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Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

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Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#81

Post by mark9white »

herge wrote: post #72
mpdehaan2 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will agree that "intelligent" time tracking features in FogBuz ~4 years ago seemed relatively flaky and random. JIRA's benefits are likely in customization - which is a giant pain for managers in some ways, but it's nice that it can do it, but JIRA is supremely frustrating when editing dashboards. Every time somebody changed a component name, it would break all the underlying queries, etc. I think there's a huge ma…

All bug trackers are literally crap. It's a really hard tool to write. The ones that make dealing with individual items/cases/tickets like Trello fall apart when you are dealing with hundred's of items. The ones that manage groups of items together efficiently (jira, maybe fogbugz) are a pain to do data entry in.

Try TargetProcess ... Gets very little attention. But hits that sweet spot for me at least.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#82

Post by draw_down »

protomyth wrote: post #71
draw_down wrote: post #46

I still can't believe they invented their own language... but #1 seems like it would have been enough. I hate using JIRA, though, just like I hate using all Atlasssian products, so it would have been nice if FogBugz won.

Ericsson and Sun invented their own languages. If your a tool company, treating language as off-limits seems limiting.

You have a point, I guess I'm more flabbergasted by the particular language they chose to invent. Also, Fog Creek ain't exactly Ericsson or Sun.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#83

Post by zem »

outworlder wrote: post #3
JimDabell wrote: post #2

There's an interesting discussion happening on Reddit involving ex-employees of both companies: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3n2sc1/why_fog...

An interesting point from that, since everyone likes to bash Wasabi: > "If we hadn't done Wasabi, then we'd have had to rewrite all of FogBugz, and that would've killed the company. Wasabi also gave us stuff that developers are only now rediscovering, like code that executes on both client and server (e.g. via server-side/client-side React), that even gave us a development edge. I've written about this at length ( ht…

i thought wasabi was an excellent idea when i first read spolsky's post about it, and nothing i've heard since has changed my mind. these days, when i see it blamed for any of fogcreek's problems, i simply see it as a sign that the commenter is unfamiliar with the issues involved.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#85

Post by eterm »

herge wrote: post #72
mpdehaan2 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will agree that "intelligent" time tracking features in FogBuz ~4 years ago seemed relatively flaky and random. JIRA's benefits are likely in customization - which is a giant pain for managers in some ways, but it's nice that it can do it, but JIRA is supremely frustrating when editing dashboards. Every time somebody changed a component name, it would break all the underlying queries, etc. I think there's a huge ma…

All bug trackers are literally crap. It's a really hard tool to write. The ones that make dealing with individual items/cases/tickets like Trello fall apart when you are dealing with hundred's of items. The ones that manage groups of items together efficiently (jira, maybe fogbugz) are a pain to do data entry in.

And then there are those which seem to manage collections and data entry but fall down completely when it comes to dashboards and data presentation. (see youtrack).

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#86

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

anthonys wrote: post #28
mariusmg wrote: post #10

Seems to me Atlassian "won" because they had a actual sales team not because of "technology".

Atlassian make a big point of saying they don't have a sales team[1] so I am not sure where this is coming from? [1] https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/purchase-licensing

From sour grapes?

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#87

Post by morgante »

jackhack wrote: post #78
morgante wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love JIRA and would absolutely advocate for using it over any other tracker. With just a little tweaking (30 minutes or so on a fresh install), I can have it perfectly configured to match my ideal workflow.

Can you please elaborate on this configuration? What is the general nature of the configuration changes you're making? Or, how is your workflow affecting the product. I ask as I am in an organization right on the cusp of implementing JIRA, and I would love to steer the implementation team toward a more useful configuration than the clunky defaults, with which I've had prior experience.

The biggest things for me are:

* Setting up several statuses (more than in the default) to reflect backlog, selected, in progress, testing, deployed

* Creating an appropriate board which splits everything into columns by status and rows by user

* Setting up a few quick filters to find things like anything which has been in the backlog for more than 6 weeks or bugs which haven't seen activity in the last 48 hours

* Integrating GitHub. Being able to kick a ticket over to QA from your commit message is awesome.

Beyond that, I mostly focus on stripping out default things to make the workflow simpler. I don't need my software to enforce that I can't move a ticket to deployed straight from in progress, and stripping out those extra rules makes it easier to deal with.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#88

Post by flarg »

omouse wrote: post #32
mariusmg wrote: post #10

Seems to me Atlassian "won" because they had a actual sales team not because of "technology".

They won because they allow managers to be in control and authoritarians. I've seen more than 2 managers who take over JIRA and lock down permissions and create custom workflows and all of them insist on having swim lanes and 5+ columns. So to move one little ticket across the board took 4+ drags. If you have a heavy-weight process where people are actually signing off on things, then yes it makes sense. But otherwis…

I had the same experience - pushing a client to use FogBugz because I knew it was not over-configurable so there wasn't much chance of the management screwing it up. I also found the estimation functionality quite wonderful. Worked well.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#89

Post by deckard1 »

shill wrote: post #25
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.

I'm far from loving any issue tracker.

That said, I've used RT (holy shit no), Pivotal Tracker (drinks too heavily from the dynamic DOM/JS koolaid, sucking up all RAM and CPU in the known universe), and JIRA. I'd take JIRA over the others.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#90

Post by protomyth »

draw_down wrote: post #82
protomyth wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ericsson and Sun invented their own languages. If your a tool company, treating language as off-limits seems limiting.

You have a point, I guess I'm more flabbergasted by the particular language they chose to invent. Also, Fog Creek ain't exactly Ericsson or Sun.

Fog Creek probably had more resource than Yukihiro Matsumoto, Larry Wall, and Guido van Rossum did.
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