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Right. The idea that Jira has been replaced made me laugh. There's probably a crowd of people that want to move on to the next issue tracker flavour and that's

Right. The idea that Jira has been replaced made me laugh. There's probably a crowd of people that want to move on to the next issue tracker flavour and that's fine but I've got work to do that isn't tool shuffling. I'll use the one that integrates with so many of our systems and, though flawed, does a great job.

solraph 5y ago
That integration piece is key. The people who want to replace Atlassian tools usually focus one part of the suite (usually Jira or Confluence), but to replace them you all you need a set of tools that work together. It's not just issue tracking, but alerting, issue management ITSM tools, source control, CI/CD, release management, documentation and I don't know what else that all need talk to each other and provide traceability from any point to another. You can do the integration yourself, but it's a gigantic PITA, and as the number of tools rises, the number of integrations you need to set up is going to rise terrifyingly fast. I have a litany of complaints about the Atlassian suite, but none of the competitors have even have the services we need.
- mtzet 5y ago
  On the other hand, I find the integration between Atlassian tools to be pretty barebones. It feels very clear to me that Atlassian tools are really developed separately, with a separate jira task to integrate specific parts. There's no "coherency" to them. You are right that it's difficult to replace the entire Atlassian suite. The thing about Atlassian is that when there's if there's a box to check on a feature list, they've made sure to check it. If you go around the office asking everyone what features they want, Atlassian is going to check all those boxes. That's pretty hard to compete with.
  - gknoy 5y ago
    There's no "coherency" to them. It's interesting to hear you say that. With the integrations we have with Slack and Github, I see previews, summaries, etc thrown at me when I link things
    - mih 5y ago
      I recently had to upgrade Jira and Confluence at the workplace. It was clear from their configuration methods and how they respond to errors/failures, they are written by different development teams. One needs to be an admin to experience this, ordinary users will see no difference. Take for example the admin UI. When adding "Application Links" to link Jira and Confluence with each other, Jira has a nice tabbed interface allowing you to configure it easily, whereas in Confluence, you have to scroll down a long sidebar with dozens of options until you chance upon the required link. Had similar experiences configuring various other options at the filesystem level. Jira configuration was more coherent, fault tolerant and failed gracefully. Confluence configuration on the other hand was messy in comparison.
      - Macha 5y ago
        Or even just the wildly different text formatting syntax across tools
      - hinkley 5y ago
        As a bamboo user who is not an admin, everyone on that team can fuck right off. Whoever thought it was a good idea to build a CI tool on a concept of information hiding is a monster who should be banished back to whatever eldritch plane they crawled out of. You can’t have a coherent conversation with anyone about the functionality of Bamboo versus other CI tools because Bamboo is constantly lying to you about what is available. You don’t even know to ask other people for help with something because you don’t know if Bamboo can do it. So people use the ugliest kludges that their privilege level allows to get things done, creating an unmaintainable mess in the process.
  - paulryanrogers 5y ago
    Second this. Even within JIRA itself the markup it accepts is inconsistent. Back ticks vs double brackets being the bane of my existence.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - hinkley 5y ago
    It is infuriating the extent to which Atlassians tools are only slightly more integrated with each other than they are integrated with third party tools. If they’d done a better job with their acquisitions then we would all be complaining about how they’ve not done enough for third party tools. I kind of want a modern version of Trac. Trac is essentially a collection of integrations that just happen to have useful features.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > It's not just issue tracking, but alerting, issue management ITSM tools, source control, CI/CD, release management, documentation and I don't know what else that all need talk to each other and provide traceability from any point to another. Isn't Phabricator trying to do all of this? It seems to get quite a lot of fairly high-profile usage in both enterprise and community-focused/FLOSS contexts.
  - solraph 5y ago
    I wasn't aware of this, I'll have to check it out. Looks like it would especially good for companies that can't or won't the atlassian tax.
- pydry 5y ago
  I don't think I've ever seen integration between confluence and jira that mattered.
  - solraph 5y ago
    The useful ones I've seen are where Confluence automatically indicates jira tickets that mention the page and confluence pages that link tickets that will have their status embedded. It's just those two though, it's also the git branches, pipelines, and release integration from jira, being able to see the support ticket cases and / or alerts that were the cause of ticket/branch/release. I'm in no way arguing that atlassian does a great job here, only that no one else offers that end to end integration. (Possible exception of phabricator mentioned in a sister thread)
- licebmi__at__ 5y ago
  Well, to add a counterpoint, never in my career I have encountered a place with a proper atlassian products integration. The most common integration I saw was using Jira and Confluence, which seems a little underwhelming to me. In all the places I have seen a mishmash of different products not really glued together and the workers had to navigate that mess. One of the places I’ve worked on had salesforce for customer sided issue tracking, and JIRA for software development tracking. Support engineers had to copy and paste tickets to raise defects and bugs, keeping track of all the interactions in both systems. Silly stuff.
  - solraph 5y ago
    That's my point though, the alternative is glueing all those tools together, and Atlassian promises (and frankly often falls woefully short on delivering) to give you an integrated out of box experience.
coldtea 5y ago
>Right. The idea that Jira has been replaced made me laugh. It shouldn't though. Jira wasn't always here, and it wont be here forever. And what's even more important, and is the point of the post, trends don't stay the same, whether a tool still maintains its existing userbase or even increases it. In a changing market, a tool might hold or even increase its userbase, but still end up with much smaller marketshare. If we add qualitative considerations too, then it's also very possible a tool to remain dominant even in market share, but still lose mindshare (and eventually be dropped by the next gen of developers). Tons of people and companies use Visual Basic too, but it's not where things are happening (or what one should study to get a job in 2021).
randallsquared 5y ago
> I've got work to do that isn't tool shuffling. Is most of that work waiting for Jira to respond to your action so you can take the next action? I don't know if it's possible to have an adequately fast installation of Jira (since I've never seen one in a decade of Jira use at various places), but I do notice that people who have to put a lot of things into Jira seem to mostly use text editors or word processors to actually plan, and then transfer it a piece at a time into Jira once the initial result is done. Yesterday I was in a planning session with two others, and we did that planning with headings, bullet points, and concurrent editing by all three of us in a Google doc.
- rkangel 5y ago
  > I don't know if it's possible to have an adequately fast installation of Jira That's not my experience of Jira. The cloud version is the best, and our current on-prem installation is perfectly fine. I agree that Jira isn't the snappiest tool to use, but I don't sit there consciously waiting for it to do stuff.
  - laurent92 5y ago
    > I agree that Jira isn’t the snappiest tool It is forbidden in the ToS 3.3 to “(i) publicly disseminate information regarding the performance of the Cloud Products“. https://www.atlassian.com/legal/cloud-terms-of-service https://www.atlassian.com/legal/cloud-terms-of-service
    - vasco 5y ago
      I also confirm that in my experience the performance of the JIRA Cloud installation has been mostly fine. It's not amazingly fast but only having used JIRA cloud, even with loads of projects and so on, I always thought it was weird to read all the stories of poor performance.
      - treeman79 5y ago
        Compared to something like pivotal tracker, Jira feels like trying to swim in glue. It just gets in the way. Individual actions are tolerable-ish. But it’s never setup right. Constantly hunting for the field that is blocking story creation. Permission issues all over the place. Finding things is often nightmarish. Management basically doesn’t care, and doesn’t want to put effort into making it work in sane fashion. Yet freak out if team wants to use something else. So we do all our planning and story tracking in google sheets instead.
hinkley 5y ago
I am so, so sick of Atlassian’s bullshit. I remember when we used Trac on a project and it seemed so primitive in many ways, but as soon as I had to use something baroque (broke), I wanted to go back to Trac. Not to say that Trac isn’t fancy, it just chose a very specific dimension of fancy to focus on and ignored anything else.

solraph 5y ago

That integration piece is key. The people who want to replace Atlassian tools usually focus one part of the suite (usually Jira or Confluence), but to replace them you all you need a set of tools that work together. It's not just issue tracking, but alerting, issue management ITSM tools, source control, CI/CD, release management, documentation and I don't know what else that all need talk to each other and provide traceability from any point to another. You can do the integration yourself, but it's a gigantic PITA, and as the number of tools rises, the number of integrations you need to set up is going to rise terrifyingly fast. I have a litany of complaints about the Atlassian suite, but none of the competitors have even have the services we need.

mtzet 5y ago
On the other hand, I find the integration between Atlassian tools to be pretty barebones. It feels very clear to me that Atlassian tools are really developed separately, with a separate jira task to integrate specific parts. There's no "coherency" to them. You are right that it's difficult to replace the entire Atlassian suite. The thing about Atlassian is that when there's if there's a box to check on a feature list, they've made sure to check it. If you go around the office asking everyone what features they want, Atlassian is going to check all those boxes. That's pretty hard to compete with.
- gknoy 5y ago
  There's no "coherency" to them. It's interesting to hear you say that. With the integrations we have with Slack and Github, I see previews, summaries, etc thrown at me when I link things
  - mih 5y ago
    I recently had to upgrade Jira and Confluence at the workplace. It was clear from their configuration methods and how they respond to errors/failures, they are written by different development teams. One needs to be an admin to experience this, ordinary users will see no difference. Take for example the admin UI. When adding "Application Links" to link Jira and Confluence with each other, Jira has a nice tabbed interface allowing you to configure it easily, whereas in Confluence, you have to scroll down a long sidebar with dozens of options until you chance upon the required link. Had similar experiences configuring various other options at the filesystem level. Jira configuration was more coherent, fault tolerant and failed gracefully. Confluence configuration on the other hand was messy in comparison.
    - Macha 5y ago
      Or even just the wildly different text formatting syntax across tools
    - hinkley 5y ago
      As a bamboo user who is not an admin, everyone on that team can fuck right off. Whoever thought it was a good idea to build a CI tool on a concept of information hiding is a monster who should be banished back to whatever eldritch plane they crawled out of. You can’t have a coherent conversation with anyone about the functionality of Bamboo versus other CI tools because Bamboo is constantly lying to you about what is available. You don’t even know to ask other people for help with something because you don’t know if Bamboo can do it. So people use the ugliest kludges that their privilege level allows to get things done, creating an unmaintainable mess in the process.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  Second this. Even within JIRA itself the markup it accepts is inconsistent. Back ticks vs double brackets being the bane of my existence.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- hinkley 5y ago
  It is infuriating the extent to which Atlassians tools are only slightly more integrated with each other than they are integrated with third party tools. If they’d done a better job with their acquisitions then we would all be complaining about how they’ve not done enough for third party tools. I kind of want a modern version of Trac. Trac is essentially a collection of integrations that just happen to have useful features.
zozbot234 5y ago
> It's not just issue tracking, but alerting, issue management ITSM tools, source control, CI/CD, release management, documentation and I don't know what else that all need talk to each other and provide traceability from any point to another. Isn't Phabricator trying to do all of this? It seems to get quite a lot of fairly high-profile usage in both enterprise and community-focused/FLOSS contexts.
- solraph 5y ago
  I wasn't aware of this, I'll have to check it out. Looks like it would especially good for companies that can't or won't the atlassian tax.
pydry 5y ago
I don't think I've ever seen integration between confluence and jira that mattered.
- solraph 5y ago
  The useful ones I've seen are where Confluence automatically indicates jira tickets that mention the page and confluence pages that link tickets that will have their status embedded. It's just those two though, it's also the git branches, pipelines, and release integration from jira, being able to see the support ticket cases and / or alerts that were the cause of ticket/branch/release. I'm in no way arguing that atlassian does a great job here, only that no one else offers that end to end integration. (Possible exception of phabricator mentioned in a sister thread)
licebmi__at__ 5y ago
Well, to add a counterpoint, never in my career I have encountered a place with a proper atlassian products integration. The most common integration I saw was using Jira and Confluence, which seems a little underwhelming to me. In all the places I have seen a mishmash of different products not really glued together and the workers had to navigate that mess. One of the places I’ve worked on had salesforce for customer sided issue tracking, and JIRA for software development tracking. Support engineers had to copy and paste tickets to raise defects and bugs, keeping track of all the interactions in both systems. Silly stuff.
- solraph 5y ago
  That's my point though, the alternative is glueing all those tools together, and Atlassian promises (and frankly often falls woefully short on delivering) to give you an integrated out of box experience.

coldtea 5y ago

>Right. The idea that Jira has been replaced made me laugh. It shouldn't though. Jira wasn't always here, and it wont be here forever. And what's even more important, and is the point of the post, trends don't stay the same, whether a tool still maintains its existing userbase or even increases it. In a changing market, a tool might hold or even increase its userbase, but still end up with much smaller marketshare. If we add qualitative considerations too, then it's also very possible a tool to remain dominant even in market share, but still lose mindshare (and eventually be dropped by the next gen of developers). Tons of people and companies use Visual Basic too, but it's not where things are happening (or what one should study to get a job in 2021).

randallsquared 5y ago

> I've got work to do that isn't tool shuffling. Is most of that work waiting for Jira to respond to your action so you can take the next action? I don't know if it's possible to have an adequately fast installation of Jira (since I've never seen one in a decade of Jira use at various places), but I do notice that people who have to put a lot of things into Jira seem to mostly use text editors or word processors to actually plan, and then transfer it a piece at a time into Jira once the initial result is done. Yesterday I was in a planning session with two others, and we did that planning with headings, bullet points, and concurrent editing by all three of us in a Google doc.

rkangel 5y ago
> I don't know if it's possible to have an adequately fast installation of Jira That's not my experience of Jira. The cloud version is the best, and our current on-prem installation is perfectly fine. I agree that Jira isn't the snappiest tool to use, but I don't sit there consciously waiting for it to do stuff.
- laurent92 5y ago
  > I agree that Jira isn’t the snappiest tool It is forbidden in the ToS 3.3 to “(i) publicly disseminate information regarding the performance of the Cloud Products“. https://www.atlassian.com/legal/cloud-terms-of-service https://www.atlassian.com/legal/cloud-terms-of-service
  - vasco 5y ago
    I also confirm that in my experience the performance of the JIRA Cloud installation has been mostly fine. It's not amazingly fast but only having used JIRA cloud, even with loads of projects and so on, I always thought it was weird to read all the stories of poor performance.
    - treeman79 5y ago
      Compared to something like pivotal tracker, Jira feels like trying to swim in glue. It just gets in the way. Individual actions are tolerable-ish. But it’s never setup right. Constantly hunting for the field that is blocking story creation. Permission issues all over the place. Finding things is often nightmarish. Management basically doesn’t care, and doesn’t want to put effort into making it work in sane fashion. Yet freak out if team wants to use something else. So we do all our planning and story tracking in google sheets instead.

hinkley 5y ago

I am so, so sick of Atlassian’s bullshit. I remember when we used Trac on a project and it seemed so primitive in many ways, but as soon as I had to use something baroque (broke), I wanted to go back to Trac. Not to say that Trac isn’t fancy, it just chose a very specific dimension of fancy to focus on and ignored anything else.