9 ms·

Too bad, hg and bb are great, but Atlassian makes abominable tools. On the upside, my account is now cheaper (free).

by mml 16y ago

tvon 16y ago
Can you expand on your Atlassian comment? I'd like to know more about them.
chrisbroadfoot 16y ago
Like what? (Disclaimer: I used to work for Atlassian)
- mml 16y ago
  ok, mea culpa. i've only used jira and confluence, along with a few plugins (the notably awful jira "agile" plugin). over the span of a number of years, myself, and everyone else in the vicinity (at multiple companies) hated it with a passion. your mileage may vary. i fear for bitbucket.
  - ghshephard 16y ago
    Hated Jira and Confluence? Compared to what? Given that I find Jira to be perhaps the finest issue tracker I've ever worked with (compared to Remedy, Vantive, Scopus, RT, bugzilla and FogBugz), I would genuinely love to hear what tool you think is better than Jira? Particularly now that they can do advanced searching with JQL (Circa 4.x), I don't know of any tool that compares, particularly out of the box. And, while sharepoint is a little more feature rich, and has better Office/IE Integration than Confluence, it also doesn't play particularly well with alternative platforms like firefox - I'd like to hear what your preferred Wiki platform is. I'm kind of a TWiki bigot personally, but if I had to drop a new wiki on a for-profit company tomorrow, it would probably be confluence.
    - pufuwozu 16y ago
      You only mentioned "for-profit" companies. If money is the problem, Confluence is free for non-profits: http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/licensing.jsp#nonprofit http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/licensing.jsp#n...
      - ghshephard 16y ago
        Right, thanks for pointing that out. I was actually coming at it from a different angle - Atlassian's support, and the ecosystem (at least in the valley) around confluence, make it (in my opinion, I'm sure others might differ) a better fit for companies that are willing to pay money than a tool like TWiki. It's not as big a difference today, though, then it was 6 years ago. But, the thing is, Atlassian almost gives away their software (compared to what other companies charge) - so, to some degree, it's almost like comparing two free software packages with each other. Confluence's real competition is actually sharepoint, more than it is TWiki.
- jshen 16y ago
  The search in confluence is absolutely horrible. What use is a wiki for a 1000+ people company if it's not searchable. Jira, and maybe this is my companies setup, takes way too many clicks to do simple things like reprioritize tickets. This could just be my preference but I like to treat tickets as an ordered list/stack with the most important at the top.
- brandon 16y ago
  I'm a fan of Confluence and JIRA from a user perspective, but oh man, they are terrible products to install and administer. For instance, we're an Atlassian shop through and through; we also use Fisheye, Crucible and Bamboo. As such, we wanted to tie all of these apps up to Atlassian's SSO solution (Crowd). Take a look at the integration guide for JIRA¹. The process can require finding missing JARs, editing Java property files, commenting and uncommenting forests of XML, and then you're still subject to a bunch of arbitrary restrictions around group membership (super fun when paired with AD). The whole thing feels like an afterthought that was never given the respect of a proper feature. I personally get the impression that Atlassian's product codebases are pretty fragmented as a result of their grow-via-acquisitions strategy. On the front end, the products are good looking and usable. On the back end, things are a mess. Still, it's my job to run the mess, so I'll keep slogging. ¹ http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CROWD/Integrating+Crowd+with+Atlassian+JIRA http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CROWD/Integrating+Cr...
  - daveoflynn 16y ago
    Yup, the JIRA-Crowd integration experience sucks. It'll be fixed in JIRA 4.3 and Confluence 3.5. What group membership restrictions do you mean? (edit: I'm the Product Manager responsible for Crowd).
    - leftcoaster 16y ago
      Crowd never should have happened. For 3 (or was it 4 or 5?) years, jira users have voted for an enhancement to drive jira groups out of LDAP. The reward for this loyalty? Crowd: a whole new product, with a separate, spendy license. Bizarrely, Confluence is capable of doing this LDAP integration without Crowd. But rather than port that over to Jira and make some users happy, Atlassian decided to take another bite out of their wallets instead. I actually bought Crowd, out of desperation to solve the problem, but dropped it after a year. Trivially obvious features weren't implemented. It ended up being easier to just script what we needed ourselves. And don't even get me started on how painful it is to upgrade Atlassian products. shudder
      - 16y ago
nadnerb 16y ago
Do you use Atlassian tools? We use Confluence and Jira (especially with Greenhopper) on the project I am currently working on. They are not perfect but I would hardly call them abominable.
- dekz 16y ago
  For my first major corporate project this year I looked into many different Bug tracking tools. Tried many open source, trac, redmine, but nothing was as polished as JIRA. I really enjoy using JIRA (note, 1 user project). They also seem like an enjoyable company to work for.
- gry 16y ago
  I currently use JIRA with Greenhopper and Bitbucket. We're currently a team of 15. My Atlassian experience is only with JIRA as a developer. I'm with mml. The user interface drive me nuts. It gets in the way of me communicating with the team. The dashboard reports things like time changes. "gry changed the Time Spent to '13920' on FOO-1000" I don't care how many seconds someone spent on an issue. If you have to configure a humane interface, something is wrong. This is a small example. It takes my locus of attention away from doing what I'm paid to do, write software. I need to communicate with the team and ask questions in order to get more information to complete an issue. I'm still responsible, yet our workflow requires us to assign the issue to someone in order for the question to be answered, then assigned back. It feels like I'm shuffling tickets rather than communicating around a ticket. The emails sent aren't humane. Don't get me going. Yet, I can't reply to a JIRA ticket via email as a standard install? The gist is, after using JIRA daily for seven months, I'm struggling. It feels like the user interface reflects the data model and I don't want to learn it. I get it, it's powerful. But why introduce how complex it is right away? There is no carrot. There's a carrot pile and when you're building velocity, it's not fun to jump over.
  - nadnerb 16y ago
    I think the problems you are talking about are configuration related. If you find your workflow requires you to assign an issue for a question to be answered before assigning it back it sounds like a workflow issue, not a problem with the tool. We use Greenhopper primarily due to having teams located in different states, working on the same project. Having two physical story walls is too hard in this situation and Greenhopper is a nice collaboration tool that solves this problem.
karanbhangui 16y ago
It's definitely not as sexy as something from 37 Signals, but it sure as hell is more useful.
pquerna 16y ago
I don't believe its that Atlassian tools and products are always 'great', but there aren't many competitors for many of their functions that do anything close. Definitely not on the open source side; And other commercial tools are generally even more terrible. They aren't great, but they are better than the rest.
- mmacaulay 16y ago
  As a Rally user, I must agree.
  - darrenkopp 16y ago
    nothing could be worse than ontime.
ianb 16y ago
They seem to be kind of enterprisey, which kind of makes sense because (a) you can get paid to make enterprisey stuff, and (b) no one likes enterprisey stuff so no one wants to make it without being paid. And usually enterprises ask for terrible features. I just hope Bitbucket doesn't get enterprisey.
calloc 16y ago
JIRA is one of the worst bug tracking/task tracking tools I have ever had the displeasure of working with.
- chromosundrift 16y ago
  What do you prefer and why? (I work for Atlassian on JIRA)

Too bad, hg and bb are great, but Atlassian makes abominable tools. On the upside, my account is now cheaper (free).

by mml 16y ago

Too bad, hg and bb are great, but Atlassian makes abominable tools. On the upside, my account is now cheaper (free).

tvon 16y ago

Can you expand on your Atlassian comment? I'd like to know more about them.

chrisbroadfoot 16y ago

Like what? (Disclaimer: I used to work for Atlassian)

mml 16y ago
ok, mea culpa. i've only used jira and confluence, along with a few plugins (the notably awful jira "agile" plugin). over the span of a number of years, myself, and everyone else in the vicinity (at multiple companies) hated it with a passion. your mileage may vary. i fear for bitbucket.
- ghshephard 16y ago
  Hated Jira and Confluence? Compared to what? Given that I find Jira to be perhaps the finest issue tracker I've ever worked with (compared to Remedy, Vantive, Scopus, RT, bugzilla and FogBugz), I would genuinely love to hear what tool you think is better than Jira? Particularly now that they can do advanced searching with JQL (Circa 4.x), I don't know of any tool that compares, particularly out of the box. And, while sharepoint is a little more feature rich, and has better Office/IE Integration than Confluence, it also doesn't play particularly well with alternative platforms like firefox - I'd like to hear what your preferred Wiki platform is. I'm kind of a TWiki bigot personally, but if I had to drop a new wiki on a for-profit company tomorrow, it would probably be confluence.
  - pufuwozu 16y ago
    You only mentioned "for-profit" companies. If money is the problem, Confluence is free for non-profits: http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/licensing.jsp#nonprofit http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/licensing.jsp#n...
    - ghshephard 16y ago
      Right, thanks for pointing that out. I was actually coming at it from a different angle - Atlassian's support, and the ecosystem (at least in the valley) around confluence, make it (in my opinion, I'm sure others might differ) a better fit for companies that are willing to pay money than a tool like TWiki. It's not as big a difference today, though, then it was 6 years ago. But, the thing is, Atlassian almost gives away their software (compared to what other companies charge) - so, to some degree, it's almost like comparing two free software packages with each other. Confluence's real competition is actually sharepoint, more than it is TWiki.
jshen 16y ago
The search in confluence is absolutely horrible. What use is a wiki for a 1000+ people company if it's not searchable. Jira, and maybe this is my companies setup, takes way too many clicks to do simple things like reprioritize tickets. This could just be my preference but I like to treat tickets as an ordered list/stack with the most important at the top.
brandon 16y ago
I'm a fan of Confluence and JIRA from a user perspective, but oh man, they are terrible products to install and administer. For instance, we're an Atlassian shop through and through; we also use Fisheye, Crucible and Bamboo. As such, we wanted to tie all of these apps up to Atlassian's SSO solution (Crowd). Take a look at the integration guide for JIRA¹. The process can require finding missing JARs, editing Java property files, commenting and uncommenting forests of XML, and then you're still subject to a bunch of arbitrary restrictions around group membership (super fun when paired with AD). The whole thing feels like an afterthought that was never given the respect of a proper feature. I personally get the impression that Atlassian's product codebases are pretty fragmented as a result of their grow-via-acquisitions strategy. On the front end, the products are good looking and usable. On the back end, things are a mess. Still, it's my job to run the mess, so I'll keep slogging. ¹ http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CROWD/Integrating+Crowd+with+Atlassian+JIRA http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CROWD/Integrating+Cr...
- daveoflynn 16y ago
  Yup, the JIRA-Crowd integration experience sucks. It'll be fixed in JIRA 4.3 and Confluence 3.5. What group membership restrictions do you mean? (edit: I'm the Product Manager responsible for Crowd).
  - leftcoaster 16y ago
    Crowd never should have happened. For 3 (or was it 4 or 5?) years, jira users have voted for an enhancement to drive jira groups out of LDAP. The reward for this loyalty? Crowd: a whole new product, with a separate, spendy license. Bizarrely, Confluence is capable of doing this LDAP integration without Crowd. But rather than port that over to Jira and make some users happy, Atlassian decided to take another bite out of their wallets instead. I actually bought Crowd, out of desperation to solve the problem, but dropped it after a year. Trivially obvious features weren't implemented. It ended up being easier to just script what we needed ourselves. And don't even get me started on how painful it is to upgrade Atlassian products. shudder
    - 16y ago

nadnerb 16y ago

Do you use Atlassian tools? We use Confluence and Jira (especially with Greenhopper) on the project I am currently working on. They are not perfect but I would hardly call them abominable.

dekz 16y ago
For my first major corporate project this year I looked into many different Bug tracking tools. Tried many open source, trac, redmine, but nothing was as polished as JIRA. I really enjoy using JIRA (note, 1 user project). They also seem like an enjoyable company to work for.
gry 16y ago
I currently use JIRA with Greenhopper and Bitbucket. We're currently a team of 15. My Atlassian experience is only with JIRA as a developer. I'm with mml. The user interface drive me nuts. It gets in the way of me communicating with the team. The dashboard reports things like time changes. "gry changed the Time Spent to '13920' on FOO-1000" I don't care how many seconds someone spent on an issue. If you have to configure a humane interface, something is wrong. This is a small example. It takes my locus of attention away from doing what I'm paid to do, write software. I need to communicate with the team and ask questions in order to get more information to complete an issue. I'm still responsible, yet our workflow requires us to assign the issue to someone in order for the question to be answered, then assigned back. It feels like I'm shuffling tickets rather than communicating around a ticket. The emails sent aren't humane. Don't get me going. Yet, I can't reply to a JIRA ticket via email as a standard install? The gist is, after using JIRA daily for seven months, I'm struggling. It feels like the user interface reflects the data model and I don't want to learn it. I get it, it's powerful. But why introduce how complex it is right away? There is no carrot. There's a carrot pile and when you're building velocity, it's not fun to jump over.
- nadnerb 16y ago
  I think the problems you are talking about are configuration related. If you find your workflow requires you to assign an issue for a question to be answered before assigning it back it sounds like a workflow issue, not a problem with the tool. We use Greenhopper primarily due to having teams located in different states, working on the same project. Having two physical story walls is too hard in this situation and Greenhopper is a nice collaboration tool that solves this problem.

karanbhangui 16y ago

It's definitely not as sexy as something from 37 Signals, but it sure as hell is more useful.

pquerna 16y ago

I don't believe its that Atlassian tools and products are always 'great', but there aren't many competitors for many of their functions that do anything close. Definitely not on the open source side; And other commercial tools are generally even more terrible. They aren't great, but they are better than the rest.

mmacaulay 16y ago
As a Rally user, I must agree.
- darrenkopp 16y ago
  nothing could be worse than ontime.

ianb 16y ago

They seem to be kind of enterprisey, which kind of makes sense because (a) you can get paid to make enterprisey stuff, and (b) no one likes enterprisey stuff so no one wants to make it without being paid. And usually enterprises ask for terrible features. I just hope Bitbucket doesn't get enterprisey.

calloc 16y ago

JIRA is one of the worst bug tracking/task tracking tools I have ever had the displeasure of working with.

chromosundrift 16y ago
What do you prefer and why? (I work for Atlassian on JIRA)