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Do people generally like Jira and/or Confluence? I know they are popular in the enterprise. However, I've used them, and I consider them pretty horrible. Not su

by latch 15y ago

Do people generally like Jira and/or Confluence? I know they are popular in the enterprise. However, I've used them, and I consider them pretty horrible. Not sure if I'm just the odd man out on this though.

xbryanx 15y ago
I use and manage our JIRA instance in a small tech group inside a large non-profit. Probably only ever had 10 users. I love it, and our team has grown to be more efficient as a result of its use. Now, Confluence? Not a big fan. Tried it, ditched it.
nirvdrum 15y ago
I've used both tools for two start-ups now. I can't imagine using anything else (well, Redmine is a nice free tool). But you're not in the minority in startups. I personally can't understand how anyone is productive with PivotalTracker, Lighthouse, or GitHub Issues (at least the older one). But people are and to each his own. FWIW, one of the reasons I love both of them is they're the only tools of their type that I've been able to throw a non-tech person at and they can use. When roping the spouses into helping out, that counts for a lot.
cujo 15y ago
I agree with you, but as a developer, I prefer these types of tools to get out of the way. Jira and Confluence seem to be written for managers that can live in them. For them, I'm sure the experience is much different.
stephen_g 15y ago
We use Jira at our company and it's probably one of the best issue tracking systems I've tried. Confluence is alright but I think that there are a few open source wiki packages that are at least as good, if not better.
- nirvdrum 15y ago
  Which free ones do you like? My biggest Confluence draws are rich text editor (nice for one-off pages), attachment indexing, and attachment versioning. But I'm always open to trying something else.
  - 18pfsmt 15y ago
    I don't have complex needs, but I like Redmine [1], and run it on a local box. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redmine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redmine
  - farkas 15y ago
    For what it's worth - we have a huge new release of Confluence coming out in 4 days time. We've also released an infographic about the history of collaboration (and I'm still not able to find the easter egg): http://www.atlassian.com/en/communication-through-the-ages-infographic.html http://www.atlassian.com/en/communication-through-the-ages-i... Confluence 4 has a completely rebuilt rich-text editor with autocomplete - the ease of use of a WYSIWYG editor with the speed of an IDE. Love your thoughts on it when it ships.
    - lebski88 15y ago
      Do you have any plans, in Jira, to allow sub-tasks to have their own sub-tasks. Only having one level of nesting is extremely restrictive and an annoyance we come up against a lot. On the whole though I quite like Jira, particularly its integration with FishEye. FishEye is also pretty decent although it chokes a lot with the size of our repository - we have a lot of code and a lot of branches which have really pushed the size up. A few JS optimisations would be nice as well - it can really chew up the CPU sometimes.
      - farkas 15y ago
        Thanks for the feedback. Letting arbitrary levels of nesting is one of the things that keeps me, and the JIRA product manager up at night. This feature request is our second highest voted issue (JRA-4446), and one that I personally want to see fixed. For the moment, there is a 3rd party plugin that solves most use cases (Structure Plugin from ALM works). The key for us as a vendor is making it work without degrading the overall experience. We have seen plenty of other issue trackers implement this, but it really detracts from the overall experience when you don't know what is a task, or a project, or a feature etc. But we're definitely trying to find a solution. On FishEye - we have it working on code bases that have hundreds of millions of lines of code, but it often requires some tuning. For example (and one of many such examples), in older versions of Subversion, there was no real way to tell what was a branch, and we rely on 'conventions' such as /branches/ to tell this. Unfortunately, every code base contains 'mistakes' where someone copied the entire tree into /branches/ or created a branch somewhere else. There are some easily configured settings that usually make FishEye run a lot faster but explicitly telling it about some of these cases. But - even saying that, performance was around 50% of the last few releases of FishEye, so the latest versions do run significantly faster in all instances.
imperialWicket 15y ago
Even as a developer, I think that Jira and Confluence are outstanding tools. They do a great job of allowing enough customization (easily) to keep them from detracting from your workflow. What did you find particularly horrible about them, and what tools do you think do a better job at those aspects?
moondowner 15y ago
Jira and FishEye are a really good combination. Love it. Haven't been really keen on Confluence but it's a decent tool too. Another good thing is that you can integrate Jira with Eclipse via Mylyn, and manage all the tasks you're working on without even opening Jira.
silverbax88 15y ago
After using it extensively, I hate it with a passion. I don't believe they are conducive to development workflow at all, but they are built for middle managers.
- ghshephard 15y ago
  Name a single product that works better for software development organizations as a generic issue tracker? What I'm finding about the hate-on I'm seeing from some people about Jira, is that they CLEARLY have never, ever been forced to deal with the pain that is remedy as an issue tracker. Jira is like a breath of fresh air, a touch of heaven, compared to that product. I have a 50 bullet-point list of unresolved issues with Remedy. My issues with Jira are tiny-corner cases problems that 99% of users wouldn't even notice.
  - Terretta 15y ago
    RT from Best Practical.
    - ghshephard 15y ago
      RT is a nice ticketing system, but Software Development Organizations run into a wall pretty much immediately (as in, once they grow beyond 40 or 50 employees) because of their lack of support for more sophisticated software development methodologies. The plugin and developer community is limited, and there is almost no commercial third party support for an ecosystem on top of RT. Finally, it may have changed since the last time I used it (it's been about 8 years), but it had limited issue<-->code checkin integration (which is critical) and I don't even think Agile tools are part of it's vocabulary. Nice ticketing tool, and, if Jira wasn't available in a 10 user license version, RT and Trac would be on my shortlist for quick-n-dirty ticketing tools for smaller software devel shops.
      - Terretta 15y ago
        You asked to name a "generic issue tracker", not a "sophisticated software development methodology tracker". With 142,000 "generic issues" tracked to date (mostly software and network support, with 1 to 100s of replies per issue), we haven't run into a wall yet. We don't use RT as our primary software dev tracker. We use it as a generic issue tracker.
Confusion 15y ago
We use Jira with the Greenhopper Agile planning plugin at our startup and that's freaking awesome for planning iterations and releases. FishEye and Crucible are great for code reviews. As soon as we hit 10 users, Atlassian will have an additional paying customer.
eftpotrm 15y ago
I had a partner organisation insist on Jira for their project a few years back. It'll obviously have changed since then and much might be down to user-specific customisations, but I hated it. Awkward, obstructive, poorly thought out workthrough that mostly involved jumping through hoops and provided us very little actual value. My main memory actually was of poor fit and finish. Just a tiny thing but every time I logged in, no matter how, it offered to remember my login. Every time, I clicked that box in hope. It never once worked.
- farkas 15y ago
  Sorry that 'remember me' didn't work for you. It could have been a bug with how it was set up, or equally likely - a bug in some edge case that you were hitting. I can assure you that it works now :)
  - eftpotrm 15y ago
    Well, that's a start at least - I'm nothing to do with that project any more to verify if the workflow is any better and of more value to developers, but obviously that would be a larger concern and one I'd hope had also been addressed :-)
  - kranner 15y ago
    A second vote for the edge-case above. I used JIRA for six months until a few months ago and 'remember me' never worked well for me either. What is the default timeout on 'remember me' in JIRA, if you'd know please?
    - bostonvaulter2 15y ago
      'Remember Me' works fine for me on JIRA v4.3.3
juiceandjuice 15y ago
I've used Jira, Confluence, and testing out FishEye. We use Crowd for single sign on stuff. I really like fisheye because we have tons of different projects on different repositories. Confluence is nice although it took some getting used to. Jira was awkward, but we're still running Jira 3 and we'll be upgrading soon. For what it's worth, Jira is the best issue tracking software I've used on the web.
2muchcoffeeman 15y ago
I hate Jira and Confluence too. Most in our team hate it. I'd rant but I've wasted too much time on that.
- ghshephard 15y ago
  Having gone through half a dozen different issue trackers in my career, Jira is the first one I've fallen unreservedly in love with - and I'm fascinated as to why others wouldn't feel the same way. Is it a Jira issue, or has someone created an overly restrictive workflow, complex data entry screen? I'm not sure if you can blame the product for how it's configured by it's users, particular when the default configuration is pretty bog simple and easy to use. What about Jira do you hate? What about other members of your team? I'm genuinely interested - maybe I'll see something in a different light.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 15y ago
    I don't know much about the details of our Jira installation. Couldn't tell you what plugins there are or whatever. I've just been using what is there. For me it is all the little things that I need to do regularly that are real annoying. - When I login the widgets that show me what issues I have are pretty useless. They don't show my progress/logged work, they don't show what you last worked on. The priority icon is kinda tiny. So I feel like I am having to track some information manually or in my head. - If you start work on a new task and try to log work, the log work action is hidden under a menu. And when you do log work, it doesn't automatically set the issue to "In progress". - Creating new issues is also a bit annoying. First it's hidden in a menu. Then it is a 2 step process. The first form is completely silly. You have 4 inputs, Project, Type, Next and Cancel. Did that really warrant it's own page? - Subtasks are also a bit crazy. Once you enter your subtasks it's hard to reorganise and prioritise your tasks. It's actually simpler to use vim or a text editor when planning out work and then enter the issues into Jira when you are satisfied. - No subtasks of subtasks!
jmathes 15y ago
I strongly dislike Jira. Everything about it is unwieldy. It's like a car with a top speed of 30mph, with a lever for each and every moving part of the car. Too many pieces of it are customizable, and all of the things which can be customized must be customized for anything to work. The amount of effort it takes to use Jira is almost enough to write your own issue tracker. Also, a fresh JIRA install with no issues, projects, or anything has a memory footprint of over 0.6GB. I don't know why people use it, but people do. My guess is that all the effort it requires provides a simulacrum of control and productivity.
- jmathes 15y ago
  farkas! If you read this: you can solve all the real problems I have with JIRA by making all but the most commonly-used pieces of its UI be harder to find. You can find out which pieces to hide with user testing.
  - farkas 15y ago
    Interestingly - I just had this exact same feedback at a pub in Amsterdam with one of our customers. I agree there is improvement here. But in my years of experience with JIRA, I do find that most software development teams approach things differently, and so there is no 'one size fits all' for most dev teams. One team wants saved filters to be front and centre, another RSS feeds. One user creates a hundred issues a day (usually QA), whilst others rarely create issues at all.
- ghshephard 15y ago
  You can take Jira from "www.atlassian.com" to a fully running instance with a baseline Software Development Issue tracking Project in 15 minutes. I will give you this - _should you chose to_ fully mastering it's screens, issue types, screen schemes, issue type screen schemes will take the better part of few hours to completely map in your head. Jira gives you amazing flexibility to do almost anything you want on the issue type level, but with that flexibility, comes an very complex model. When I first encountered it, I was exasperated that I had to take those couple hours to draw the hierarchy and map it out in my head - but now that I know It, I'm happy it's there.
pointyhat 15y ago
No they are absolutely abysmal. Stay away for your own sanity. My FINAL experience with JIRA + Fisheye + Greenhopper + Crucible nearly made me cry. This is on an 8 core Xeon, 12Gb RAM, 15k SAS RAID and Ubuntu 10.04LTS and Sun hotspot VM. Random failures, null pointer exceptions all over the place that took us out for a couple of days, incredible memory usage, 8xCPUs jammed at 100% due to race conditions, Fisheye only barely just about works in Google Chrome because it's so slow, useless paid support, horridly slow and inconsistent UI, MyISAM tables causing relation failures (!!!!), don't even talk to me about their plugin management - it's a crock of shit. I couldn't recommend it at all. It's worse than Visual Source Safe. That's as a JIRA admin. As a JIRA user, I get people saying "can we have Trac back please". If anyone at Atlassian is listening, please sort your product out. It's not fit for purpose.
- ghshephard 15y ago
  I've been involved in my company in seven different versions of Jira, and have installed it personally, at other companies, and my own server, and for test purpose no less than 50 times. The hardware we have installed Jira ranged from a 1 Gigabyte VM with 8 Gigabytes of Hard disk, up to a 2 CPU Dual core server. 90% of the time with mySql as the backend, 10% of the time with HSQL Operating System has been whatever the LTS variant of Ubuntu, or the more up to date version of RHEL (or CentOS as the case might be) JRE has always been the most recent version from Sun. We only use fisheye and Crucible internal to our company, but that accounts for 60% of my experience. In the last four years (and 10 or so versions) - I've never had a random failure or null pointer cause a failure. It's been the most reliable software package I've ever used. Interesting that we have two completely polar opposite experiences.
  - MattGrommes 15y ago
    My experience is more like yours. I've used Jira a ton of times and any problems we've had using Jira/Greenhopper have been organizational. The only problems I've had with Confluence have been fixed in newer versions.
  - pointyhat 15y ago
ghshephard 15y ago
Jira and/or Confluence are _not_ popular in the enterprise. They are the tool for the small scrappy startup, and end up in the enterprise because hackers, or team-leaders need a tool and just go buy it (Jira and Confluence both cost less than $10,000 - which requires almost no purchase authority in a company) I _LOVE_ Jira - I find it to be the greatest extensible issue tracker out there, and, after extensively using both it, and Remedy (a tool which costs on the order of $800,000 to do an enterprise install, and another $100,000/year to support, and is therefore popular in the enterprise) - I can say with some authority it outperforms Remedy in almost every category. There is zero doubt in my mind that if someone is looking for a flexible issue tracker, that Jira has to be final-3 consideration in any down selection. Ask me anything about Jira - I live, eat, and breath the product.
Gring 15y ago
We just started using Confluence. Design-wise, it's an absolute piece of junk. Nothing aligns, everything is ugly. Lots of plugins to adapt to what you want (which is great), but all those plugins add yet more design differences.
earino 15y ago
We use it. We love it. Confluence / Jira / Fisheye really work together very well for our needs. I don't understand people being negative about this toolset... I haven't hit any real limitations yet with it. Mind you, our software teams are small teams (7 people or less), but it's work splendidly for us. We are a manufacturing / media / distribution company with billions in revenue.
liquidcool 15y ago
I've had my frustrations with both, but I haven't found an alternative that does everything we need and isn't way more expensive. Things I need to do, outside of the usual: - time tracking - detailed planning/reporting (we use Greenhopper) - customer service (hiding projects and fields for internal use) - integration with version control We use a few plugins, but not many, and the whole 10 users for $10 is pretty amazing. By the time you need more, you can afford it. I also like FogBugz/Kiln, but the price is much higher for 3-10 users (OnDemand gives 2 free to startups and students). By far, my biggest complaint to Atlassian is upgrades, which are a huge PITA. There has to be an amazing new feature for me to go through that.
- pointyhat 15y ago
  I use Trac for all those things with the following plugins: * Time tracking: http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/TimingAndEstimationPlugin * Planning/reporting: simple trac reports + wiki dashboard. * Customer service, we have a separate trac instance with Intertrac set up between so you can link tickets. * VCS integration: works with hg and svn fine Also costs zero and upgrades flawlessly.
- farkas 15y ago
  > By far, my biggest complaint to Atlassian is upgrades, which are a huge PITA. There has to be an amazing new feature for me to go through that. Just as a FYI - the latest version of JIRA (4.4) and the soon to be released (next week) version of Confluence (4.0) have had the install and upgrade process rewritten from the ground up. If you've been bitten in the past, I'd strongly recommend taking another look. A summary of the features here: http://blogs.atlassian.com/jira/2011/06/jira-44-sneak-peek--the-new-upgrader.html http://blogs.atlassian.com/jira/2011/06/jira-44-sneak-peek--...
brown9-2 15y ago
I've used both and have been happy with them. On the other hand, I've never seen an instance of Fisheye deployed for an OSS project that didn't take minutes and minutes to load a single page.
Jacquass12321 15y ago
I'm developing on a 4 man team trying out Jira+fisheye+crucible. I have no complaints so far and the crucible review process is pretty slick.
timcederman 15y ago
Those of us who have to use Jira on a daily basis have a saying - jira delenda est.
sim0n 15y ago
Absolutely not. I was forced to use Jira at a previous job which actually made me actually quit my job and start building my own project management app (which took part in YCS11)!
notJim 15y ago
Until recently, I hated Jira, but my current company uses Jira + Greenhopper, and I actually really like it. Greenhopper gives you a sort of PivotalTracker like interface, except that I've always found PivotalTracker to be a good idea, poorly implemented. We also use Crucible, which is a great code review tool, and Confluence, which I don't really care for, but I don't really dislike it any more than any other wiki software.
Aloisius 15y ago
Hate them so much. I had to deal with both products at my last company and maybe it was just how they set it up, but entering a bug into Jira was ridiculous. Finding anything was worse. It was probably the most user unfriendly piece of web software I've ever had to use. Confluence? Ugh. The WYSIWYG editor was questionable at best. I had hours of fun cleaning up pages with big tables that were edited by multiple people. And seriously, a hierarchical wiki? Do you know what you get when you have a hierarchical wiki? A wiki that has almost no inner links because no one can remember what the path is to any document. Again, it could have just been how they set it up, but I just feel like they threw every feature and the kitchen sink into that product in the name of "flexibility."
Produce 15y ago
I've never had any problems with Jira (about 3 months' worth of experience) but Confluence is so broken when trying to paste content into an article.
jholman 15y ago
I had a very negative experience with Jira and Confluence. The context was a very small development team (around 5) in a very small company (under 50), and some very inexperienced administrators, so maybe some of those are key factors. And again, I want to emphasize that no one really knew what they were doing with it, including me, so maybe in 20 years I'll have better context that lets me appreciate what Jira was doing for us. Certainly when I read ghshepard's several comments, I think "wow, okay, if you're a much bigger heavier bloatier organization, with much more byzantine needs from an issue tracker, maybe this thing actually has some value!" I eventually got superuser privileges, and spent a lot of time myself trying to figure out how to beat it into getting out of our way and just tracking some frigging tickets. That's a week of my life I'll never have back, with no benefit to anyone. At some point, management decided to double-down, and renew our license, to get an upgrade (I think to Jira 4.0, since this decision was late 2009). Oh my god. For one thing, we wasted SO MUCH TIME on that upgrade. And for another, the dashboard started taking 30-60 seconds to load, because it's suddenly full of clever (read: not clever, not performant) AJAX. And I still don't remember getting anything out of it. Please, Jira, just get the hell out of our way! At this point, if Jira was the only product on the market, I'd rather use one huge text file to track tickets, shared via svn or git. It would offer less useful features, sure, but it'd also offer way way less pain. The main argument anyone could give was that it would have features not present in our other issue tracker, RT 1.0. Uh, y'think? Short summary of my experience: on my small team, in a small company, with no experienced hands to manage it quickly and efficiently, Jira is a big bag of slow-down pain, with nothing to recommend it, and I'd rather use NO tool than use THIS tool. $10 for 10 users sounds like about $1000 too much. Oh, and don't get me started on Confluence. I mean, less pain than Jira, but ZERO useful features (relative to free pain-free alternatives). Why would you ever choose this over Mediawiki? My new company uses ikiwiki, and that's beautiful, and it clocks in under 25kloc of Perl.

by latch 15y ago

xbryanx 15y ago

I use and manage our JIRA instance in a small tech group inside a large non-profit. Probably only ever had 10 users. I love it, and our team has grown to be more efficient as a result of its use. Now, Confluence? Not a big fan. Tried it, ditched it.

nirvdrum 15y ago

I've used both tools for two start-ups now. I can't imagine using anything else (well, Redmine is a nice free tool). But you're not in the minority in startups. I personally can't understand how anyone is productive with PivotalTracker, Lighthouse, or GitHub Issues (at least the older one). But people are and to each his own. FWIW, one of the reasons I love both of them is they're the only tools of their type that I've been able to throw a non-tech person at and they can use. When roping the spouses into helping out, that counts for a lot.

cujo 15y ago

I agree with you, but as a developer, I prefer these types of tools to get out of the way. Jira and Confluence seem to be written for managers that can live in them. For them, I'm sure the experience is much different.

stephen_g 15y ago

We use Jira at our company and it's probably one of the best issue tracking systems I've tried. Confluence is alright but I think that there are a few open source wiki packages that are at least as good, if not better.

nirvdrum 15y ago
Which free ones do you like? My biggest Confluence draws are rich text editor (nice for one-off pages), attachment indexing, and attachment versioning. But I'm always open to trying something else.
- 18pfsmt 15y ago
  I don't have complex needs, but I like Redmine [1], and run it on a local box. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redmine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redmine
- farkas 15y ago
  For what it's worth - we have a huge new release of Confluence coming out in 4 days time. We've also released an infographic about the history of collaboration (and I'm still not able to find the easter egg): http://www.atlassian.com/en/communication-through-the-ages-infographic.html http://www.atlassian.com/en/communication-through-the-ages-i... Confluence 4 has a completely rebuilt rich-text editor with autocomplete - the ease of use of a WYSIWYG editor with the speed of an IDE. Love your thoughts on it when it ships.
  - lebski88 15y ago
    Do you have any plans, in Jira, to allow sub-tasks to have their own sub-tasks. Only having one level of nesting is extremely restrictive and an annoyance we come up against a lot. On the whole though I quite like Jira, particularly its integration with FishEye. FishEye is also pretty decent although it chokes a lot with the size of our repository - we have a lot of code and a lot of branches which have really pushed the size up. A few JS optimisations would be nice as well - it can really chew up the CPU sometimes.
    - farkas 15y ago
      Thanks for the feedback. Letting arbitrary levels of nesting is one of the things that keeps me, and the JIRA product manager up at night. This feature request is our second highest voted issue (JRA-4446), and one that I personally want to see fixed. For the moment, there is a 3rd party plugin that solves most use cases (Structure Plugin from ALM works). The key for us as a vendor is making it work without degrading the overall experience. We have seen plenty of other issue trackers implement this, but it really detracts from the overall experience when you don't know what is a task, or a project, or a feature etc. But we're definitely trying to find a solution. On FishEye - we have it working on code bases that have hundreds of millions of lines of code, but it often requires some tuning. For example (and one of many such examples), in older versions of Subversion, there was no real way to tell what was a branch, and we rely on 'conventions' such as /branches/ to tell this. Unfortunately, every code base contains 'mistakes' where someone copied the entire tree into /branches/ or created a branch somewhere else. There are some easily configured settings that usually make FishEye run a lot faster but explicitly telling it about some of these cases. But - even saying that, performance was around 50% of the last few releases of FishEye, so the latest versions do run significantly faster in all instances.

imperialWicket 15y ago

Even as a developer, I think that Jira and Confluence are outstanding tools. They do a great job of allowing enough customization (easily) to keep them from detracting from your workflow. What did you find particularly horrible about them, and what tools do you think do a better job at those aspects?

moondowner 15y ago

Jira and FishEye are a really good combination. Love it. Haven't been really keen on Confluence but it's a decent tool too. Another good thing is that you can integrate Jira with Eclipse via Mylyn, and manage all the tasks you're working on without even opening Jira.

silverbax88 15y ago

After using it extensively, I hate it with a passion. I don't believe they are conducive to development workflow at all, but they are built for middle managers.

ghshephard 15y ago
Name a single product that works better for software development organizations as a generic issue tracker? What I'm finding about the hate-on I'm seeing from some people about Jira, is that they CLEARLY have never, ever been forced to deal with the pain that is remedy as an issue tracker. Jira is like a breath of fresh air, a touch of heaven, compared to that product. I have a 50 bullet-point list of unresolved issues with Remedy. My issues with Jira are tiny-corner cases problems that 99% of users wouldn't even notice.
- Terretta 15y ago
  RT from Best Practical.
  - ghshephard 15y ago
    RT is a nice ticketing system, but Software Development Organizations run into a wall pretty much immediately (as in, once they grow beyond 40 or 50 employees) because of their lack of support for more sophisticated software development methodologies. The plugin and developer community is limited, and there is almost no commercial third party support for an ecosystem on top of RT. Finally, it may have changed since the last time I used it (it's been about 8 years), but it had limited issue<-->code checkin integration (which is critical) and I don't even think Agile tools are part of it's vocabulary. Nice ticketing tool, and, if Jira wasn't available in a 10 user license version, RT and Trac would be on my shortlist for quick-n-dirty ticketing tools for smaller software devel shops.
    - Terretta 15y ago
      You asked to name a "generic issue tracker", not a "sophisticated software development methodology tracker". With 142,000 "generic issues" tracked to date (mostly software and network support, with 1 to 100s of replies per issue), we haven't run into a wall yet. We don't use RT as our primary software dev tracker. We use it as a generic issue tracker.

Confusion 15y ago

We use Jira with the Greenhopper Agile planning plugin at our startup and that's freaking awesome for planning iterations and releases. FishEye and Crucible are great for code reviews. As soon as we hit 10 users, Atlassian will have an additional paying customer.

eftpotrm 15y ago

I had a partner organisation insist on Jira for their project a few years back. It'll obviously have changed since then and much might be down to user-specific customisations, but I hated it. Awkward, obstructive, poorly thought out workthrough that mostly involved jumping through hoops and provided us very little actual value. My main memory actually was of poor fit and finish. Just a tiny thing but every time I logged in, no matter how, it offered to remember my login. Every time, I clicked that box in hope. It never once worked.

farkas 15y ago
Sorry that 'remember me' didn't work for you. It could have been a bug with how it was set up, or equally likely - a bug in some edge case that you were hitting. I can assure you that it works now :)
- eftpotrm 15y ago
  Well, that's a start at least - I'm nothing to do with that project any more to verify if the workflow is any better and of more value to developers, but obviously that would be a larger concern and one I'd hope had also been addressed :-)
- kranner 15y ago
  A second vote for the edge-case above. I used JIRA for six months until a few months ago and 'remember me' never worked well for me either. What is the default timeout on 'remember me' in JIRA, if you'd know please?
  - bostonvaulter2 15y ago
    'Remember Me' works fine for me on JIRA v4.3.3

juiceandjuice 15y ago

I've used Jira, Confluence, and testing out FishEye. We use Crowd for single sign on stuff. I really like fisheye because we have tons of different projects on different repositories. Confluence is nice although it took some getting used to. Jira was awkward, but we're still running Jira 3 and we'll be upgrading soon. For what it's worth, Jira is the best issue tracking software I've used on the web.

2muchcoffeeman 15y ago

I hate Jira and Confluence too. Most in our team hate it. I'd rant but I've wasted too much time on that.

ghshephard 15y ago
Having gone through half a dozen different issue trackers in my career, Jira is the first one I've fallen unreservedly in love with - and I'm fascinated as to why others wouldn't feel the same way. Is it a Jira issue, or has someone created an overly restrictive workflow, complex data entry screen? I'm not sure if you can blame the product for how it's configured by it's users, particular when the default configuration is pretty bog simple and easy to use. What about Jira do you hate? What about other members of your team? I'm genuinely interested - maybe I'll see something in a different light.
- 2muchcoffeeman 15y ago
  I don't know much about the details of our Jira installation. Couldn't tell you what plugins there are or whatever. I've just been using what is there. For me it is all the little things that I need to do regularly that are real annoying. - When I login the widgets that show me what issues I have are pretty useless. They don't show my progress/logged work, they don't show what you last worked on. The priority icon is kinda tiny. So I feel like I am having to track some information manually or in my head. - If you start work on a new task and try to log work, the log work action is hidden under a menu. And when you do log work, it doesn't automatically set the issue to "In progress". - Creating new issues is also a bit annoying. First it's hidden in a menu. Then it is a 2 step process. The first form is completely silly. You have 4 inputs, Project, Type, Next and Cancel. Did that really warrant it's own page? - Subtasks are also a bit crazy. Once you enter your subtasks it's hard to reorganise and prioritise your tasks. It's actually simpler to use vim or a text editor when planning out work and then enter the issues into Jira when you are satisfied. - No subtasks of subtasks!

jmathes 15y ago

I strongly dislike Jira. Everything about it is unwieldy. It's like a car with a top speed of 30mph, with a lever for each and every moving part of the car. Too many pieces of it are customizable, and all of the things which can be customized must be customized for anything to work. The amount of effort it takes to use Jira is almost enough to write your own issue tracker. Also, a fresh JIRA install with no issues, projects, or anything has a memory footprint of over 0.6GB. I don't know why people use it, but people do. My guess is that all the effort it requires provides a simulacrum of control and productivity.

jmathes 15y ago
farkas! If you read this: you can solve all the real problems I have with JIRA by making all but the most commonly-used pieces of its UI be harder to find. You can find out which pieces to hide with user testing.
- farkas 15y ago
  Interestingly - I just had this exact same feedback at a pub in Amsterdam with one of our customers. I agree there is improvement here. But in my years of experience with JIRA, I do find that most software development teams approach things differently, and so there is no 'one size fits all' for most dev teams. One team wants saved filters to be front and centre, another RSS feeds. One user creates a hundred issues a day (usually QA), whilst others rarely create issues at all.
ghshephard 15y ago
You can take Jira from "www.atlassian.com" to a fully running instance with a baseline Software Development Issue tracking Project in 15 minutes. I will give you this - _should you chose to_ fully mastering it's screens, issue types, screen schemes, issue type screen schemes will take the better part of few hours to completely map in your head. Jira gives you amazing flexibility to do almost anything you want on the issue type level, but with that flexibility, comes an very complex model. When I first encountered it, I was exasperated that I had to take those couple hours to draw the hierarchy and map it out in my head - but now that I know It, I'm happy it's there.

pointyhat 15y ago

No they are absolutely abysmal. Stay away for your own sanity. My FINAL experience with JIRA + Fisheye + Greenhopper + Crucible nearly made me cry. This is on an 8 core Xeon, 12Gb RAM, 15k SAS RAID and Ubuntu 10.04LTS and Sun hotspot VM. Random failures, null pointer exceptions all over the place that took us out for a couple of days, incredible memory usage, 8xCPUs jammed at 100% due to race conditions, Fisheye only barely just about works in Google Chrome because it's so slow, useless paid support, horridly slow and inconsistent UI, MyISAM tables causing relation failures (!!!!), don't even talk to me about their plugin management - it's a crock of shit. I couldn't recommend it at all. It's worse than Visual Source Safe. That's as a JIRA admin. As a JIRA user, I get people saying "can we have Trac back please". If anyone at Atlassian is listening, please sort your product out. It's not fit for purpose.

ghshephard 15y ago
I've been involved in my company in seven different versions of Jira, and have installed it personally, at other companies, and my own server, and for test purpose no less than 50 times. The hardware we have installed Jira ranged from a 1 Gigabyte VM with 8 Gigabytes of Hard disk, up to a 2 CPU Dual core server. 90% of the time with mySql as the backend, 10% of the time with HSQL Operating System has been whatever the LTS variant of Ubuntu, or the more up to date version of RHEL (or CentOS as the case might be) JRE has always been the most recent version from Sun. We only use fisheye and Crucible internal to our company, but that accounts for 60% of my experience. In the last four years (and 10 or so versions) - I've never had a random failure or null pointer cause a failure. It's been the most reliable software package I've ever used. Interesting that we have two completely polar opposite experiences.
- MattGrommes 15y ago
  My experience is more like yours. I've used Jira a ton of times and any problems we've had using Jira/Greenhopper have been organizational. The only problems I've had with Confluence have been fixed in newer versions.
- pointyhat 15y ago

ghshephard 15y ago

Jira and/or Confluence are _not_ popular in the enterprise. They are the tool for the small scrappy startup, and end up in the enterprise because hackers, or team-leaders need a tool and just go buy it (Jira and Confluence both cost less than $10,000 - which requires almost no purchase authority in a company) I _LOVE_ Jira - I find it to be the greatest extensible issue tracker out there, and, after extensively using both it, and Remedy (a tool which costs on the order of $800,000 to do an enterprise install, and another $100,000/year to support, and is therefore popular in the enterprise) - I can say with some authority it outperforms Remedy in almost every category. There is zero doubt in my mind that if someone is looking for a flexible issue tracker, that Jira has to be final-3 consideration in any down selection. Ask me anything about Jira - I live, eat, and breath the product.

Gring 15y ago

We just started using Confluence. Design-wise, it's an absolute piece of junk. Nothing aligns, everything is ugly. Lots of plugins to adapt to what you want (which is great), but all those plugins add yet more design differences.

earino 15y ago

We use it. We love it. Confluence / Jira / Fisheye really work together very well for our needs. I don't understand people being negative about this toolset... I haven't hit any real limitations yet with it. Mind you, our software teams are small teams (7 people or less), but it's work splendidly for us. We are a manufacturing / media / distribution company with billions in revenue.

liquidcool 15y ago

I've had my frustrations with both, but I haven't found an alternative that does everything we need and isn't way more expensive. Things I need to do, outside of the usual: - time tracking - detailed planning/reporting (we use Greenhopper) - customer service (hiding projects and fields for internal use) - integration with version control We use a few plugins, but not many, and the whole 10 users for $10 is pretty amazing. By the time you need more, you can afford it. I also like FogBugz/Kiln, but the price is much higher for 3-10 users (OnDemand gives 2 free to startups and students). By far, my biggest complaint to Atlassian is upgrades, which are a huge PITA. There has to be an amazing new feature for me to go through that.

pointyhat 15y ago
I use Trac for all those things with the following plugins: * Time tracking: http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/TimingAndEstimationPlugin * Planning/reporting: simple trac reports + wiki dashboard. * Customer service, we have a separate trac instance with Intertrac set up between so you can link tickets. * VCS integration: works with hg and svn fine Also costs zero and upgrades flawlessly.
farkas 15y ago
> By far, my biggest complaint to Atlassian is upgrades, which are a huge PITA. There has to be an amazing new feature for me to go through that. Just as a FYI - the latest version of JIRA (4.4) and the soon to be released (next week) version of Confluence (4.0) have had the install and upgrade process rewritten from the ground up. If you've been bitten in the past, I'd strongly recommend taking another look. A summary of the features here: http://blogs.atlassian.com/jira/2011/06/jira-44-sneak-peek--the-new-upgrader.html http://blogs.atlassian.com/jira/2011/06/jira-44-sneak-peek--...

brown9-2 15y ago

I've used both and have been happy with them. On the other hand, I've never seen an instance of Fisheye deployed for an OSS project that didn't take minutes and minutes to load a single page.

Jacquass12321 15y ago

I'm developing on a 4 man team trying out Jira+fisheye+crucible. I have no complaints so far and the crucible review process is pretty slick.

timcederman 15y ago

Those of us who have to use Jira on a daily basis have a saying - jira delenda est.

sim0n 15y ago

Absolutely not. I was forced to use Jira at a previous job which actually made me actually quit my job and start building my own project management app (which took part in YCS11)!

notJim 15y ago

Until recently, I hated Jira, but my current company uses Jira + Greenhopper, and I actually really like it. Greenhopper gives you a sort of PivotalTracker like interface, except that I've always found PivotalTracker to be a good idea, poorly implemented. We also use Crucible, which is a great code review tool, and Confluence, which I don't really care for, but I don't really dislike it any more than any other wiki software.

Aloisius 15y ago

Hate them so much. I had to deal with both products at my last company and maybe it was just how they set it up, but entering a bug into Jira was ridiculous. Finding anything was worse. It was probably the most user unfriendly piece of web software I've ever had to use. Confluence? Ugh. The WYSIWYG editor was questionable at best. I had hours of fun cleaning up pages with big tables that were edited by multiple people. And seriously, a hierarchical wiki? Do you know what you get when you have a hierarchical wiki? A wiki that has almost no inner links because no one can remember what the path is to any document. Again, it could have just been how they set it up, but I just feel like they threw every feature and the kitchen sink into that product in the name of "flexibility."

Produce 15y ago

I've never had any problems with Jira (about 3 months' worth of experience) but Confluence is so broken when trying to paste content into an article.

jholman 15y ago

I had a very negative experience with Jira and Confluence. The context was a very small development team (around 5) in a very small company (under 50), and some very inexperienced administrators, so maybe some of those are key factors. And again, I want to emphasize that no one really knew what they were doing with it, including me, so maybe in 20 years I'll have better context that lets me appreciate what Jira was doing for us. Certainly when I read ghshepard's several comments, I think "wow, okay, if you're a much bigger heavier bloatier organization, with much more byzantine needs from an issue tracker, maybe this thing actually has some value!" I eventually got superuser privileges, and spent a lot of time myself trying to figure out how to beat it into getting out of our way and just tracking some frigging tickets. That's a week of my life I'll never have back, with no benefit to anyone. At some point, management decided to double-down, and renew our license, to get an upgrade (I think to Jira 4.0, since this decision was late 2009). Oh my god. For one thing, we wasted SO MUCH TIME on that upgrade. And for another, the dashboard started taking 30-60 seconds to load, because it's suddenly full of clever (read: not clever, not performant) AJAX. And I still don't remember getting anything out of it. Please, Jira, just get the hell out of our way! At this point, if Jira was the only product on the market, I'd rather use one huge text file to track tickets, shared via svn or git. It would offer less useful features, sure, but it'd also offer way way less pain. The main argument anyone could give was that it would have features not present in our other issue tracker, RT 1.0. Uh, y'think? Short summary of my experience: on my small team, in a small company, with no experienced hands to manage it quickly and efficiently, Jira is a big bag of slow-down pain, with nothing to recommend it, and I'd rather use NO tool than use THIS tool. $10 for 10 users sounds like about $1000 too much. Oh, and don't get me started on Confluence. I mean, less pain than Jira, but ZERO useful features (relative to free pain-free alternatives). Why would you ever choose this over Mediawiki? My new company uses ikiwiki, and that's beautiful, and it clocks in under 25kloc of Perl.