Why Fogbugz lost to Jira • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#151

Post by nchelluri » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 1:01 AM UTC

jeffmk wrote: post #130

Has anyone had experience with Redmine [1]? It's quite easy to use and extend via its plugin system, but I don't see many people who have encountered it in the wild. I think its horrendous out-of-the-box look-and-feel detract heavily from its appeal. Nowadays I'd probably lean toward Gitlab, which seems to offer much of the same but appears much more modern. [1] https://www.redmine.org/

Having used FogBugz, JIRA, and RedMine, as a developer, my order of preference is:

1 - fogbugz

2 - redmine

3 - jira

I actually found myself pretty comfortable with Redmine's UI and its integrated wiki. Fogbugz was very easy for me to use, but I last used it ~7 years ago.

It may be possible to get JIRA configured so it works nicely, but in general I find I am always running into some kind of workflow issues. It does work, it just seems to take more effort and sometimes me or my teammates come up with ways to work around things that are broken or just not smooth and that we don't have access rights to debug or fix.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#152

Post by mijustin » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 1:02 AM UTC

What metric are we using to determine who "won" here?

Did Jira "win" just because OP likes it better?

Because both companies are private, we don't really know how much profit either product has made.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#153

Post by taspeotis » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 1:02 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #147

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…

What I always fail to understand about Wasabi: why did they keep the code in the source language and compile to CLR object code, instead of running the same parser with a different codegen target, to transform the PHP wholesale into valid C# once , and then overwrite the codebase with that?

From the linked HN comment:

> the C# code was not human-readable

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#154

Post by dang » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 1:02 AM UTC

gaius wrote: post #55

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.

Have you considered the possibility that your cow-orkers hate it, and by extension, you?

> your cow-orkers hate it, and by extension, you

I'm guessing you meant this as a joke, but such jokes come across as personal attacks, which are not ok here.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#155

Post by nchelluri » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 1:08 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #150

nchelluri wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really want to inherit autogenerated code? I doubt the autogenerated C# would be nearly as easy to understand or read as the original Wasabi code. I also think writing CLR object code, if it's anything like writing assembly, would be much easier to generate than C#.

Well, it is what they eventually did, after ten years. With tons of tweaks to make it spit out natural-looking outputs. I just don't understand why they didn't go that way from the start.

I was unaware of that. I'm still betting they didn't go that way initially because of the inherent difficulties of autogenerating C# code.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#156

Post by doodpants » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 1:11 AM UTC

Steltek wrote: post #119

sbierwagen wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was that really the xkcd you wanted?

I actually misread the URL as https://xkcd.com/927/ (having memorized that number like everyone else here, I'm sure) until I saw your comment. #277 is definitely not right.

#277 sure seems to me like a reasonable reply to "Whoever designed deserves a special place in hell", which is what it was posted in response to.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#157

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 1:13 AM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#158

Post by grossvogel » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 1:13 AM UTC

benologist wrote: post #100

grossvogel wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You're right, I hadn't even considered the Fog Creek blog, but the article specifically talks about Joel on Software.

And Atlassian's blog seems to be in the same ballpark as Fog Creek's: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=atlassian.com

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#159

Post by chetanahuja » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 1:17 AM UTC

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…

"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)."

OK someone has to call bullshit on this. I started as a lowly software engineer straight out of school at the same time. I started at 70K (east cost, not NY). You lost me right at the beginning there and any desire I might have had to go through your wall of text evaporated immediately.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#160

Post by keithwarren » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 1:18 AM UTC

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 think the world has figured out that programmers are writing the script for the future that everybody is going to live in"

Well put.