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Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

movingfulcrum.com

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Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#131

Post by brazzledazzle »

lugg wrote: post #115
manicdee wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if your installation is set up that way. Here's how I create a Jira ticket in my organisation: 1. Click "Create Issue", 2. type in a summary (the headline), 3. type in the detail, 3. Click "Create" If you have more stuff to fill out, that's an issue with your local configuration. Blame your Jira master, not Jira or Atlassian :D

I'm still going to blame Jira/Atlassian for making that workflow possible. My work flow is exactly the same as yours, yet it still feels clunky, and is quite correctly, a total dog. Much like, you know, going to the DMV.

You only have to enter two fields in your workflow and it feels clunky? This doesn't jive with my experience at all but perhaps you're on an old version or it's resource starved. Once you start beating up jira or confluence you have to start tweaking defaults and jvm settings to get the most out of it.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#132

Post by pdeva1 »

spolsky wrote: post #121

Sorry, Prashant, you lost track of the plot of the story somewhere along the way. (creator of FogBugz, here) FogBugz won and Jira won, but they were playing different games. I wanted to make software development better for programmers. When I started creating Fog Creek Software in 2000 programmers were treated like typists. They were not paid very well (my starting salary was $33,000). There was almost no thought aro…

I appreciate the response Joel and remain a big fan of your blog.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#133

Post by stephen_g »

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…

The Jira and Stash (now Bitbucket Server) UI has come a long way in the last little while.

I think I have our company's Jira set up quite nicely, and really the only things that annoy me are the dropdowns (why isn't the selected item shown? Super confusing...) and not switching to Markdown for comment formatting.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#134

Post by nirvdrum »

vacri wrote: post #103
nobleach wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atlassian products tend to make me SO mad in this way. Confluence, can I just use markdown? No! Forget that I used it in so many other places. Oh but wait, someone may have built an importer... try to get that installed.

Confluence used to use markdown and wysiwyg, and about 5 years ago abandoned markdown to reduce development costs. They have a lot of non-developer users using Confluence, who aren't good with things like markdown. Our shop didn't like it, of course, since we were all capable of markdown and wysiwyg is never actually wysiwyg.

I could be wrong, but I think it used textile (I believe Confluence predates markdown). I'm not sure it matters a whole lot, but if you wanted markdown it's likely you would have felt underwhelmed with textile.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#135

Post by stephen_g »

Domenic_S wrote: post #19
rabid_fish wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used both, and I can only imagine your complaints about JIRA's UI are due to how it's been configured for your use. The out of the box user experience is the best I've seen for a web application. A robust yet easy to use 'search' feature is at the heart of many things, like the scrum and kanban boards, as well as widgets that can be put on your own personalize dashboard. You get a nice visual designer for settin…

Whoever designed JIRA's psuedo-markdown text format deserves a special place in hell.

I fully agree that it's well past the time to switch to Markdown. That and the dropdown things are my main annoyances with JIRA.

It does make sense when you think about the context though - JIRA pre-dates Markdown by two years (according to Wikipedia) and Markdown has only got really popular in the last five years. Back when Jira's text formatting came in, everybody was doing their own thing...

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#136

Post by martingordon »

My Jira experience was absolutely terrible. We were an 8 person team at time and looking for something more robust than Trello and ended up settling on Pivotal Tracker.

I signed us up for an Atlassian Cloud trial and right away things weren't looking good. I was expecting to dive right in but instead had to wait 30 minutes until my instance was ready or whatever.

They only offer a 7-day trial. How am I supposed to properly evaluate something as fundamental as an issue tracker in 7 days? That's not long enough to learn to use it and then get the team to try it out for a small project.

Worst of all were the 5-10 second load times on each page. I contacted support to see what they could do but they weren't too helpful and I stopped using it 2 hours into the 7 day trial.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#137

Post by wpietri »

zkhalique wrote: post #102

I have a question about raising VC money earlier. If you want to grow fast and push some free platform out to change the world, what is main danger in raising VC? I'm talking about the VCs these days who invest in companies that make open source like NGiNX, MySQL etc. And you need resources to grow, if you want to beat competitor platforms. I mean logically, if they've already given you the money and there isn't any…

Once you take money from investors, you have both a legal and a moral responsibility to them.

It's important to remember that selling equity is really selling something, just like selling a product. You can't sell something, take somebody's money, and then just not deliver. What you are selling to investors, generally, is return on investment.

The real problem comes in because founders and VCs have different understandings of "grow fast". There will come choices that have different levels of risk. VCs always want you to take the high-risk, high-reward path, because they have a portfolio company and are looking for the few really big winners. You, on the other hand, are trying to build something (team, community, product, etc), and so you will favor slower but safer growth.

I guess in theory you could sell VCs on a high-growth approach and then turn around and say, "Ha ha, fuck you, we're going to keep your money and try to grow modestly." But a) VCs are way better at their game than you are, so they're hard to fool, and b) then you're an asshole, which is bad on its own and also has consequences for future relationships (and future funding). Plus, if you're in a VC-fundable space, you'll probably have competitors who are also taking money, and they'll be able to outspend you on future rounds.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#138

Post by vacri »

nirvdrum wrote: post #134
vacri wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Confluence used to use markdown and wysiwyg, and about 5 years ago abandoned markdown to reduce development costs. They have a lot of non-developer users using Confluence, who aren't good with things like markdown. Our shop didn't like it, of course, since we were all capable of markdown and wysiwyg is never actually wysiwyg.

I could be wrong, but I think it used textile (I believe Confluence predates markdown). I'm not sure it matters a whole lot, but if you wanted markdown it's likely you would have felt underwhelmed with textile.

Sorry, yes. Confluence had a markup language. it didn't use Markdown.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#139

Post by xrstf »

martingordon wrote: post #136

My Jira experience was absolutely terrible. We were an 8 person team at time and looking for something more robust than Trello and ended up settling on Pivotal Tracker. I signed us up for an Atlassian Cloud trial and right away things weren't looking good. I was expecting to dive right in but instead had to wait 30 minutes until my instance was ready or whatever. They only offer a 7-day trial. How am I supposed to pr…

In my experience, most Atlassian products are slow as hell, with Bitbucket being among the faster ones. Confluence can maybe control a space shuttle with all its features, but it's slow to a point where it becomes unusable.

We evaluated JIRA as well, but it didn't work well for people like who are in many different projects at once and don't want to spend days trying to build a view for all those issues (that encompasses swim lanes and such). Also, as you've mentioned, it's pretty slow.

We settled with Trello and are relatively happy.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#140

Post by caf »

shanemhansen wrote: post #125
pinaceae wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

absolutely in enterprise SaaS. beginning with Salesforce.com downwards you have vendors releasing on a fixed schedule. your valve is scope, but even that is fairly fixed as customers drive what needs to get released when (not "stupid" managers).

Frankly the valve is often quality. Quite often something ships on a date. That something is usually crap. In order to get schedule to change, you'd have to convince salespeople to do something. They are generally the ones doing the convincing. In order to get the features to change, you'd have to get a product manager to give up what they want to build "because of technical reasons". That doesn't happen often. But i…

A classic "pick two" situation: Fixed Ship Date, Fixed Scope, Fixed Quality.
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