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Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

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Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#171

Post by mmatants »

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…

Here's the issue, though - no matter how violently we may agree on the downsides of traditional project management, opinionated tools are just ahead of their time. The market is not at all ready to agree on what software workflow should look like. It just takes time for good techniques to propagate - this is such a young industry...

So until there is stable consensus among everyone up to even late adopters about how software work should be managed, any opinion built into the tool will end up being an obstacle for users who are still yet to learn agility the hard way.

The real value of an opinionated tool is the opinion itself. And that is something that has to be instilled first. Build a knowledge-base, a following, a community, then make the tool a companion piece.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#172

Post by EGreg »

wpietri wrote: post #137
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 understa…

No, assuming you're not an asshole, just want to reduce risk or make your own decisions in good faith, how can they force you to make a decision you normally wouldn't make?

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#173

Post by thedufer »

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?

> to transform the PHP wholesale into valid C# once

I'm not quite sure what you mean; PHP was only ever a target; there was no source in PHP. It was something VBScript-esque being compiled to both ASP (later C#) for Windows and PHP for Linux. This started, of course, long before Mono.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#174

Post by tptacek »

btilly wrote: post #163
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.

The whole quote you're referring to:

    FogBugz 7.0 will include a long list of simple
    improvements that will make life dramatically
    easier for people trying to get things done,
    especially when they want to do things just a wee
    bit differently than we do here in the Land of the
    Fog. Every little feature will be a delight for
    somebody, especially that person who keeps
    emailing us because he can't believe that the
    feature he wants which is obviously only six lines
    of code hasn't been implemented in FogBugz 1.0,
    2.0, 3.0, 4.0, "4.5", or 6.0, and if we don't get
    it soon he JUST MIGHT HAVE TO GO OVER TO THE
    AUSTRALIANS.
That reads like he's making fun of the idea that he's competing with Atlassian, not that he's existentially terrified of competing with Atlassian.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#176

Post by daemin »

buro9 wrote: post #63
skrebbel wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/277/

Every JIRA product has it's own special markup. I can never remember how to write code into comments or titles. It literally changes from product to product and yet all of the products orchestrate together so that if you do happen to use Stash, JIRA, Wiki, etc all together, then you encounter as many different markup languages as there are Atlassian products. It really is hellish. I hope there's some good reason why…

That's because almost every Atlassian product started off at a separate company that was then acquired.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#177

Post by overgard »

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…

Kinda depends on if it's more important to be on time vs complete. Sometimes hitting a window of time is more important than getting the feature done perfectly, like for an industry event that could build buzz, or a specific holiday season where being late means a lot of lost sales. The worst deadlines are fixed ones for no point, though.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#178

Post by StillBored »

UK-AL wrote: post #65
skrebbel wrote: post #27

A bit off topic, and I know I'm sounding like a condescending jerk here but I mean it: but why do people love bugs so much that they want to purchase an entire database program to track them? I mean, if you have more than 10 bugs that are highly important to keep track of, it seems to me that you have much larger problem than whether to purchase JIRA or FogBugz. I mean, either a bug is important to you so prioritize…

Theres not really "bug trackers", there issue trackers. All the micro tasks are created, organised and tracked though to completion. Often visually represented on a kanban board.

Which is a nice abstraction, but really fails with a little reflection. Bugs, shouldn't really have long lifecycles, dependency chains, target dates, etc... Features need these things but don't have wontfix, notabug, multiple branch targets, and discussions about reproduction. Which is why i always like running two different processes and joining the results at release mgmt/source tree level.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#179

Post by thedufer »

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

Atlassian could just as well title all of their engineers as "developers" and claim not to have an engineering team; the claim they're making is only true in a very narrow and ultimately meaningless sense.

They pay people to convince other companies to buy their product. The claim of "no sales people" stems from the fact that they only talk to people who contact them, rather than cold-calling.

This is, interestingly, also what the sales team at my company does. They are pretty sure they're doing sales, though, so we call them that.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#180

Post by toyg »

Vendan wrote: post #145
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…

wow, $33,000 15 years ago? That really puts a spin on me making $36,000 6 months ago, working in 4 languages and 2 platforms to build a really complicated SPA web app and mac flash content player system. Glad I got out of that job!

as others pointed out, 2000 is when he founded Fog Creek, not when he started programming. He was in MS when Excel was still competing against Lotus, so that salary is likely from the '90s.
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