Why Fogbugz lost to Jira • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#161

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

chetanahuja wrote: post #159

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 e…

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 ...

Joel started Fog Creek in 2000, but began programming professionally much earlier than that.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#162

Post by amyjess » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 1:22 AM UTC

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…

Yes, I've never liked anything about JIRA's UI.

I much prefer the UI used in Trac and its clones (e.g. Redmine), which is simple and straightforward.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#163

Post by btilly » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 1:23 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…

You may have arrived at this view now, but it isn't believable that you never saw them as direct competition with you.

For example http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/07/20.html makes it clear that you were adding features so that people wouldn't have to switch to "THE AUSTRALIANS". Which is a pretty clear reference to Atlassian.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#164

Post by chris_hawk » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 1:24 AM UTC

mijustin wrote: post #152

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.

In reality, it's a double-win relative to the goals each company was striving for - and acheived!

In the author's mind, Jira wins because it's OMG ENTERPRISE and going public.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#165

Post by amyjess » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 1:31 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/

I use Redmine at my current employer, and I really like it. Reminds me a lot of Trac, which I used two companies ago and loved.

By the way, at my last employer, we rapidly switched between a number of trackers. At first, we used Unfuddle for our proprietary projects and Assembla's custom Trac for our open-source projects. Well, theoretically at least; in practice, we did very little with Assembla as a bug tracker (which is a shame, because I love Trac). At some point, we switched to using OpenERP for everything. it was terrible. Then we switched to JIRA, and it was only slightly less terrible.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#166

Post by Daishiman » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 1:32 AM UTC

caf wrote: post #140

shanemhansen wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

More like "pick one".

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#167

Post by tbrock » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 1:38 AM UTC

  This meant they couldn't use all of the ecosystem and amazing tooling around Java

I've never laughed so hard in my entire life.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#168

Post by dodders » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 1:40 AM UTC

DavidPlumpton wrote: post #91

omouse wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My first job was writing JCL decks on an IBM ESA/390. We had several shelves of manuals for the thing. And people read them.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#169

Post by philliphaydon » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 1:44 AM UTC

manicdee wrote: post #57

command_tab wrote: post #16

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

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

Jeez so many replies to jira hate with. Oh buts how you configure it. Oh its this. It's that. Stop apologising for a shitty product. If a user find it hard. It's failed. End of story.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#170

Post by philliphaydon » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 1:45 AM UTC

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.

Never met anyone who likes it. Except the replies to this blog post.