4 ms·

> these products are nothing but garbage fires Would you care to give us alternatives, for example, to the JIRA bug tracker (which I used a lot, slowly :-))

by wiz21c 5y ago

kodah 5y ago
ZenHub! I love, as an engineer, that it layers on top of GitHub issues. So, in my general day to day I never leave GitHub.com or GHE, while project managers get all their shiny toys in ZenHub that plays nicely with GitHub issues.
HillRat 5y ago
Spolsky’s FogBugz is still out there after a few ownership changes, and is still a hell of a lot less painful to use than Jira.
- dwd 5y ago
  It was innovative 13 years ago, but never really caught on. Kiln was also a great product and allowed for using both Git and Mercurial. It was way better than anything else at the time, but lost out to Github. I always liked Spolsky's Evidence Based Scheduling that was built into the products. https://fogbugz.com/evidence-based-scheduling/ https://fogbugz.com/evidence-based-scheduling/
  - jlarocco 5y ago
    > Kiln was also a great product and allowed for using both Git and Mercurial. It was way better than anything else at the time, but lost out to Github. I used both FogBugz and Kiln at a previous employer, and I really liked FogBugz, but we had nothing but problems with Kiln. We had a fairly large team (maybe 75-100 people) and a good sized project (maybe 300k lines), and it was painfully slow to do anything in Kiln and it was down/broken at least once a month. It wasn't so bad early on when we were small, but it didn't scale with us very well.
- knightofmars 5y ago
  No. It isn't. Having recently moved (a year ago) from FogBugz to Jira it's like a fresh breeze has blown into our case management process.
jimbob45 5y ago
Is TFS no longer considered a competitor? Feels like it should have been the first mentioned here. Not saying TFS is problem-free, of course.
- derekbaker783 5y ago
  Azure DevOps?
- mzl 5y ago
  I've had to use Azure DevOps recently, and it made me long for the speed, simplicity, and stability of Jira... The most annoying bug was that one could only have around 4-5 tabs open before something went wrong and everything stopped updating.
eadmund 5y ago
> Would you care to give us alternatives, for example, to the JIRA bug tracker Paper. An Excel spreadsheet shared on a Windows for Workgroups share drive. Carrier pigeon. Quitting software to become a llama herder. Seriously, though, after over two decades of using different tracking systems I think that the real alternative to stuff like Jira is to not go there. You may think that you need all those bells and whistles, but you really don't. What you actually need is the simplest possible issue tracking system you can get away with. All you really need is a prioritised list of issues, and a list of who is working on which issues now. ‘Kanban’ boards get pretty close. Minimalism is power.
- smaudet 5y ago
  I don't disagree that Atlassian programs are generally bloated, but it is interesting to see everyone jumping at JIRA when its Confluence with the CVE... JIRA is too many things to too many people - in the quest to be everyone's bug tracker, they wrote (badly) in the whole kitchen sink. This is a general issue with most software, though. Especially big software. You cannot have complex capable software that is also simple. That's an oxymoron. You can have complex software which works, but it is difficult to get there, and keep it there. There is simply too much that can go wrong that over time, it almost must go wrong. Keeping everything 'simple' is not an alternative - the world is complex and so even a bunch of simple things, when put together, make something complex. Think unix shell scripts which can be so much sphagetti. The unix philosophy is to keep things simple, and yet ignoring the complexity leads to its own complexity. That's the real 'terrible engineeing practices' which get down Atlassian and everyone else's programs. Someone said 'use paper' or 'quit and become a llamma herder' - these seem simple but again, paper burns, shepherds get shot or held up by drug gangs. All to say, I don't think JIRA is actually that bad. There could be worse products, there could be better. But it would exceedingly difficult to make something simple which also served everybody.
bamboozled 5y ago
I would prefer to use anything but JIRA,I fucking loathe it.
borkyborkbork 5y ago
Jetbrains Youtrack is soooo much better in any and all ways that I can think of. https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/ https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/

> these products are nothing but garbage fires Would you care to give us alternatives, for example, to the JIRA bug tracker (which I used a lot, slowly :-))

by wiz21c 5y ago

> these products are nothing but garbage fires Would you care to give us alternatives, for example, to the JIRA bug tracker (which I used a lot, slowly :-))

kodah 5y ago

ZenHub! I love, as an engineer, that it layers on top of GitHub issues. So, in my general day to day I never leave GitHub.com or GHE, while project managers get all their shiny toys in ZenHub that plays nicely with GitHub issues.

HillRat 5y ago

Spolsky’s FogBugz is still out there after a few ownership changes, and is still a hell of a lot less painful to use than Jira.

dwd 5y ago
It was innovative 13 years ago, but never really caught on. Kiln was also a great product and allowed for using both Git and Mercurial. It was way better than anything else at the time, but lost out to Github. I always liked Spolsky's Evidence Based Scheduling that was built into the products. https://fogbugz.com/evidence-based-scheduling/ https://fogbugz.com/evidence-based-scheduling/
- jlarocco 5y ago
  > Kiln was also a great product and allowed for using both Git and Mercurial. It was way better than anything else at the time, but lost out to Github. I used both FogBugz and Kiln at a previous employer, and I really liked FogBugz, but we had nothing but problems with Kiln. We had a fairly large team (maybe 75-100 people) and a good sized project (maybe 300k lines), and it was painfully slow to do anything in Kiln and it was down/broken at least once a month. It wasn't so bad early on when we were small, but it didn't scale with us very well.
knightofmars 5y ago
No. It isn't. Having recently moved (a year ago) from FogBugz to Jira it's like a fresh breeze has blown into our case management process.

jimbob45 5y ago

Is TFS no longer considered a competitor? Feels like it should have been the first mentioned here. Not saying TFS is problem-free, of course.

derekbaker783 5y ago
Azure DevOps?
mzl 5y ago
I've had to use Azure DevOps recently, and it made me long for the speed, simplicity, and stability of Jira... The most annoying bug was that one could only have around 4-5 tabs open before something went wrong and everything stopped updating.

eadmund 5y ago

> Would you care to give us alternatives, for example, to the JIRA bug tracker Paper. An Excel spreadsheet shared on a Windows for Workgroups share drive. Carrier pigeon. Quitting software to become a llama herder. Seriously, though, after over two decades of using different tracking systems I think that the real alternative to stuff like Jira is to not go there. You may think that you need all those bells and whistles, but you really don't. What you actually need is the simplest possible issue tracking system you can get away with. All you really need is a prioritised list of issues, and a list of who is working on which issues now. ‘Kanban’ boards get pretty close. Minimalism is power.

smaudet 5y ago
I don't disagree that Atlassian programs are generally bloated, but it is interesting to see everyone jumping at JIRA when its Confluence with the CVE... JIRA is too many things to too many people - in the quest to be everyone's bug tracker, they wrote (badly) in the whole kitchen sink. This is a general issue with most software, though. Especially big software. You cannot have complex capable software that is also simple. That's an oxymoron. You can have complex software which works, but it is difficult to get there, and keep it there. There is simply too much that can go wrong that over time, it almost must go wrong. Keeping everything 'simple' is not an alternative - the world is complex and so even a bunch of simple things, when put together, make something complex. Think unix shell scripts which can be so much sphagetti. The unix philosophy is to keep things simple, and yet ignoring the complexity leads to its own complexity. That's the real 'terrible engineeing practices' which get down Atlassian and everyone else's programs. Someone said 'use paper' or 'quit and become a llamma herder' - these seem simple but again, paper burns, shepherds get shot or held up by drug gangs. All to say, I don't think JIRA is actually that bad. There could be worse products, there could be better. But it would exceedingly difficult to make something simple which also served everybody.

bamboozled 5y ago

I would prefer to use anything but JIRA,I fucking loathe it.

borkyborkbork 5y ago

Jetbrains Youtrack is soooo much better in any and all ways that I can think of. https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/ https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/