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Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

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Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#21

Post by jordigh »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #17

On the other hand, I wish bitbucket were more popular compared to github. It doesn't seem like they invest much into bitbucket, as some silly issues have persisted for years. Have they given up?

Asking around on IRC, it just seems like bitbucket doesn't bring Atlassian a lot of money. It seems that they just see it as marketing for their other offerings, so accordingly bitbucket does not get a lot development.

I wish they improved their Mercurial support. I believe they have only one guy handling all of the Mercurial issues.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#22

Post by grossvogel »

curiousjorge wrote: post #4

I think the last bit about what didn't matter has a huge take away home value. It's ironic that so much crap we read today drives home these two things that we focus so much on: 1. Content Marketing 2. Sales Team

Joel on Software has 6 posts over the last 3 years. I'm not sure how long Jira has been winning (whatever that means), but it doesn't seem fair to say that Content Marketing doesn't work when the blog in question isn't actively updated.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#23

Post by grossvogel »

jordigh wrote: post #21
mixmastamyk wrote: post #17

On the other hand, I wish bitbucket were more popular compared to github. It doesn't seem like they invest much into bitbucket, as some silly issues have persisted for years. Have they given up?

Asking around on IRC, it just seems like bitbucket doesn't bring Atlassian a lot of money. It seems that they just see it as marketing for their other offerings, so accordingly bitbucket does not get a lot development. I wish they improved their Mercurial support. I believe they have only one guy handling all of the Mercurial issues.

That makes sense. I'd guess the main reason people use Bitbucket over Github is "free private repos," with "we already use other Atlassian products" a close second.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#24

Post by gmarx »

curiousjorge wrote: post #4

I think the last bit about what didn't matter has a huge take away home value. It's ironic that so much crap we read today drives home these two things that we focus so much on: 1. Content Marketing 2. Sales Team

I would argue that FogCreek's early success was the result of Joel's blog. Around that time he had said most of what he had to say and posting frequency declined. I haven't looked at his site more than a couple times in the past 10 years. So I think it did matter tremendously and momentum declined after that factor was removed

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#25

Post by shill »

command_tab wrote: post #16

And yet, "Creating a JIRA task is like going to the fucking DMV." https://twitter.com/jesseherlitz/status/648557144845910016

Does the opposite kind of user exist? Has anyone ever met a fanatical JIRA lover?

In my experience there are only people that tolerate JIRA on one side of the spectrum and a bunch of people that hate JIRA on the other side.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#26

Post by fideloper »

Who is Prashant Deva and should I care about their opinion?

Did Fogbugz actually lose? Do they even have the same market (enterprise vs smaller)? Perhaps they just fine operating at a smaller volume.

Isn't the product being "too basic" a sign of focus? Perhaps the author needs/wants more features, but that can't be generalized for all of Fogbugz's audience.

I've heard just as many owners say "I don't want as many features as competitor X".

That all being said, there are some good things in there - perhaps Fogbugz could look into a partner ecosystem. Making your own language is probably a bad long-run choice.

However I get the feeling this is comparing apples to oranges.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#27

Post by skrebbel »

A bit off topic, and I know I'm sounding like a condescending jerk here but I mean it: but why do people love bugs so much that they want to purchase an entire database program to track them? I mean, if you have more than 10 bugs that are highly important to keep track of, it seems to me that you have much larger problem than whether to purchase JIRA or FogBugz.

I mean, either a bug is important to you so prioritize fixing it, or it isn't important to you so you can just ignore it and see if it surfaces again.

Every single team I've seen that used a bug tracker ended up with hundreds of issues, status of 90% of which was unknown, maybe already fixed, maybe not relevant anymore because the entire component got overhauled the other day by Joe. What's the use of this stuff?

I got this from a blog post (by Ron Jeffries I believe, but I forgot), but basically his idea was that the moment you turn something that you don't want to have into a formalized process, people tend to bias towards getting more of it. If you are forced to choose between fixing a bug or forgetting about it, you're urged to fix it fast. If you can just "file the bug and go on with your work", the bug stays.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#29

Post by solutionyogi »

Having mainly done line of business applications my entire life, I have a slightly different take.

Jira won because it was not opinionated. You can use it however you want. FogBugz had the philosophy to make bug entry super easy above anything else. Jira will let a manager define new custom fields and make them all compulsory. It perfectly fits how manager at big companies think.

FogBugz provides Completion Date Probability Distribution chart and Burn Down Chart [2]. Anyone who has worked for big companies knows that these two are USELESS for them. They set a project delivery date and you just have to hit it.

At my current company, we are going for SOC1 compliance. This forces an amazingly complicated issue workflow and they implemented it very easily in Jira. I am looking at FogBugz documentation on workflows [1], and I don't see how we could have implemented the same in FogBugz.

I also feel that Jira has a better ecosystem for plugins and integrations then FogBugz.

[1] http://help.fogcreek.com/7483/statuses-categories-and-workfl...

[2] http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/features/project-management/

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#30

Post by omouse »

MichaelGG wrote: post #6

Yet FogBugz still feels way easier to use. Every time I'm in an Atlassian product, mainly Stash and JIRA, the UI sucks. I use them several times a week and still get lost. Maybe I'm dumb, but I don't seem to have this problem on other systems. But hey, at least JIRA isn't the craptastic laggy pos that is Podio. Certainly right that I've never seen FogBugz outside of myself or customers. Also, I think the name must hu…

I've overheard devs and marketing people talk about JIRA while walking down the street. It's really messed up.
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