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Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M
- whalesalad 8y ago> a service that aims to give enterprises plan their strategic projects and workstreams ??? Interesting software. My spidey sense tells me that your team will need at least 1 FTE just to massage whatever kind of workflow is required to get stuff in Jira to play nice with this. These tools that promise insight into what is actually happening within prod/eng teams are always really great on paper but in actuality I have never seen one work. "Yeah so there is a dusty old EC2 instance running on so-and-so's old IAM role (who is now terminated, but we can't kill their IAM or things will break) running this .jar which tries to take our JIRA stuff from these 3 projects and merge it into a pseudo "fake" project named "KPI BOARD DO NOT EDIT" that gets sync'd with a lambda function every hour to AgileCraft via a Google sheet. If this box isn't running then the KPI reports don't get generated in metabase and the board is going to lose their shit. Make sure to check the disk with df next time you login because it fills up ocassionally."
- yuchi 8y agoFor the uninitiated in Enterprise-talk, FTE stands for Full Time Employee. flies away
- yaseenk 8y agoFYI it’s Full Time _Equivalent_. E.g a new feature may require 1 FTE for 1 week. That doesn’t necessarily mean 1 person 1 week. It may be 2 people 2.5 days each, etc.
- Waterluvian 8y agoOr 9 women to birth a baby in a month. I don't like being reduced to a quantifiable amount. You end up with crappy managers who have secret multipliers for every employee to try to make their crappy estimates work. Nothing makes your colleagues dislike you more than it accidentally slipping that your manager sees you as worth 2.5 of them.
- tomrod 8y agoTruth. Even saving their bacon, time and again, doesn't help.
- quonn 8y agoNot really, it‘s for high-level planning, e.g. for features that involve multiple teams and often multiple companies. Mostly helpful for large-scale organizations. Jira is used one level below that.
- whalesalad 8y agoReminds me of the dumpster fire that is 'Portfolio' - https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/portfolio https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/portfolio
- chrisweekly 8y agoYikes! Not every place is like that, thankfully.
- opportune 8y agoIME there are only two kinds of Ops structures. Either you have an organized, byzantine, inflexible system with way too many developers actually working on ops full time, or you have this kind of system which is more flexible in the short term but becomes an operational nightmare as technical debt accrues and accrues. I'm not sure if there is a way to get something in the middle. The second system is a result of Agile methodology where some dev makes the mistake of telling the PM/management "well, we could get it deployed today if we just do [terribly hacky unmaintainable thing]" and gets the ok because the project is two weeks behind and half the team is going on vacation next month. The first system is the result of the "everything must fit the spec" methodology where you have excessivley long and inflexible iteration cycles, usually because you are an older more enterprisey organization.
- keithnz 8y agoI've been really unimpressed with atlassian over the last few years. We started with bitbucket before it was acquired, it was super robust, then once atlassian got it slowly small bug after small bug kept making it into production creating mini headaches and they never seem like its super important to them. We also have Confluence, which is okish, but again, small bug after small bug keeps creeping in, like at the moment, they have a bug with putting markdown into pages (it's completely broken ). Their attitude is it's a low priority fix and they have no idea when it will be fixed. Bugs happen, sure.... but this kind of thing says to me that they must be so overwhelmed by bugs that fixing documented features of their product is just not a priority if it's deemed to be too fringe. Maybe they are just getting too big and too removed from their customers? Either way, for me it's triggered a search for alternatives.
- nisa 8y agoThey just don't seem to care. You research something - after hours you'll end up at their bugtracker, where you can read the desperation of others (often some issues are not fixed in 10+ years). I don't understand their priorities. There is to date still no way to restrict visibility of work-logs on issues - a usecase basically every smaller shop has because the client is often participating directly in the JIRA. Service Desk solves that problem but it's quite expensive and you can't mix software projects with service desk projects. So you have to create linked-issues and have yet another layer of indirection :/ We end up syncing projects with another plugin on the same instance :/ Confluence lacking some robust text-only markup (like markdown or asciidoc or whatever) is also more than lame. It shouldn't be that hard because most macros can be configured by text attributes anyway... Expose that Wiki in a readable markdown format and have me let git... like github gist would be more than enough. I despise using Confluence at the moment... Gitlab could eat their lunch but they also seem to have their priorities off
- jedberg 8y ago> Confluence lacking some robust text-only markup (like markdown or asciidoc or whatever) The really irony here is that it used to have that! That was the only way I edited Confluence docs back in 2012 (and before) until they took the feature away. For a while you could dig into it, but pretty much any change you made not using the WYSIWYG editor broke the whole page.
- DavidPiper 8y agoI don't read a lot of TechCrunch, but did anybody else find this article quite poorly (perhaps hastily) written? (My apologies to the author for the flippancy of that question) An incorrect word in the opening sentence, a few places where tenses are mixed or incorrect, and generally long-winded sentences... Is this usual for TechCrunch? Regardless, interesting news to wake up to - I'll be interested to watch the direction of both product suites after the acquisition.
- sethhochberg 8y agoA lot of web journalism is like this now... whoever published first gets all the link traffic, so its often a (literal) race to the bottom.
- jacques_chester 8y agoIt looks to be a lightly-edited press release. Very common for journalists in a hurry to make quota or get the first link up.
- freddie_mercury 8y agoIt may be common for other journalists but I don't think that's the explanation in this case. Every acquisition I've been part of, we've briefed journalists beforehand (almost always someone at Techcrunch), they were under an embargo, and the article was pre-written.
- jacques_chester 8y ago> a service that aims to help enterprises plan their strategic projects and workstreams. The service provides business leaders with additional insights into the current status of technical projects and gives them insights into the bottlenecks, risks and dependencies of these projects. These are not words I would expect a journalist to spontaneously generate. This is presser fluff.
- freddie_mercury 8y ago
- Benjammer 8y agoAll this advanced tracking/planning stuff from companies like Atlassian seem to me like some kind of weird, dystopian "C-Suite-Porn." The going narrative seems to be this idea that companies have, throughout the history of business, been guided completely by the whims and emotional fancies of the leadership team and/or CEO. And now we're adding tools to surface more and more status tracking information up to the C Suite, which is going to directly lead to better decision-making that moves the company forward. This seems like nonsense to me. Imo, leaders set the culture, network outside the company, and guide longer-term strategic vision, while directors wrangle the people and manage alignment with higher level goals, and team leads make the projects happen by empowering and supporting the IC's who do the actual day to day work. I just don't understand the value proposition for a company as a whole to putting more data on the plate of higher-ups at any level above team leaders (1st level management, with all-IC direct-reports). We need analysis and summary tooling that doesn't add any overhead to team leaders and ICs, not more overhead on the people actually getting things done. We need better information on the desks of leadership, not more data points. We need more efficient communication tools, essentially "better nozzles," as opposed to higher flow rate in the company-information-firehose. These products seem to play directly into the psyche of the typical narcissist CEO who wants to know everything that is going on at the company, right now, and micromanage everything directly. The incentives don't seem very well-aligned with things like "servant leadership" and "cross-functional knowledge," because, how do you make those into a Jira ticket that will be tracked towards your performance reviews? If it's cross-functional then which functional task-board does it belong to?
- drum 8y agoAfter using Jira for the last 2 years, Atlassian has struck me as the 800 pound gorilla that's resting on its laurels. On my dashboard, I'm consistently annoyed by being shown the option of creating a new user account and having to decipher the UI to choose wether my ticket is a bug or feature during mission critical moments. Just give me one big button that says 'Create Ticket', we'll figure out the rest later. Secondly, why aren't tickets shown on the dashboard by default? When I log in, I'd expect to see what's going on, not have them tucked away in the nav menu. Recently during a mission critical ticket, email responses to Jira threads were not creating new messages in Jira, creating massive delays in communication with the team until we figured out messages weren't posting. Diagnosing the issue later, it seemed to be due to file attachments in the email responses.
- politician 8y agoWhat's Voltron? Their SEO must be poor because Googling "Atlassian vs Voltron" brings up TFS as the top hit and a page full of Atlassian spam.
- drum 8y agoDoh! Thanks for asking. Voltron is a white labeled version of Jira (which I did not realize when writing my post). Edited.
- arthurcolle 8y ago> Atlassian today announced that it has acquired AgileCraft, a service that aims to give enterprises plan their strategic projects and workstreams. Whatever happened to editing in Journalism?
- Benjammer 8y agodelta in ad impressions for being first to publish >>> delta in ad impressions for having poor copy-editing
- jondubois 8y agoMy view of Atlassian's project management tools and services is that they can allow terrible managers to become mediocre managers (which is not great but still an improvement) but no matter how much they try, they can never turn a mediocre manager into a good manager. The value proposition of Atlassian is that their software can give a manager more visibility over the technical/engineering processes within their company; but this improved visibility is useless unless the manager has both a clear vision and a deep technical understanding of their project. No amount of tooling can match the value of having technical understanding of the project. For example, Jira can generate a lot of pretty charts and workflow visualizations which create a great illusion of progress but this illusion typically comes at the expense of real progress.
- 013a 8y agoMuch like Oracle or IBM; they're a company that had some very interesting products and ideas in their day, and eventually just decided (or was forced, for internal reasons) to rest of their laurels. Today, they produce products that are purchased by people who don't actually use them, because the people who use them hate it. And, well, they pursue growth by acquisition. It's honestly a sad story, because they could have been so much more. Maybe they still can, but my faith dwindles every year that goes by. I have more and more respect for Microsoft, who had every opportunity to go this route (and, really, did for quite a while), but was able to right the ship and continue to produce products that people actually want to buy. Sometimes they're buggy, and bloated, and strange to use, but they listen to their customers and continue to push improvements. That's why they ate IBM's lunch back in the day and have become the world's most valuable enterprise software company.
- MediumD 8y ago"The price total of the acquisition is about $166 million, with $154 million in cash and the remainder in restricted shares." Is it normal to have nearly the entirety of the acquisition be cash? I would have assumed the standard would be shares with a new vesting schedule to incentivize the founders to stay on board. To my uneducated self, this seems like the founders can basically immediately walk away with very little money left on the table.
- rozenmd 8y agoTypically if a firm has the cash lying around, it may as well deploy it. They get around the founders leaving issue by adding earn-outs and various contractual clauses to make it in the founders' best interest to stay.
- neovive 8y agoContrary to some of the other commenters, I've been quite happy with Confluence over the past 8 years. We use Confluence heavily at our institution (higher-education) and it's been well-received by both technical and non-technical staff. It functions extremely well as a knowledgebase and is part of the daily workflow for dozens of staff. I also use a separate Confluence Cloud license for my personal knowledgebase and journal--I find it more productive than my previous Markdown+Git workflow for notetaking. The only negative experience so far was the big price jump a few years ago for the higher-education license that forced us to reduce our licensed user count.
- jupp0r 8y agoI feel like all Atlassian products I’ve used so far have been made for winning feature checkbox comparisons. They all get the job done somehow, but nobody I know would actually choose them over tools whose makers actually care about their users instead of users IT departments.
- shimms 8y agoGenuinely curious - what would you choose over Jira for agile/product planning and work item tracking? I’ve been increasingly falling out of love with Jira, but all the alternatives lack core features.