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How Atlassian Built a $10B Growth Engine

226 points by AliCollins 9y ago

jmcqk6 9y ago
Growth is great, but I've never met a single dev that is excited to use their tools. Management loves their app because they can spit out numbers, and don't care how good or meaningful those number are. Jira is a painful to use, especially compared to trello. They own trello now, so I hope they don't mess it up.
- the_common_man 9y ago
  Jira and trello were built for different use cases.
  - athenot 9y ago
    Trello will probably be assimilated into Jira's answer to GitHub projects.
- mathattack 9y ago
  I’ve heard Jira described by developers as “the worst except for everything else out there.” Its put in with reluctance rather than enthusiasm.
  - raverbashing 9y ago
    That is the correct answer And to be honest, it's a process tool. Dealing with processes is boring. Jira is better than bugzilla and trac. And much better than some tools, constructed from manure, from big IT companies and sold for very high price tags.
    - hinkley 9y ago
      After years of using Jira I kinda miss Trac. It's sad to me that they lost momentum. I think they got stuck trying to overcome tech debt and bug fixes and feature requests started to pile up. From time to time I keep an eye on CommonMark implementations and fantasize about writing an MVP to replicate parts of Trac by composing existing tools. Unfortunately there are like 5 other things I'd rather do with my free time.
      - Game_Ender 9y ago
        Check out Phabricator, it’s written in php, but it has that nice integrated suite feel that Trac had. It also gets a lot of use including at Facebook.
  - Steeeve 9y ago
    That's actually a fantastic description of Jira.
  - subpixel 9y ago
    I've heard Confluence described as "Satan's wiki", and my experience with Jira is very similar.
- logicuce 9y ago
  I feel Jira is actually a workflow management system disguised as a ticketing system. It is a complex product and their pricing is shit expensive but I haven't come across anything more powerful. IMHO If you are a small startup and can be self disciplined, you don't need Jira. It is more for enterprise setup where accountability/responsibility has to be generally enforced.
  - jmcqk6 9y ago
    >a workflow management system I think this is some kind of natural law: any sufficiently old enterprise system tends towards becoming an ad-hoc, bug-ridden, poorly specified workflow engine.
  - crdoconnor 9y ago
    It's only "good for enterprises" insofar as management gets a boner over the reports it issues and the level of detail it lets you drill down to. Those reports are not generally being used to make sensible decisions, but they make management feel more in the know and in control and thats what really drives sales.
- PhilipA 9y ago
  Not to mention their UX is horrendous. You never hear people wanting to copy their UX. With the size of their company they should be able to produce better.
  - braderhart 9y ago
    That's what happens when you build things in Java.
    - oblio 9y ago
      What does that have to do with anything?
      - braderhart 9y ago
        Just about every web-based Java project I've came across carries a certain persona of UX being terrible to navigate, slow to use and all around a negative experience once you try something that just works. Jenkins comes to mind, Jira of course, and just about any other Java project's website still looks like it is from the 90s.
        oblio 9y ago
        Maybe that's because they actually are from the 90's? Well, not 90's, but early 00's. And they target the enterprise market. Also, all the big internet companies use Java, basically. You're using Google, Amazon, Twitter, Netflix, etc. products and you're using Java. Do you also hate those? :) Furthermore, Java is mostly server side at this point so I'm not sure your UI complaint is really valid...
        kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
        The problem isn't Java per se but that the UI code becomes fossilized and nobody wants to put in the effort to update it. The same issue happened with Perl and now (to a lesser extent) Rails sites.
- sz4kerto 9y ago
  > Jira is a painful to use, especially compared to trello. If you're using JIRA for stuff that Trello works for, then sure. What JIRA does and does exceptionally well: grows with your organisation. You can start using JIRA for a simple ticketing system with 3 devs, then continue using it through 100x growth and still use it with multiple product teams, multiple development teams, overlapping projects, CI, code review, wikis, reporting tools, and so on. If you think that all these tools and sophistication is bullshit, then that's a different conversation -- but a non-negligible number of smart people think that these integrations worth a lot. JIRA is like Excel or Word -- 80% of people use only 20% of the functionality (or less), but it's a different 20% for all of them. And it's really-really painful to realize that Trello/GH Issues/etc. works great with a slick UI, except that it can't do that single stuff you'd really need because of your special situation.
  - jmcqk6 9y ago
    >If you think that all these tools and sophistication is bullshit, then that's a different conversation -- but a non-negligible number of smart people think that these integrations worth a lot. If you can point me towards someplace visible that is using these tools well, I'm more than happy to be wrong. Every time I've seen them used, they're more like rorschach number generators for management, so I have naturally assumed that my experiences are the normal. That is, of course, a fallacy, so if you can point me to such a paragon of use, I'll be more than happy to check it out.
    - sz4kerto 9y ago
      You seem to be talking about JIRA reports. JIRA != Trello + fancy reports. The strength of JIRA is that if your company suddenly needs a different development flow (whatever it is -- new tooling, new workflow, more teams, awkward regulatory requirements etc.) then you can stay with JIRA because whatever you want to do will be possible with JIRA. (Uh, I sound like an Atlassian shill, even though I dislike the lagginess of their UI and also how they handle Bitbucket. :) )
      - ravitation 9y ago
- rdtsc 9y ago
  > Growth is great, but I've never met a single dev that is excited to use their tools. I've seen one dev excited - the one who tested other tools and picked Jira because it checked off on all the "features" needed. It really did handle the arcane and complicated workflow we had. But besides that few liked it, though it was a mix of hating the slow and unresponsive UI and hating the arcane process.
  - gxs 9y ago
    I think this post speaks to a lot of the issues I see not just with JIRA, but with enterprise tools in general. Instead of adopting a sound process, customers will take an overly complicated business process and make the tool conform to this process. And please note that in this cases how you manage your code workflow is, in fact, the business process. Any tool will struggle - often it's the process that's cumbersome and not the tools.
    - switchbak 9y ago
      My main gripe with Atlassian products is the execution - the ideas behind the products are usually sound, it's just pretty clunky to use. For me, I'd love to have a flexible-enough tool for small to medium sized orgs that encourages a modern lightweight process and discourages ad-hoc process sillyness. Sometimes having a tool gently encourage better practices among all participants is a useful thing.
  - qudat 9y ago
    I wouldn't hate JIRA so much if it wasn't for the terrible UX. Literally every action I do there's a loading spinner.
    - mivanchev 9y ago
      I think I'm traumatized by the Ajax spinners in Jira. It was just TOO MUCH.
- tootie 9y ago
  I love JIRA from a tech leadership perspective. It's very adaptable to different situations even if configuration isn't straightforward. Once you have a good workflow, it's great for devs and managers. The value for managers really should not be understated here. It's great for devs to have a simple ticket management system to help the flow of work, but being able to show measurable progress against priorities to management is absolutely to everyone's benefit.
  - jmcqk6 9y ago
    >The value for managers really should not be understated here. Can you expand on that? I've never seen a manager use it well. They use it to generate numbers for their reports for the people they report to, and it doesn't tend to matter what those numbers or reports actually represent. For example, it's very easy for process to make velocity numbers complete hogwash. Basically, as far as I can tell, it's great and being able to tell you what you want to hear, and not very good at providing usable insights that increases productivity, but people don't notice because they're hearing what they want to hear.
    - hux_ 9y ago
      Now do a little thought experiment - what do you think they would be reporting if Jira or whatever else did not exist.
    - tootie 9y ago
      Well, once you're in that situation, you've already lost. Scrum is worthless if you haven't set he appropriate expectations with stakeholders at the outset. If you get them to understand definitions of Ready and Done as well as quality-first approach and being flexible on scope, then the backlog gives them all the information they need to understand what is being worked on and when. I've seen it done correctly a few times and I've even seen behemoth organizations get behind it and get a ton of value out of it. For my money, the #1 benefit to scrum is improved visibility to stakeholders and any productivity gains to the dev are the result of them being able to work on things in the correct priority order due mainly to benefit #1.
    - 9y ago
- j45 9y ago
  As much as I'm a hesitant user of JIRA, there is little out there that can grow with the complexity of a project and organization like it has. Other tools, fogbugz, trello, etc are very good at what they do. Invariably though when you get enough projects that are complex enough (not always big), JIRA has been the only thing that could take a bite out of managing the details like few others. JIRA also can be greatly simplified to use but most users don't do this. The JIRA core offering is what I recommend to folks. JIRA is heavier for dealing with heavier projects. On the flip side. Having a search engine of every issue and decision, be it design, system, implementation, roll out ticket for every project in a company is second to none. I recently assisted a client in their systems design and growth from from 0 to 50m revenue in 4 years. It feels strange and wondeful to have every decision made in one searchable place, on one time line for every major piece of software or system implemented for them.
  - braderhart 9y ago
    The features you are talking about, like having a search engine, are in just about every product that could exist in this arena. Have you used GitLab and GitHub before for issue and project tracking? What about Phabricator?
    - j45 9y ago
      Complex projects, complete with their integrated support, roadmapping, sprint management invariably have a few order magnitude higher level of complexity and management. There are few tools that truly do the above well, or bearably competently. Most start from scratch projects can be nicely managed in Trello et al. Generic search alone isn't the feature, or the benefit. None of those options listed have a deep enough search. GitLab and GitHub aren't a project manager - projects that are manageable in Git* likely aren't complex, or enterprise grade. I have tried nearly every product in this arena as well over 20 yrs of dev in different types and sizes of projects. JIRA begrudgingly is my neccesary evil. I hear nice things about Pivotal Tracker as well, just didn't reach my sphere of folks when I was looking.
  - klenwell 9y ago
    > It feels strange and wondeful to have every decision made in one searchable place, on one time line for every major piece of software or system implemented for them. I can see the appeal of that. That is a killer feature for me. My team currently runs what I find to be a pretty lean and clean workflow using Trello, Github (for source control and issues), and Wikimedia for documentation. (Oh, and can't forget Outlook for release scheduling.) Having all of that in one place would make life easier. On the other hand, not having a monolithic service handling everything has forced us to pay attention to our workflows and practices and keep them sharp. But the team is small. If we grew or had to manage more projects across multiple teams, this would be really valuable.
- braderhart 9y ago
  Especially compared to GitLab and Phabricator, which both offer open source versions that are way better IMO all around.
- SonicSoul 9y ago
  Have you tried managing 1000 tickets in Trello? Jira also offers decent API so you can streamline it a bit. Although I’ve gotten used to their cloud ui where it’s pretty easy to manage. I do wish response was faster though
- mkobit 9y ago
  I can understand why management would want to choose Atlassian. * The idea of the "Atlassian Ecosystem", in that buying more of their services seems to work better. * On-premise for most of their tools * Pricing. For example, Bitbucket Server - $26,400 for 500-1000 users /year [1]. GitHub Enterprise - $2,500 per 10 users / year [2]. Self-hosted GitLab - $39 or $199 per user / year (Starter compared to Enterprise Edition Premium package) [3]. If at a 1000 users, that is $26,400 compared to $250,000 or $39,000/$200,000. * "Other big companies use them" * "Reporting and metrics" * "There is a plugin for that" But, I and most of the other developers I have worked with hate every single Atlassian product we use. JIRA eventually turns into a micromanagement tool with all of the customization people think they want. People seem to think that because it is customizable, it will solve their problems. It always seems to take up more time and resources to try and bend their tools to do anything useful than it is to just say, "well, I guess we don't really need that". [1]: https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/bitbucket-server https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/bitbucket-server [2]: https://enterprise.github.com/features#pricing https://enterprise.github.com/features#pricing [3]: https://about.gitlab.com/products/ https://about.gitlab.com/products/
  - gsylvie 9y ago
    Bitbucket Server is only $26,400 for the 1st year in your scenario. The 2nd and subsequent years are $13,200/year.
  - seanjregan 9y ago
    GitHub Enterprise Cloud . $21U/M Bitbucket Cloud Premium $5 U/M https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing?tab=host-in-the-cloud https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing?tab=host-in-the-cloud https://github.com/pricing https://github.com/pricing
- taude 9y ago
  I hear this a lot, but I'd love to hear what people prefer better. Also, I don't get the argument that JIRA is difficult to use. I can open a bug, fill out a few fields, assign it to someone, etc. easy peasy. Almost all the other tools I hear as substitutes are decent only when you have a few devs on the team. Personally, I don't mind JIRA and the Atlassian toolset as they are so much better than what we used to use in the old days.
- TsomArp 9y ago
  Have to totally agree with you. I don't see what people see on them.
- lbartlett 9y ago
  I feel like JIRA was just a configurable workflow tool at a time when all the processes around software development were still being defined/standardized. It worked well for it's era because people could get it to do whatever they felt was perfect fit for them, but overtime I feel like it's broken down for much the same reason that people prefer to buy a SaaS product that has 95% of their needs out of the box. Processes (agile) and UIs (kanban) have been much more standardized in software project management and only now does it seem like some companies are coming up to give you that 90% out of the book with 10% the overhead/ management. Pivotal Tracker came close.. Clubhouse.io is the one I've seen doing it best.
  - jacques_chester 9y ago
    Pivotal Tracker has been around for a fair while now; it's usually compared to JIRA. They have quite different DNA. Tracker grew out of Pivotal Labs and it is mostly molded to how Labs and R&D teams do their daily and weekly work. To me it seemed constricted and limited until I came to work at Pivotal; now it makes sense.
  - chrisco255 9y ago
    I've used Pivotal Tracker and I think it's great for small teams, but I can not see a big company with 500+ users using it. JIRA is better for ticket tracking, issue linking, cloning, reporting, integration with Bitbucket/Github branches, user permissions, build system integrations, burndown charts, analytics, media services support, and not to mention the ecosystem around JIRA is just huge. Disclosure: I'm an Atlassian employee, but I had these opinions before I started.
- stephenhuey 9y ago
  I know many devs who prefer JIRA over TFS.
- mgkimsal 9y ago
  > Jira is a painful to use, especially compared to trello Have never been able to use trello effectively with any clients. It's simply too open-ended on its own. "Issue trackers" (like Jira) have some semblance of workflow predefined, and act as a decent guide for people who are not "project managers" to still bring some degree of order/structure, with the benefit that that structure was actually defined by someone else who thought about data/structure/flow/etc.
liveoneggs 9y ago
we just moved from jira hosted to jira cloud and it is, shockingly, worse! As a user I've always hated JIRA and as an admin it is shockingly bad. There must be some alternatives that are still viable.
- the_common_man 9y ago
  I believe you but can you elaborate what is bad about it?
  - liveoneggs 9y ago
    it's slower, it's uglier, and you can't customize it at all (even basic stuff like font sizes)
  - ivankirigin 9y ago
    There are some actions in Asana, like tags and projects, which are immediate and inline, often with a hotkey. In jira, it could literally be 4 full screens. Other examples include filtering and search. Google has raised the bar so high in both gmail and core search for how a query should work. Jira says fuck you here is JQL, and it isn't at all obvious why.
    - maxxxxx 9y ago
      Yes, search is really bad. We now have a corporation wide JIRA and searches return results from all 100+ projects. If I want to search in my project I have to use JQL.
- jschwartzi 9y ago
  You could try hosting a Redmine instance. I remember it being pretty comparable to JIRA in feature set. I haven't used it in years though.
  - mariusmg 9y ago
    Personally i find Redmine to be pretty horrible (and i have to use it daily). It's slow and it doesn't have a working search feature. Maybe Mantis is better these days...
lazyjones 9y ago
> The thing that made the product challenging to learn was what developers loved most about it—that it did everything needed for issue tracking, and they could customize it to work precisely the way they needed it to for their specific teams and projects. I don't believe this. There were plenty of competing Open Source tools out with the same problems. I hated every single one of them and so did other developers I know. Perhaps developers preferred Jira because the management could be told they'd have to pay a qualified contractor for customization instead of torturing the developers with that kind of work?
- matt_s 9y ago
  Every dev I know has never liked any ticketing system. Maybe its psychological though, makes us feel like we work at a deli counter?
  - hinkley 9y ago
    Someone observed a very long time ago that you can only count on devs to put the information into the ticketing system that is useful for their day to day work. I've only had luck with management (analysis and planning) of ticketing systems when we treat this observation as law. Either you measure what you have the data to measure, or you convince the developers that maintaining some part of the data is useful to them on a daily basis. The third leg of that stool is realizing that graphs and trends are for asking better questions, not for making decisions. Everything else comes down to a weak appeal to ethics. The problem is that a lot of devs either have or think they have a richer sense of ethics (not necessarily better, but more considered) than the people who want the data. So these appeals come across as tone deaf.
  - lazyjones 9y ago
    I wrote and used a minimalistic one to save me time: plain e-mails to people with "[t]" in the subject got put in a database, recipients got modified e-mails with URLs to a web interface in the body (in addition to the original e-mail). When the task was completed, you only needed to click on one link in the web interface (or in the e-mail) and the original sender would get a confirmation by e-mail (i.e. you didn't need to write that e-mail yourself). The web interface provided an overview of open tickets and statistics. Later, comments, re-assigning tickets, priorities and other stuff was added. This was used for > 10 years (for a few 10000 tickets) AFAIR until it got replaced by Jira. It worked well and was accepted (or so it seemed) because it didn't really interfere with the typical way of doing things till then (e-mails) and offered minimalistic features on top.
ttul 9y ago
How they built a $10B growth engine was by being precisely on point with their timing and then having pretty good product execution.
- dannyw 9y ago
  Not just product execution but GTM strategy, pricing. Jira is cheap. It’s a no brainer. Disclaimer: ex-Atlassian
ndh2 9y ago
Some facts in the article that was linked are definitely not correct. Fogbugz was out there before JIRA. Spolsky wrote about JIRA multiple times, yet the article never mentions it. So what is this site anyways? There's no About page, no contact, no ownership information, no author, nothing. Looks like an advertisement to me.
- wwalser 9y ago
  producthabits.com is a lead generation for whatever Hiten Shah sells next. He's fairly prolific in the software startup and product marketing spaces.
athenot 9y ago
In the eary days, Jira was an awesome bug tracker (free for OSS), compared to Bugzilla or Trac. But they focused on adding lots of features without much thought on the overall user experience. Their latest UI revamp only made things worse. Somehow, they managed to accumulate the negatives of a flexible product (resulting in poor/incoherent UX) and the negatives of rigid assumptions regarding workflows (try modelling staggered deployments in different datacenters/environments spanning multiple sprints... good luck!). Going forward, I expect Atlassian to cater to rigid organizations and neglect those who design their own processes (whether lightweight ad-hoc or complex custom ones that don't fit what Atlassian Sales can understand).
- dmitriid 9y ago
  I also "love" how they re-designed the issue UI. What do you need in an issue? Obviously, issue description. Now even on largest monitors issue description starts below the fold. Everything else is taken up by nice crisp white-space-separated "important" information: the sprint name, the epic link, number of hours projected, who it is assigned to, etc. etc.
  - liveoneggs 9y ago
    how many points is this outage going to be to fix? we'll need to bring it up to the project committee to see if we can allocate it out of the next sprint
    - justinator 9y ago
      "Points" the gateway drug of JIRA. It's honestly the most difficult/simple concept to understand, since it's all about "don't think intuitively, because in JIRA that's the wrong way to think."
  - softawre 9y ago
    You can reorder the issue fields can't you?
    - 9y ago
polskibus 9y ago
They sure did outsourcing well, I wonder how has that contributed to their success. There's a big dev shop in Poland maintaining and developing large bits of their core offering - Spartez.
- wwalser 9y ago
  Most of their dev is done Sydney and SF. They also have offices in Austin and NY now. Spartez has obviously been a great partnership but "large bits of their core offering" is inaccurate. That's not to deminish the efforts of the people involved. It's just materially untrue for most values of "large" and "core".
whoisjuan 9y ago
Good for them, but JIRA still sucks.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
qaq 9y ago
The amazing part Jira is most basic tool many of us use daily . As evidenced by huge number of posts here people really hate it yet there is no good alternative. So instead of uber for pancakes maybe someone will be inspired to build one :)
tablet 9y ago
The more interesting question is "Who can beat Atlassian in productivity market?" What properties this product should have? What Atlassian weaknesses should it attack?
jasonmaydie 9y ago
it's the SAP of development management tools. Everyone hates it but everyone uses it
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  I only wish that companies also accepted that you need a ton of consultant time before you can actually use it like it's known for SAP. The out-of-the-box experience of JIRA is pretty poor.
- hb3b 9y ago
  I came for this comment. The big difference between JIRA and SAP is that SAP is a "batteries-included + kitchen sink" package (which tends to require molding business processes around it). My problem w/ JIRA is that anything beyond the simplest workflows/BPM requires purchasing a ton of paid plugins that tend to be abandoned over time. Atlassian knows what users want but they are dog-slow at bringing them to fruition.
pletnes 9y ago
Most comments revolve around JIRA as an issue tracker. I think those miss the point. Atlassian products are never best in any given category (in my opinion); however, they all integrate easily and (almost) out of the box. Choosing JIRA over another product might not be meaningful, but you need source control, chat, build servers, etc. Having them play nicely together without fiddling with tricky settings is a huge benefit.
- tablet 9y ago
  What if you have a product, that integrates best tools in any given category? Slack, GitHub, etc? Can this solution beat Jira?
  - maratd 9y ago
    > What if you have a product, that integrates best tools in any given category? Slack, GitHub, etc? Can this solution beat Jira? No, it can't. Atlassian's tooling is used by large teams. It doesn't make sense in a small team environment. In a large team of say a dozen people, can you imagine managing accounts/permission/access to a dozen services? That's over 144 accounts, plus billing, plus all the other stuff needed to make everything play together. Nobody wants that headache. That's just the tip of the iceberg too. Atlassian already plays well with Github and other services. So you can have your cake and eat it too.
    - qaq 9y ago
      Large teams generally use SSO solution like okta, oneLogin etc. so not really an issue
      - dannyw 9y ago
        Scoped permissions, scoping or referencing the same projects, etc add additional value b
      - toomuchtodo 9y ago
        We use JIRA and Bitbucket in an org with thousands of users. AD SSO support is mandatory.
stuff4ben 9y ago
Funny, they don't mention Bamboo CI. But probably for the better since there are tons of better tools out there like CircleCI, Shippable, and even Jenkins.
- nsxwolf 9y ago
  Bamboo is sheer madness. Used it almost once an hour for 3 years and it felt like I was back to square one each time. I could never really learn the UI.
- wwalser 9y ago
  One thing to keep in mind is that Bamboo was first released in 2007. Less than a year after AWS was initially launched and well before things like Travis or CircleCI existed to make the cloud side of the CI equation obvious. I agree that there are better services if you don't mind running on other people's infra. Behind the firewall Jenkins I'm not sure about, I haven't tried it in ages.
  - Rapzid 9y ago
    Team City is great IMHO; at least compared to bamboo.
- Rapzid 9y ago
  2016 I was almost 2 years into using bamboo heavily. End of 2016 there was still a feature/ticket open with them requesting an http/s target for build notifications... Really, no option to notify an endpoint when a build finished...
nunez 9y ago
I've developed against JIRA and used JIRA pretty heavily at several companies now. JIRA is a really nice product, but one's experience with it heavily depends on who "owns" it.
- rando444 9y ago
  This has been exactly my experience as well.
  - walterbell 9y ago
    It helps if JIRA users (i.e. developers) help to define the workflow.
    - megy 9y ago
      Oh yes, not allowing others to go back and edit tickets is a huge one for us.
- wwalser 9y ago
  Finally, someone makes _the_ point in a thread about JIRA. JIRA's most powerful feature is that it affords for mapping businesses processes onto software. This is incredibly compelling to enterprise customers. Software that enforces workflows, procedures and requirements can be an incredible lever and JIRA's price point makes build vs buy decisions an absolute no-brainer. The down side for the true end-users, those who actually use the software day-to-day, is that most business processes are awful. If your experience is the hellish existence that I see strolled about on threads where JIRA comes up, I can say with near absolute confidence that it's because of one of three things: * Your admin(s) set it up once and hasn't bothered to iterate on those workflows. * The business mapped their autonomy stripping processes onto JIRA intentionally. I'd guess that most of your work experience is similar. Process stifled nonsense. * You're on an instance that is serving too many people with too few resources. Shard your instances folks, the money for extra licenses is wildly cheaper than the human time you're wasting waiting for stuff to load.
  - 9y ago
kchoudhu 9y ago
I didn't realize there was so much money in to-do lists.
- dajt 9y ago
  There is obviously more to it than that, but it was my thought way back when. I interviewed with Mike and Scott when there didn't seem to be many other people involved. A few days later the company I worked for started the process of getting acquired. I tossed up what I thought my share options might be worth against two guys who seemed to be just out of uni with a bug tracker. I called them back and said I'd stay where I was. My options were worth nothing. Joke was on me big time! Later on lots of my dev team ended up working for Atlassian and I thought it might be time to check it out again. I went for an interview and was told I wasn't smart enough, despite the fact I'd already mentored a bunch of their devs. At least they gave me an interview. Most places don't 'cause I don't have the book learning to get past HR.
bedros 9y ago
What differentiates JIRA from other issue trackers is that it's very popular with Chip/Asic companies; they have support for all chip design phases, which other issue trackers lack. in other words, they found a market need others ignored, and they served it.
- godelmachine 9y ago
  Where can I read more about this? Would you kindly refer me to some web page or anything ? Also, do you know which ASIC/ Chip / VLSI companies use JIRA?
  - bedros 9y ago
    I know Intel uses JIRA heavily from colleagues I work at another ASIC company (Storage Industry) and we use JIRA as main issue tracker; JIRA feels very tailored for ASIC, at least the version at our company
ngrilly 9y ago
The title, mentioning $10B, is misleading. As of 2017, Atlassian revenue is $620 million. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlassian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlassian
- pm90 9y ago
  Market cap is different from revenue: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/atlassian-heads-toward-10-billion-market-cap-with-a-story-to-tell-2017-10-19 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/atlassian-heads-toward-10-...
  - ngrilly 9y ago
    You're right. The title is probably referring to the market cap. I didn't know Atlassian was listed.
kapauldo 9y ago
Never understood why anyone paid for any atlassian product.
hyperpallium 9y ago
> While a lot of companies make acquisitions, most don’t execute well on integration. I have a theory that much of the success of web-based companies isn't due to the internet's reach itself, but because they can actually harness programming to business. Make something happen; check for something; modify everything. Of course, there's always problems with programming but it's so much easier than doing it any other way. But traditional businesses cannot reap these benefits, because they cannot make IT central. They can't be IT first. And they lack the talent and experience to handle all the problems of programming. Therefore, it is the new web-based companies that know what they are doing (with programming) that win this. The quote above is a great example: it's hard to integrate acquired businesses, they usually just become a messy "conglomerate". What if you could actually integrate other products and services into your products and services? With programming, it is possible, whereas it wasn't really before. There are still problems - and other commemts highlight how the UI has suffered. Indeed, enlarging a codebase inevitably has much in common with a messy "conglomerate". But it's so much easier than doing it in any other way than with programs (i.e. traditional businesses). (Atlassian's products also help other businesses run on programs, but that's not my focus here).
olingern 9y ago
As an unhappy Bitbucket user, I have my fingers crossed for better Github enterprise pricing (does not scale for dev agencies with many repos), but mostly for AWS Code Commit. It's somewhat scary the breadth that AWS has in their ecosystem now; however, Bitbucket is wrought with issues like: - no large file collapsing, i.e. lock files - random downtimes ( I wonder if they actually meet their SLA ) - feature requests on boards where Atlassian members ask why x is needed, followed by a slew of +1's, to only see someone ask 3 years later, "where is this at?" I'm a jaded Atlassian user who believes they buy competition and then stagnant the product's evolution.
- gravyboat 9y ago
  Have you looked at GitLab's offering recently? It might be a better fit than GitHub.
  - olingern 9y ago
    I've cruised by it a couple of times, but my workplace is already bought in on AWS. Code Commit has some nice integrations for CI / CD whereas I can't really make the case for Gitlab other than, "I like it more" Positioning it more like: - It will save us X amount of time on average - Give us better security through IAM - Reduces fragmentation across org software sells a lot better to people with credit cards than, "I like it more"
    - sytse 9y ago
      We'll have a comparison between GitLab and Codestart/Codecommit up soon https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/1807 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/1807
- jschumacher 9y ago
  > I'm a jaded Atlassian user who believes they buy competition and then stagnant the product's evolution. What product do you think Atlassian has bought to stifle it's evolution? Bitbucket specifically was a product with 50k users and Atlassian has grown it to Millions. Buying a competitor just to let the product stagnate and die makes rarely sense in business.
iamleppert 9y ago
Having worked extensively with JIRA in the past, I will say that whoever designed it had to have done it with clear intention. JIRA has an uncanny way of attracting to it a very specific (and valuable) person inside organizations. I mean the person who is obsessed with the creation and quantification of knowledge worker processes that are subtly complex. This complexity naturally gives plenty of fodder and massive surface area for engagement and features —- one can spend hours tweaking JIRA workflows, running reports, and playing with the query builder. And we all know that once a user is engaged past a few days you’ve got them, almost like a kind of pair bonding. They have bonded with your software, and they’ll be forced to spend their days in it. If there is some ritual like work involved all the more better. I’ve seen these guys come in from other organizations where they’ve used JIRA and the first thing they do is push for its adoption and use. There could be plenty of other things to tackle and I’m not here to make the case JIRA is or isn’t a good tool, has value, or is more or less important, I’m just sharing my observations. When you’ve literally made it your job to be the JIRA master, you are in fact more concerned with the performance of the work than the actual work product itself. It’s like the difference between introverted and extroverted personality types. Some people come in and want to get their hands dirty with the product and code, while others want to setup JIRA and start tweaking workflows. Another brilliant thing I noticed they did was to optimize the scrum display for large TVs. Many issue trackers and other tools simply don’t look good (not readable) or are not functional on a massive 70” screen. The purpose of this is clear: for standups and planning meetings where it is used in a group setting (usually by the JIRA advocate/master). Another big thing is the daily e-mails. It’s a way to show your boss and co-workers you’re doing something without telling them directly. And it makes people feel good to see activity, regardless of what is actually being done, it’s often times more important that people are working together, as 90% of all work done in JIRA is irrelevant anyway. People talk bad about JIRA and despite its flaws you’d do well to study its workings if you are at all interested in building a similar B2B or enterprise app that requires a certain manipulation of the end user.

226 points by AliCollins 9y ago

Growth is great, but I've never met a single dev that is excited to use their tools. Management loves their app because they can spit out numbers, and don't care how good or meaningful those number are. Jira is a painful to use, especially compared to trello. They own trello now, so I hope they don't mess it up.

the_common_man 9y ago
Jira and trello were built for different use cases.
- athenot 9y ago
  Trello will probably be assimilated into Jira's answer to GitHub projects.
mathattack 9y ago
I’ve heard Jira described by developers as “the worst except for everything else out there.” Its put in with reluctance rather than enthusiasm.
- raverbashing 9y ago
  That is the correct answer And to be honest, it's a process tool. Dealing with processes is boring. Jira is better than bugzilla and trac. And much better than some tools, constructed from manure, from big IT companies and sold for very high price tags.
  - hinkley 9y ago
    After years of using Jira I kinda miss Trac. It's sad to me that they lost momentum. I think they got stuck trying to overcome tech debt and bug fixes and feature requests started to pile up. From time to time I keep an eye on CommonMark implementations and fantasize about writing an MVP to replicate parts of Trac by composing existing tools. Unfortunately there are like 5 other things I'd rather do with my free time.
    - Game_Ender 9y ago
      Check out Phabricator, it’s written in php, but it has that nice integrated suite feel that Trac had. It also gets a lot of use including at Facebook.
- Steeeve 9y ago
  That's actually a fantastic description of Jira.
- subpixel 9y ago
  I've heard Confluence described as "Satan's wiki", and my experience with Jira is very similar.
logicuce 9y ago
I feel Jira is actually a workflow management system disguised as a ticketing system. It is a complex product and their pricing is shit expensive but I haven't come across anything more powerful. IMHO If you are a small startup and can be self disciplined, you don't need Jira. It is more for enterprise setup where accountability/responsibility has to be generally enforced.
- jmcqk6 9y ago
  >a workflow management system I think this is some kind of natural law: any sufficiently old enterprise system tends towards becoming an ad-hoc, bug-ridden, poorly specified workflow engine.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  It's only "good for enterprises" insofar as management gets a boner over the reports it issues and the level of detail it lets you drill down to. Those reports are not generally being used to make sensible decisions, but they make management feel more in the know and in control and thats what really drives sales.
PhilipA 9y ago
Not to mention their UX is horrendous. You never hear people wanting to copy their UX. With the size of their company they should be able to produce better.
- braderhart 9y ago
  That's what happens when you build things in Java.
  - oblio 9y ago
    What does that have to do with anything?
    - braderhart 9y ago
      Just about every web-based Java project I've came across carries a certain persona of UX being terrible to navigate, slow to use and all around a negative experience once you try something that just works. Jenkins comes to mind, Jira of course, and just about any other Java project's website still looks like it is from the 90s.
      - oblio 9y ago
        Maybe that's because they actually are from the 90's? Well, not 90's, but early 00's. And they target the enterprise market. Also, all the big internet companies use Java, basically. You're using Google, Amazon, Twitter, Netflix, etc. products and you're using Java. Do you also hate those? :) Furthermore, Java is mostly server side at this point so I'm not sure your UI complaint is really valid...
        kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
        The problem isn't Java per se but that the UI code becomes fossilized and nobody wants to put in the effort to update it. The same issue happened with Perl and now (to a lesser extent) Rails sites.
sz4kerto 9y ago
> Jira is a painful to use, especially compared to trello. If you're using JIRA for stuff that Trello works for, then sure. What JIRA does and does exceptionally well: grows with your organisation. You can start using JIRA for a simple ticketing system with 3 devs, then continue using it through 100x growth and still use it with multiple product teams, multiple development teams, overlapping projects, CI, code review, wikis, reporting tools, and so on. If you think that all these tools and sophistication is bullshit, then that's a different conversation -- but a non-negligible number of smart people think that these integrations worth a lot. JIRA is like Excel or Word -- 80% of people use only 20% of the functionality (or less), but it's a different 20% for all of them. And it's really-really painful to realize that Trello/GH Issues/etc. works great with a slick UI, except that it can't do that single stuff you'd really need because of your special situation.
- jmcqk6 9y ago
  >If you think that all these tools and sophistication is bullshit, then that's a different conversation -- but a non-negligible number of smart people think that these integrations worth a lot. If you can point me towards someplace visible that is using these tools well, I'm more than happy to be wrong. Every time I've seen them used, they're more like rorschach number generators for management, so I have naturally assumed that my experiences are the normal. That is, of course, a fallacy, so if you can point me to such a paragon of use, I'll be more than happy to check it out.
  - sz4kerto 9y ago
    You seem to be talking about JIRA reports. JIRA != Trello + fancy reports. The strength of JIRA is that if your company suddenly needs a different development flow (whatever it is -- new tooling, new workflow, more teams, awkward regulatory requirements etc.) then you can stay with JIRA because whatever you want to do will be possible with JIRA. (Uh, I sound like an Atlassian shill, even though I dislike the lagginess of their UI and also how they handle Bitbucket. :) )
    - ravitation 9y ago
rdtsc 9y ago
> Growth is great, but I've never met a single dev that is excited to use their tools. I've seen one dev excited - the one who tested other tools and picked Jira because it checked off on all the "features" needed. It really did handle the arcane and complicated workflow we had. But besides that few liked it, though it was a mix of hating the slow and unresponsive UI and hating the arcane process.
- gxs 9y ago
  I think this post speaks to a lot of the issues I see not just with JIRA, but with enterprise tools in general. Instead of adopting a sound process, customers will take an overly complicated business process and make the tool conform to this process. And please note that in this cases how you manage your code workflow is, in fact, the business process. Any tool will struggle - often it's the process that's cumbersome and not the tools.
  - switchbak 9y ago
    My main gripe with Atlassian products is the execution - the ideas behind the products are usually sound, it's just pretty clunky to use. For me, I'd love to have a flexible-enough tool for small to medium sized orgs that encourages a modern lightweight process and discourages ad-hoc process sillyness. Sometimes having a tool gently encourage better practices among all participants is a useful thing.
- qudat 9y ago
  I wouldn't hate JIRA so much if it wasn't for the terrible UX. Literally every action I do there's a loading spinner.
  - mivanchev 9y ago
    I think I'm traumatized by the Ajax spinners in Jira. It was just TOO MUCH.
tootie 9y ago
I love JIRA from a tech leadership perspective. It's very adaptable to different situations even if configuration isn't straightforward. Once you have a good workflow, it's great for devs and managers. The value for managers really should not be understated here. It's great for devs to have a simple ticket management system to help the flow of work, but being able to show measurable progress against priorities to management is absolutely to everyone's benefit.
- jmcqk6 9y ago
  >The value for managers really should not be understated here. Can you expand on that? I've never seen a manager use it well. They use it to generate numbers for their reports for the people they report to, and it doesn't tend to matter what those numbers or reports actually represent. For example, it's very easy for process to make velocity numbers complete hogwash. Basically, as far as I can tell, it's great and being able to tell you what you want to hear, and not very good at providing usable insights that increases productivity, but people don't notice because they're hearing what they want to hear.
  - hux_ 9y ago
    Now do a little thought experiment - what do you think they would be reporting if Jira or whatever else did not exist.
  - tootie 9y ago
    Well, once you're in that situation, you've already lost. Scrum is worthless if you haven't set he appropriate expectations with stakeholders at the outset. If you get them to understand definitions of Ready and Done as well as quality-first approach and being flexible on scope, then the backlog gives them all the information they need to understand what is being worked on and when. I've seen it done correctly a few times and I've even seen behemoth organizations get behind it and get a ton of value out of it. For my money, the #1 benefit to scrum is improved visibility to stakeholders and any productivity gains to the dev are the result of them being able to work on things in the correct priority order due mainly to benefit #1.
  - 9y ago
j45 9y ago
As much as I'm a hesitant user of JIRA, there is little out there that can grow with the complexity of a project and organization like it has. Other tools, fogbugz, trello, etc are very good at what they do. Invariably though when you get enough projects that are complex enough (not always big), JIRA has been the only thing that could take a bite out of managing the details like few others. JIRA also can be greatly simplified to use but most users don't do this. The JIRA core offering is what I recommend to folks. JIRA is heavier for dealing with heavier projects. On the flip side. Having a search engine of every issue and decision, be it design, system, implementation, roll out ticket for every project in a company is second to none. I recently assisted a client in their systems design and growth from from 0 to 50m revenue in 4 years. It feels strange and wondeful to have every decision made in one searchable place, on one time line for every major piece of software or system implemented for them.
- braderhart 9y ago
  The features you are talking about, like having a search engine, are in just about every product that could exist in this arena. Have you used GitLab and GitHub before for issue and project tracking? What about Phabricator?
  - j45 9y ago
    Complex projects, complete with their integrated support, roadmapping, sprint management invariably have a few order magnitude higher level of complexity and management. There are few tools that truly do the above well, or bearably competently. Most start from scratch projects can be nicely managed in Trello et al. Generic search alone isn't the feature, or the benefit. None of those options listed have a deep enough search. GitLab and GitHub aren't a project manager - projects that are manageable in Git* likely aren't complex, or enterprise grade. I have tried nearly every product in this arena as well over 20 yrs of dev in different types and sizes of projects. JIRA begrudgingly is my neccesary evil. I hear nice things about Pivotal Tracker as well, just didn't reach my sphere of folks when I was looking.
- klenwell 9y ago
  > It feels strange and wondeful to have every decision made in one searchable place, on one time line for every major piece of software or system implemented for them. I can see the appeal of that. That is a killer feature for me. My team currently runs what I find to be a pretty lean and clean workflow using Trello, Github (for source control and issues), and Wikimedia for documentation. (Oh, and can't forget Outlook for release scheduling.) Having all of that in one place would make life easier. On the other hand, not having a monolithic service handling everything has forced us to pay attention to our workflows and practices and keep them sharp. But the team is small. If we grew or had to manage more projects across multiple teams, this would be really valuable.
braderhart 9y ago
Especially compared to GitLab and Phabricator, which both offer open source versions that are way better IMO all around.
SonicSoul 9y ago
Have you tried managing 1000 tickets in Trello? Jira also offers decent API so you can streamline it a bit. Although I’ve gotten used to their cloud ui where it’s pretty easy to manage. I do wish response was faster though
mkobit 9y ago
I can understand why management would want to choose Atlassian. * The idea of the "Atlassian Ecosystem", in that buying more of their services seems to work better. * On-premise for most of their tools * Pricing. For example, Bitbucket Server - $26,400 for 500-1000 users /year [1]. GitHub Enterprise - $2,500 per 10 users / year [2]. Self-hosted GitLab - $39 or $199 per user / year (Starter compared to Enterprise Edition Premium package) [3]. If at a 1000 users, that is $26,400 compared to $250,000 or $39,000/$200,000. * "Other big companies use them" * "Reporting and metrics" * "There is a plugin for that" But, I and most of the other developers I have worked with hate every single Atlassian product we use. JIRA eventually turns into a micromanagement tool with all of the customization people think they want. People seem to think that because it is customizable, it will solve their problems. It always seems to take up more time and resources to try and bend their tools to do anything useful than it is to just say, "well, I guess we don't really need that". [1]: https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/bitbucket-server https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/bitbucket-server [2]: https://enterprise.github.com/features#pricing https://enterprise.github.com/features#pricing [3]: https://about.gitlab.com/products/ https://about.gitlab.com/products/
- gsylvie 9y ago
  Bitbucket Server is only $26,400 for the 1st year in your scenario. The 2nd and subsequent years are $13,200/year.
- seanjregan 9y ago
  GitHub Enterprise Cloud . $21U/M Bitbucket Cloud Premium $5 U/M https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing?tab=host-in-the-cloud https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing?tab=host-in-the-cloud https://github.com/pricing https://github.com/pricing
taude 9y ago
I hear this a lot, but I'd love to hear what people prefer better. Also, I don't get the argument that JIRA is difficult to use. I can open a bug, fill out a few fields, assign it to someone, etc. easy peasy. Almost all the other tools I hear as substitutes are decent only when you have a few devs on the team. Personally, I don't mind JIRA and the Atlassian toolset as they are so much better than what we used to use in the old days.
TsomArp 9y ago
Have to totally agree with you. I don't see what people see on them.
lbartlett 9y ago
I feel like JIRA was just a configurable workflow tool at a time when all the processes around software development were still being defined/standardized. It worked well for it's era because people could get it to do whatever they felt was perfect fit for them, but overtime I feel like it's broken down for much the same reason that people prefer to buy a SaaS product that has 95% of their needs out of the box. Processes (agile) and UIs (kanban) have been much more standardized in software project management and only now does it seem like some companies are coming up to give you that 90% out of the book with 10% the overhead/ management. Pivotal Tracker came close.. Clubhouse.io is the one I've seen doing it best.
- jacques_chester 9y ago
  Pivotal Tracker has been around for a fair while now; it's usually compared to JIRA. They have quite different DNA. Tracker grew out of Pivotal Labs and it is mostly molded to how Labs and R&D teams do their daily and weekly work. To me it seemed constricted and limited until I came to work at Pivotal; now it makes sense.
- chrisco255 9y ago
  I've used Pivotal Tracker and I think it's great for small teams, but I can not see a big company with 500+ users using it. JIRA is better for ticket tracking, issue linking, cloning, reporting, integration with Bitbucket/Github branches, user permissions, build system integrations, burndown charts, analytics, media services support, and not to mention the ecosystem around JIRA is just huge. Disclosure: I'm an Atlassian employee, but I had these opinions before I started.
stephenhuey 9y ago
I know many devs who prefer JIRA over TFS.
mgkimsal 9y ago
> Jira is a painful to use, especially compared to trello Have never been able to use trello effectively with any clients. It's simply too open-ended on its own. "Issue trackers" (like Jira) have some semblance of workflow predefined, and act as a decent guide for people who are not "project managers" to still bring some degree of order/structure, with the benefit that that structure was actually defined by someone else who thought about data/structure/flow/etc.

liveoneggs 9y ago

we just moved from jira hosted to jira cloud and it is, shockingly, worse! As a user I've always hated JIRA and as an admin it is shockingly bad. There must be some alternatives that are still viable.

the_common_man 9y ago
I believe you but can you elaborate what is bad about it?
- liveoneggs 9y ago
  it's slower, it's uglier, and you can't customize it at all (even basic stuff like font sizes)
- ivankirigin 9y ago
  There are some actions in Asana, like tags and projects, which are immediate and inline, often with a hotkey. In jira, it could literally be 4 full screens. Other examples include filtering and search. Google has raised the bar so high in both gmail and core search for how a query should work. Jira says fuck you here is JQL, and it isn't at all obvious why.
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    Yes, search is really bad. We now have a corporation wide JIRA and searches return results from all 100+ projects. If I want to search in my project I have to use JQL.
jschwartzi 9y ago
You could try hosting a Redmine instance. I remember it being pretty comparable to JIRA in feature set. I haven't used it in years though.
- mariusmg 9y ago
  Personally i find Redmine to be pretty horrible (and i have to use it daily). It's slow and it doesn't have a working search feature. Maybe Mantis is better these days...

lazyjones 9y ago

> The thing that made the product challenging to learn was what developers loved most about it—that it did everything needed for issue tracking, and they could customize it to work precisely the way they needed it to for their specific teams and projects. I don't believe this. There were plenty of competing Open Source tools out with the same problems. I hated every single one of them and so did other developers I know. Perhaps developers preferred Jira because the management could be told they'd have to pay a qualified contractor for customization instead of torturing the developers with that kind of work?

matt_s 9y ago
Every dev I know has never liked any ticketing system. Maybe its psychological though, makes us feel like we work at a deli counter?
- hinkley 9y ago
  Someone observed a very long time ago that you can only count on devs to put the information into the ticketing system that is useful for their day to day work. I've only had luck with management (analysis and planning) of ticketing systems when we treat this observation as law. Either you measure what you have the data to measure, or you convince the developers that maintaining some part of the data is useful to them on a daily basis. The third leg of that stool is realizing that graphs and trends are for asking better questions, not for making decisions. Everything else comes down to a weak appeal to ethics. The problem is that a lot of devs either have or think they have a richer sense of ethics (not necessarily better, but more considered) than the people who want the data. So these appeals come across as tone deaf.
- lazyjones 9y ago
  I wrote and used a minimalistic one to save me time: plain e-mails to people with "[t]" in the subject got put in a database, recipients got modified e-mails with URLs to a web interface in the body (in addition to the original e-mail). When the task was completed, you only needed to click on one link in the web interface (or in the e-mail) and the original sender would get a confirmation by e-mail (i.e. you didn't need to write that e-mail yourself). The web interface provided an overview of open tickets and statistics. Later, comments, re-assigning tickets, priorities and other stuff was added. This was used for > 10 years (for a few 10000 tickets) AFAIR until it got replaced by Jira. It worked well and was accepted (or so it seemed) because it didn't really interfere with the typical way of doing things till then (e-mails) and offered minimalistic features on top.

ttul 9y ago

How they built a $10B growth engine was by being precisely on point with their timing and then having pretty good product execution.

dannyw 9y ago
Not just product execution but GTM strategy, pricing. Jira is cheap. It’s a no brainer. Disclaimer: ex-Atlassian

ndh2 9y ago

Some facts in the article that was linked are definitely not correct. Fogbugz was out there before JIRA. Spolsky wrote about JIRA multiple times, yet the article never mentions it. So what is this site anyways? There's no About page, no contact, no ownership information, no author, nothing. Looks like an advertisement to me.

wwalser 9y ago
producthabits.com is a lead generation for whatever Hiten Shah sells next. He's fairly prolific in the software startup and product marketing spaces.

athenot 9y ago

In the eary days, Jira was an awesome bug tracker (free for OSS), compared to Bugzilla or Trac. But they focused on adding lots of features without much thought on the overall user experience. Their latest UI revamp only made things worse. Somehow, they managed to accumulate the negatives of a flexible product (resulting in poor/incoherent UX) and the negatives of rigid assumptions regarding workflows (try modelling staggered deployments in different datacenters/environments spanning multiple sprints... good luck!). Going forward, I expect Atlassian to cater to rigid organizations and neglect those who design their own processes (whether lightweight ad-hoc or complex custom ones that don't fit what Atlassian Sales can understand).

dmitriid 9y ago
I also "love" how they re-designed the issue UI. What do you need in an issue? Obviously, issue description. Now even on largest monitors issue description starts below the fold. Everything else is taken up by nice crisp white-space-separated "important" information: the sprint name, the epic link, number of hours projected, who it is assigned to, etc. etc.
- liveoneggs 9y ago
  how many points is this outage going to be to fix? we'll need to bring it up to the project committee to see if we can allocate it out of the next sprint
  - justinator 9y ago
    "Points" the gateway drug of JIRA. It's honestly the most difficult/simple concept to understand, since it's all about "don't think intuitively, because in JIRA that's the wrong way to think."
- softawre 9y ago
  You can reorder the issue fields can't you?
  - 9y ago

polskibus 9y ago

They sure did outsourcing well, I wonder how has that contributed to their success. There's a big dev shop in Poland maintaining and developing large bits of their core offering - Spartez.

wwalser 9y ago
Most of their dev is done Sydney and SF. They also have offices in Austin and NY now. Spartez has obviously been a great partnership but "large bits of their core offering" is inaccurate. That's not to deminish the efforts of the people involved. It's just materially untrue for most values of "large" and "core".

whoisjuan 9y ago

Good for them, but JIRA still sucks.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

qaq 9y ago

The amazing part Jira is most basic tool many of us use daily . As evidenced by huge number of posts here people really hate it yet there is no good alternative. So instead of uber for pancakes maybe someone will be inspired to build one :)

tablet 9y ago

The more interesting question is "Who can beat Atlassian in productivity market?" What properties this product should have? What Atlassian weaknesses should it attack?

jasonmaydie 9y ago

it's the SAP of development management tools. Everyone hates it but everyone uses it

maxxxxx 9y ago
I only wish that companies also accepted that you need a ton of consultant time before you can actually use it like it's known for SAP. The out-of-the-box experience of JIRA is pretty poor.
hb3b 9y ago
I came for this comment. The big difference between JIRA and SAP is that SAP is a "batteries-included + kitchen sink" package (which tends to require molding business processes around it). My problem w/ JIRA is that anything beyond the simplest workflows/BPM requires purchasing a ton of paid plugins that tend to be abandoned over time. Atlassian knows what users want but they are dog-slow at bringing them to fruition.

pletnes 9y ago

Most comments revolve around JIRA as an issue tracker. I think those miss the point. Atlassian products are never best in any given category (in my opinion); however, they all integrate easily and (almost) out of the box. Choosing JIRA over another product might not be meaningful, but you need source control, chat, build servers, etc. Having them play nicely together without fiddling with tricky settings is a huge benefit.

tablet 9y ago
What if you have a product, that integrates best tools in any given category? Slack, GitHub, etc? Can this solution beat Jira?
- maratd 9y ago
  > What if you have a product, that integrates best tools in any given category? Slack, GitHub, etc? Can this solution beat Jira? No, it can't. Atlassian's tooling is used by large teams. It doesn't make sense in a small team environment. In a large team of say a dozen people, can you imagine managing accounts/permission/access to a dozen services? That's over 144 accounts, plus billing, plus all the other stuff needed to make everything play together. Nobody wants that headache. That's just the tip of the iceberg too. Atlassian already plays well with Github and other services. So you can have your cake and eat it too.
  - qaq 9y ago
    Large teams generally use SSO solution like okta, oneLogin etc. so not really an issue
    - dannyw 9y ago
      Scoped permissions, scoping or referencing the same projects, etc add additional value b
    - toomuchtodo 9y ago
      We use JIRA and Bitbucket in an org with thousands of users. AD SSO support is mandatory.

stuff4ben 9y ago

Funny, they don't mention Bamboo CI. But probably for the better since there are tons of better tools out there like CircleCI, Shippable, and even Jenkins.

nsxwolf 9y ago
Bamboo is sheer madness. Used it almost once an hour for 3 years and it felt like I was back to square one each time. I could never really learn the UI.
wwalser 9y ago
One thing to keep in mind is that Bamboo was first released in 2007. Less than a year after AWS was initially launched and well before things like Travis or CircleCI existed to make the cloud side of the CI equation obvious. I agree that there are better services if you don't mind running on other people's infra. Behind the firewall Jenkins I'm not sure about, I haven't tried it in ages.
- Rapzid 9y ago
  Team City is great IMHO; at least compared to bamboo.
Rapzid 9y ago
2016 I was almost 2 years into using bamboo heavily. End of 2016 there was still a feature/ticket open with them requesting an http/s target for build notifications... Really, no option to notify an endpoint when a build finished...

nunez 9y ago

I've developed against JIRA and used JIRA pretty heavily at several companies now. JIRA is a really nice product, but one's experience with it heavily depends on who "owns" it.

rando444 9y ago
This has been exactly my experience as well.
- walterbell 9y ago
  It helps if JIRA users (i.e. developers) help to define the workflow.
  - megy 9y ago
    Oh yes, not allowing others to go back and edit tickets is a huge one for us.
wwalser 9y ago
Finally, someone makes _the_ point in a thread about JIRA. JIRA's most powerful feature is that it affords for mapping businesses processes onto software. This is incredibly compelling to enterprise customers. Software that enforces workflows, procedures and requirements can be an incredible lever and JIRA's price point makes build vs buy decisions an absolute no-brainer. The down side for the true end-users, those who actually use the software day-to-day, is that most business processes are awful. If your experience is the hellish existence that I see strolled about on threads where JIRA comes up, I can say with near absolute confidence that it's because of one of three things: * Your admin(s) set it up once and hasn't bothered to iterate on those workflows. * The business mapped their autonomy stripping processes onto JIRA intentionally. I'd guess that most of your work experience is similar. Process stifled nonsense. * You're on an instance that is serving too many people with too few resources. Shard your instances folks, the money for extra licenses is wildly cheaper than the human time you're wasting waiting for stuff to load.
- 9y ago

kchoudhu 9y ago

I didn't realize there was so much money in to-do lists.

dajt 9y ago
There is obviously more to it than that, but it was my thought way back when. I interviewed with Mike and Scott when there didn't seem to be many other people involved. A few days later the company I worked for started the process of getting acquired. I tossed up what I thought my share options might be worth against two guys who seemed to be just out of uni with a bug tracker. I called them back and said I'd stay where I was. My options were worth nothing. Joke was on me big time! Later on lots of my dev team ended up working for Atlassian and I thought it might be time to check it out again. I went for an interview and was told I wasn't smart enough, despite the fact I'd already mentored a bunch of their devs. At least they gave me an interview. Most places don't 'cause I don't have the book learning to get past HR.

bedros 9y ago

What differentiates JIRA from other issue trackers is that it's very popular with Chip/Asic companies; they have support for all chip design phases, which other issue trackers lack. in other words, they found a market need others ignored, and they served it.

godelmachine 9y ago
Where can I read more about this? Would you kindly refer me to some web page or anything ? Also, do you know which ASIC/ Chip / VLSI companies use JIRA?
- bedros 9y ago
  I know Intel uses JIRA heavily from colleagues I work at another ASIC company (Storage Industry) and we use JIRA as main issue tracker; JIRA feels very tailored for ASIC, at least the version at our company

ngrilly 9y ago

The title, mentioning $10B, is misleading. As of 2017, Atlassian revenue is $620 million. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlassian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlassian

pm90 9y ago
Market cap is different from revenue: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/atlassian-heads-toward-10-billion-market-cap-with-a-story-to-tell-2017-10-19 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/atlassian-heads-toward-10-...
- ngrilly 9y ago
  You're right. The title is probably referring to the market cap. I didn't know Atlassian was listed.

kapauldo 9y ago

Never understood why anyone paid for any atlassian product.

hyperpallium 9y ago

> While a lot of companies make acquisitions, most don’t execute well on integration. I have a theory that much of the success of web-based companies isn't due to the internet's reach itself, but because they can actually harness programming to business. Make something happen; check for something; modify everything. Of course, there's always problems with programming but it's so much easier than doing it any other way. But traditional businesses cannot reap these benefits, because they cannot make IT central. They can't be IT first. And they lack the talent and experience to handle all the problems of programming. Therefore, it is the new web-based companies that know what they are doing (with programming) that win this. The quote above is a great example: it's hard to integrate acquired businesses, they usually just become a messy "conglomerate". What if you could actually integrate other products and services into your products and services? With programming, it is possible, whereas it wasn't really before. There are still problems - and other commemts highlight how the UI has suffered. Indeed, enlarging a codebase inevitably has much in common with a messy "conglomerate". But it's so much easier than doing it in any other way than with programs (i.e. traditional businesses). (Atlassian's products also help other businesses run on programs, but that's not my focus here).

olingern 9y ago

As an unhappy Bitbucket user, I have my fingers crossed for better Github enterprise pricing (does not scale for dev agencies with many repos), but mostly for AWS Code Commit. It's somewhat scary the breadth that AWS has in their ecosystem now; however, Bitbucket is wrought with issues like: - no large file collapsing, i.e. lock files - random downtimes ( I wonder if they actually meet their SLA ) - feature requests on boards where Atlassian members ask why x is needed, followed by a slew of +1's, to only see someone ask 3 years later, "where is this at?" I'm a jaded Atlassian user who believes they buy competition and then stagnant the product's evolution.

gravyboat 9y ago
Have you looked at GitLab's offering recently? It might be a better fit than GitHub.
- olingern 9y ago
  I've cruised by it a couple of times, but my workplace is already bought in on AWS. Code Commit has some nice integrations for CI / CD whereas I can't really make the case for Gitlab other than, "I like it more" Positioning it more like: - It will save us X amount of time on average - Give us better security through IAM - Reduces fragmentation across org software sells a lot better to people with credit cards than, "I like it more"
  - sytse 9y ago
    We'll have a comparison between GitLab and Codestart/Codecommit up soon https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/1807 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/1807
jschumacher 9y ago
> I'm a jaded Atlassian user who believes they buy competition and then stagnant the product's evolution. What product do you think Atlassian has bought to stifle it's evolution? Bitbucket specifically was a product with 50k users and Atlassian has grown it to Millions. Buying a competitor just to let the product stagnate and die makes rarely sense in business.

iamleppert 9y ago

Having worked extensively with JIRA in the past, I will say that whoever designed it had to have done it with clear intention. JIRA has an uncanny way of attracting to it a very specific (and valuable) person inside organizations. I mean the person who is obsessed with the creation and quantification of knowledge worker processes that are subtly complex. This complexity naturally gives plenty of fodder and massive surface area for engagement and features —- one can spend hours tweaking JIRA workflows, running reports, and playing with the query builder. And we all know that once a user is engaged past a few days you’ve got them, almost like a kind of pair bonding. They have bonded with your software, and they’ll be forced to spend their days in it. If there is some ritual like work involved all the more better. I’ve seen these guys come in from other organizations where they’ve used JIRA and the first thing they do is push for its adoption and use. There could be plenty of other things to tackle and I’m not here to make the case JIRA is or isn’t a good tool, has value, or is more or less important, I’m just sharing my observations. When you’ve literally made it your job to be the JIRA master, you are in fact more concerned with the performance of the work than the actual work product itself. It’s like the difference between introverted and extroverted personality types. Some people come in and want to get their hands dirty with the product and code, while others want to setup JIRA and start tweaking workflows. Another brilliant thing I noticed they did was to optimize the scrum display for large TVs. Many issue trackers and other tools simply don’t look good (not readable) or are not functional on a massive 70” screen. The purpose of this is clear: for standups and planning meetings where it is used in a group setting (usually by the JIRA advocate/master). Another big thing is the daily e-mails. It’s a way to show your boss and co-workers you’re doing something without telling them directly. And it makes people feel good to see activity, regardless of what is actually being done, it’s often times more important that people are working together, as 90% of all work done in JIRA is irrelevant anyway. People talk bad about JIRA and despite its flaws you’d do well to study its workings if you are at all interested in building a similar B2B or enterprise app that requires a certain manipulation of the end user.