stack; if you give them a .war that runs on Tomcat then they know what to do, and if they don't know then there are plenty of open-source tutorials. If you're giving them a .net product to deploy on a windows machine, not so much. I think the final chapter is yet to be written though. Trello is a joy to use, much better than Jira. And AIUI it's on a much more developer-friendly stack.

toyg 11y ago
>"The kind of people who read Joel's blog run on nix, and probably have some Java in their stack"* I'm afraid you're really off-base there. Spolsky is a MS alumni and his core followers have always been people living in the MS ecosystem. The forums he kept for a while were overwhelmingly populated by people talking of VB and then .NET. StackOverflow was clearly dominated by .Net questions for the first few years. His choice of platform, when it came to developing his own software, was never really in doubt. Note that FogBugz was not even the actual product he started the company for; that was a proto-blogging publishing platform called CityDesk, which was Windows-only and meant for the general public. FogBugz was an internal tool that he pivoted on, thanks in great part to the cred he had built by blogging candidly on software development matters (at a time when this was very rare). If you now see his customers as "running on *nix", it's because the world has changed. Now the bugtracker is looked after by devops, people who started working after the wave of cheap Linux server that built the modern web had long settled.
- lloydde 11y ago
  > I'm afraid you're really off-base there. Spolsky is a MS alumni and his core followers have always been people living in the MS ecosystem. What do you mean by core followers? You underestimate his influence. I haven't worked in the MS ecosystem in my 15 year career across six companies. I've regularly seen his book around and his writing is referenced from time to time. I'd go so far to say some of those environments I've worked in and some of the people championing his work have been somewhat anti-microsoft.

davidw 11y ago

Did Fogbugz really 'lose'? It's not as if bug tracking systems are a winner-take all market with strong network externalities. Granted, it did not 'win as much' as JIRA, but that's not necessarily a loss. One of the cool things about many businesses is that they are positive sum games. Maybe FogBugz works better in some niches and still generates a nice living for the people who work on it.

jeffmk 11y ago

Has anyone had experience with Redmine [1]? It's quite easy to use and extend via its plugin system, but I don't see many people who have encountered it in the wild. I think its horrendous out-of-the-box look-and-feel detract heavily from its appeal. Nowadays I'd probably lean toward Gitlab, which seems to offer much of the same but appears much more modern. [1] https://www.redmine.org/ https://www.redmine.org/

xrstf 11y ago
We used Redmine for a while, but never got the Ruby stack to perform good (we are a PHP shop, so..). I remember the insane version dependencies ("redmine revision x to y needs package P in revision a to b") and that it seemed to stagnate in its development. In the end I'm happy we ditched it in favor of Trello.
- jeffmk 11y ago
  Love Trello. I'd like a locally installable version of that integrated with something like Gitlab (maybe this already exists, I haven't bothered to look). It always seemed a bit slow to me as well. The dependencies issue may be fixed with modern usage of rvm-/rbenv-type things, but I haven't messed with Redmine for a couple years. It's funny you mention the pace of development too; the community actually forked at once point [1], I believe due to frustration with how the development community was being handled. That fork is dead now though. [1] https://www.chiliproject.org/ https://www.chiliproject.org/
nchelluri 11y ago
Having used FogBugz, JIRA, and RedMine, as a developer, my order of preference is: 1 - fogbugz 2 - redmine 3 - jira I actually found myself pretty comfortable with Redmine's UI and its integrated wiki. Fogbugz was very easy for me to use, but I last used it ~7 years ago. It may be possible to get JIRA configured so it works nicely, but in general I find I am always running into some kind of workflow issues. It does work, it just seems to take more effort and sometimes me or my teammates come up with ways to work around things that are broken or just not smooth and that we don't have access rights to debug or fix.

martingordon 11y ago

My Jira experience was absolutely terrible. We were an 8 person team at time and looking for something more robust than Trello and ended up settling on Pivotal Tracker. I signed us up for an Atlassian Cloud trial and right away things weren't looking good. I was expecting to dive right in but instead had to wait 30 minutes until my instance was ready or whatever. They only offer a 7-day trial. How am I supposed to properly evaluate something as fundamental as an issue tracker in 7 days? That's not long enough to learn to use it and then get the team to try it out for a small project. Worst of all were the 5-10 second load times on each page. I contacted support to see what they could do but they weren't too helpful and I stopped using it 2 hours into the 7 day trial.

xrstf 11y ago
In my experience, most Atlassian products are slow as hell, with Bitbucket being among the faster ones. Confluence can maybe control a space shuttle with all its features, but it's slow to a point where it becomes unusable. We evaluated JIRA as well, but it didn't work well for people like who are in many different projects at once and don't want to spend days trying to build a view for all those issues (that encompasses swim lanes and such). Also, as you've mentioned, it's pretty slow. We settled with Trello and are relatively happy.

maxharris 11y ago

I had to use Jira at my last job. I could never figure out what it did that you couldn't do in github with less trouble and fuss. I can't say that I would absolutely refuse to work at a place that uses Jira, but it is definitely something that would make me lean towards another offer.

dannyrosen 11y ago

I brought Fogbugz into two organizations (100+ accounts) as a QA Engineer and it worked great -- when it came to bugs. When we started doing agile (and then "Agile" ... ugh) development the entire process broke down. There were no (good) plugins that could do kanban and moving features from state to state to state dramatically increased the size of an items log. That, along with the friendly, and then suddenly not so friendly filtering lead to our team dropping the product and moving to Jira. While Fogcreek's "Fastbugz" was a gallant effort in modernizing the application stack and speeding up page loading time, it fell short as it didn't functionality support feature _and_ bug management. I should note, we had reached out to Fogcreek with all of our requests and critiques but they weren't interested in hearing us out passed the usual account or customer service manager.

mijustin 11y ago

What metric are we using to determine who "won" here? Did Jira "win" just because OP likes it better? Because both companies are private, we don't really know how much profit either product has made.

chris_hawk 11y ago
In reality, it's a double-win relative to the goals each company was striving for - and acheived! In the author's mind, Jira wins because it's OMG ENTERPRISE and going public.

tbrock 11y ago

This meant they couldn't use all of the ecosystem and amazing tooling around Java I've never laughed so hard in my entire life.

rsobers 11y ago

Won based on what criteria? Atlassian has over 1,100 employees. When I was at Fog Creek we had ~30. So if we're talking about profit per employee, I can assure you the people who built FogBugz don't feel like they've lost anything.

dwd 11y ago

Surprised no mention of Kiln which was a really nice product when I first used it back in 2008. The ability to inline comments in a code review that then hooked back to the job in FB was fantastic. GitStash is getting there now, but the Jira integration is still a little lacking.

mangeletti 11y ago

What about the name? He could have potentially left out the most important mistake Spolsky ever made, which is to name a product Fog Buzz. He might as well have named it Rain Smelt, or Lamp Shade. It sounds terrific once you use and like the product, but it doesn't sound remnisent of any kind of successful brand ever. Even the use of 2 words is a departure from the norm. Most of the big brands have 1-word names, and this is not s coincidence. Even Facebook was changed from The Facebook. Brand matters, and names matter. To play devil's advocate with my own argument, 37 Signals is a bit different as well and people (perhaps more so in the tech community) loved the brand, but the thing is, they used "Basecamp" as their product name.

julianz 11y ago
Possibly your most important mistake is not reading the name correctly. It's Fogbugz. One word.
- deleted 11y ago
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- mangeletti 11y ago
  Potatoemuffintrain. See what I did there. 3 words do not become 1 word, simply because the proper spaces are omitted. I will say though, for many years I have thought the company was called Fog Buzz, (not Bugz).

dragonsh 11y ago

I am still not sure if fogbugz lost. In general simple systems are always hard to built. In general while doing a project with fixed date approach Jira issue tracker is indeed not inline with the source code. So there is a discrepancy between what is in issue tracker and whats in the source tree. Moreover developers cutting corners to meet the fixed date is a technical debt for future and Jira promotes it. Fogbugz with its probabilistic approach is better matched with the actual source code, since even though developers over or under estimate, its probabilistic distribution analysis puts standard deviation and means put in front of their eyes to do better. So in general fogbugz approach results in better source tree and less technical debt.

atesti 11y ago

For me the main way in which FogBugz has "lost" is that they silently discontinued the "FogBugz for your Server" version. The plugin system was great and we have our own installation on our own systems (no cloud allowed). With the "performance upgrade" they seem to have forked FogBugz, thrown out all the plugins, Lucene search and redid the GUI. And stopped updates for the server version: http://help.fogcreek.com/fogbugz-release-notes http://help.fogcreek.com/fogbugz-release-notes And now just recently there was a little bit of activity, like that they now offer a VM of some kind with the new version. But I think we can't use that because it is the expensive, unlimited user license and they must install it somehow and plugins would still be gone, which we depend on. And for all of this there is little to no communication. The stop of "Kiln for your Server" was also done extremely quitely.

atesti 11y ago
Here is the FAQ which outlines that plugins and the old FogBugz for your server has been discontinued: http://help.fogcreek.com/10706/future-of-for-your-server-faq http://help.fogcreek.com/10706/future-of-for-your-server-faq Very sad

otabdeveloper 11y ago

Programmers hate being held accountable, yes. (This is logical given that they control so few of the risks.) But in the end, accountability is the reason why you're being paid that salary, not knowledge of framework APIs or algorithms. Embrace that responsibility and process, don't fight it.

lifeisstillgood 11y ago

1. Make a JIRA plug-in that turns JIRA into Fogbugz 2. Profit