Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

movingfulcrum.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 251 posts

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#91

Post by DavidPlumpton »

omouse wrote: post #37
solutionyogi wrote: post #29

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 Prob…

I don't see how we could have implemented the same in FogBugz. How would you implement the compliance without technology in place? I'm being serious, how do you think compliance happened in the days of 486s, TRS-80s, punchcards or no computers at all? There isn't always a technical solution to a social problem, and JIRA's customizations are a micromanagers dreams. I'm sure there are good cases where that level of con…

They used to say the Space Shuttle isn't ready to fly unless the weight of the paperwork is equal to the weight of the shuttle.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#92

Post by jackhack »

morgante wrote: post #87
jackhack wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 * In…

Much appreciated. That's a great opener for a discussion with our impl. team.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#93

Post by meej »

deckard1 wrote: post #89
shill wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've used Mantis and Bugzilla and I'd also take JIRA over those.

JIRA is the best bug tracking software I've used since I left Microsoft, which was over a decade ago. Sometimes I still miss Raid, particularly it's ability to build complex queries, but also the ability to connect to any team's project. At the time, it was supposedly the only internal tool used throughout the entire company.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#94

Post by Meekro »

solutionyogi wrote: post #29

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 Prob…

They set a project delivery date and you just have to hit it.

Do you find that this really works out, in practice? Joel has argued[1] that the only schedule worth anything is the one set by the developers themselves. Management can set relative priorities (X is twice as important as Y), but trying to force a faster deadline on the developers is like trying to make your Linux box run faster by renice-ing every process to -20.

Now, the problem with developer-set schedules is that they tend to underestimate how long things will take. Hence, FogBugz figures out how much each developer underestimates on average, and builds bell curves for the realistic completion time.

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#95

Post by codeulike »

Meekro wrote: post #94
solutionyogi wrote: post #29

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 Prob…

They set a project delivery date and you just have to hit it. Do you find that this really works out, in practice? Joel has argued[1] that the only schedule worth anything is the one set by the developers themselves. Management can set relative priorities (X is twice as important as Y), but trying to force a faster deadline on the developers is like trying to make your Linux box run faster by renice-ing every process…

Do you find that this really works out, in practice?

No. Good luck persuading the management to try something else!

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#96

Post by mey »

sixothree wrote: post #77
outworlder wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hanselminutes podcast recently had an interview with Jacob Krall about the history of wasabi. I found it quite interesting. http://hanselminutes.com/493/killing-off-wasabi-a-20yr-old-v...

An aside: Any other podcasts to recommend?

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#97

Post by baus »

It could be argued that Trello will eventually be larger than either of these products, so I don't think the story has been completely told. I've used Jira as a manager in both a large and a small installation and hated it both times. It feels like 90s bug tracking system with huge forms and intractable workflows.

With that said, Spolsky (although I think a lot of his writing is fantastic) rarely addresses his mistakes.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#98

Post by mtdewcmu »

Meekro wrote: post #94
solutionyogi wrote: post #29

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 Prob…

They set a project delivery date and you just have to hit it. Do you find that this really works out, in practice? Joel has argued[1] that the only schedule worth anything is the one set by the developers themselves. Management can set relative priorities (X is twice as important as Y), but trying to force a faster deadline on the developers is like trying to make your Linux box run faster by renice-ing every process…

Managers are the ones that buy this stuff, not developers.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#99

Post by sixothree »

mey wrote: post #96
sixothree wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hanselminutes podcast recently had an interview with Jacob Krall about the history of wasabi. I found it quite interesting. http://hanselminutes.com/493/killing-off-wasabi-a-20yr-old-v...

An aside: Any other podcasts to recommend?

As far as technology related, I listen to Coding Blocks, RunAs Radio, Hanselminutes, Software Engineering Radio, Herding Code, .Net Rocks. Always looking for more though.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#100

Post by benologist »

grossvogel wrote: post #22
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.

They're actively marketing their blog on HN -

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=fogcreek.com

Post reply on HN