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Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

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Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#221

Post by nl »

wpietri wrote: post #128
nl wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> They set a project delivery date and you just have to hit it. > Do you find that this really works out, in practice? Of course it works. You just redefine the project (or parts of the project) as you go, shrinking (or occasionally growing) the scope. There's nothing wrong with a fixed delivery date, provided you can adjust scope and/or resources (to some extent) to compensate.

That is not my understanding of what most large companies do. Over and over I talk to people who have to deal with fixed dates and fixed scopes. The common outcomes seem to be: 1. Wait until the date is close. Redefine scope in a panic so that success can be declared. 2. Wait until the date has arrived or is past. Have rounds of tears and/or shouting; pick a new date and scope, often as illusory as the first. 3. When…

I've been in all these situations.

The key is to over communicate. When I'm managing a project like that in a situation like that I send an email similar to this:

As it currently stands our team will not make the deadline. In order to meet our priorities, I would like to redefine "feature A" to exclude "component Z". This means we will have to do manual work around X. The following alternatives are available: (A) change the deadline, (B) move feature A to next release, (C) remove some other feature". In the absence of any other guidance I'll direct the team to follow the plan above. Happy to discuss further.

I've always found this is a pretty effective strategy. Big companies aren't often dumb, you just need to know how to operate in them.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#222

Post by keypusher »

wpietri wrote: post #128
nl wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> They set a project delivery date and you just have to hit it. > Do you find that this really works out, in practice? Of course it works. You just redefine the project (or parts of the project) as you go, shrinking (or occasionally growing) the scope. There's nothing wrong with a fixed delivery date, provided you can adjust scope and/or resources (to some extent) to compensate.

That is not my understanding of what most large companies do. Over and over I talk to people who have to deal with fixed dates and fixed scopes. The common outcomes seem to be: 1. Wait until the date is close. Redefine scope in a panic so that success can be declared. 2. Wait until the date has arrived or is past. Have rounds of tears and/or shouting; pick a new date and scope, often as illusory as the first. 3. When…

Indeed, there are many wrong ways to go about doing things. That doesn't mean there aren't also correct ways, and companies who do them that way. In many cases, big projects at large companies require a date. This is how you accomplish that goal.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#223

Post by porker »

simoncion wrote: post #206
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've used Redmine. It's a MUCH better Trac. Out of the box, it's ugly, but -frankly- who cares? We're all programmers here, and value proper function much more highly than lacquered handles. :)

> Out of the box, it's ugly, but -frankly- who cares? We're all programmers here

Uhh, humans? ;)

I find a better-looking tool to be more pleasant to work with, and Redmine was not-as-painful-but-almost as JIRA for me, for the experience being so poor.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#224

Post by olavk »

outworlder wrote: post #3
JimDabell wrote: post #2

There's an interesting discussion happening on Reddit involving ex-employees of both companies: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3n2sc1/why_fog...

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…

They could have achieved the same (same code on client and server) if they had just written in JavaScript/JScript though. I bet JavaScript is also easier to translate to PHP and C# than VBScript. They also claim that Wasabi made it possible for them to add closures to VBScript. Cool, but again, using JavaScript from the beginning would have been a lot easier.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#225

Post by keypusher »

mwhuber wrote: post #33
outworlder wrote: post #15

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. Exactly. There are some companies that go so overboard with Jira customizations that a single "create new issue" requires hitting page down three times to get to the end. And they arrive at that by adding a field here for the QA team, a field there for the Sales team... In the end, you get a mons…

We use vanilla Jira and I find it painful - over-reliance on modals, slow JS calls, etc.; I do enjoy Source Tree. As a PM, Pivotal Tracker (used in a previous life) is one of the best work-tools I've ever used.

Pivotal isn't really a bug tracker though, is it? It's more for tracking project tasks. On some projects, these might be similar things, but when you have a large QA team and customer support teams, I don't think it's going to cut it.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#226

Post by keypusher »

omouse wrote: post #32
mariusmg wrote: post #10

Seems to me Atlassian "won" because they had a actual sales team not because of "technology".

They won because they allow managers to be in control and authoritarians. I've seen more than 2 managers who take over JIRA and lock down permissions and create custom workflows and all of them insist on having swim lanes and 5+ columns. So to move one little ticket across the board took 4+ drags. If you have a heavy-weight process where people are actually signing off on things, then yes it makes sense. But otherwis…

If management is that messed up, it really doesn't matter what bug tracker you use. Jira is more flexible, and threfore your bad managers can bend it to their will more easily. The solution to the problem is to find new managers.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#227

Post by peripitea »

hravnx wrote: post #207
radmuzom wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is not talking about software development methodologies, he is talking about the role of people (mostly developers) in the software development process.

If you think the software methodologies of Olden Times did not consider the role of people in the software development process you are mistaken. They might seem archaic (and even wrong) when we look at them today, but still: smart people put a lot of thought into the methods, they were hotly debated among professionals, books were written, and consultants made money teaching and preaching them. In other words, not th…

There have always been people who thought about how to make software development better, but there were far fewer of them, both in software and in management. Relative to what we have now, I think it's absolutely fair to say that there was almost no thought about it.

Even ten years ago I was convincing my co-workers and manager that we should be able to run our build without human intervention; today I would not believe you if you told me your team had that problem, let alone that people disagreed it was a problem.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#229

Post by emmelaich »

meshko wrote: post #187
meshko wrote: post #101

Never used Fogz, but Atlassian products are so astonishingly bad that it is hard to find anything about them inspiring.

I think the fact that my useless inflammatory comment didn't get immediately downvoted to hell is proof that I'm right!

"bad" by itself doesn't mean much; the important thing is the relative goodness.

What were open source projects going to us instead? RequestTracker? Scarab? Bugzilla?

All of those were much worse than JIRA for development.

RT is fine for helpdesks but ugly as hell and no integration with SCMs.

Scarab never got to a satisfactory level of maturity.

Bugzilla? Just say no.

I've been a JIRA admin for 5 years now, and we seriously considered Fogbugz as well. I've never regretted our decision even though we've had plenty of issues() with JIRA.

free pun included.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#230

Post by jordigh »

rajksarkar wrote: post #129
mixmastamyk wrote: post #17

On the other hand, I wish bitbucket were more popular compared to github. It doesn't seem like they invest much into bitbucket, as some silly issues have persisted for years. Have they given up?

Nor true - we have been investing quite a lot on Bitbucket. Check out our most recent blog post: http://blog.bitbucket.org/2015/09/22/1-in-3-fortune-500-comp...

You're letting Mercurial die, though.

And for all that investing, you are not fixing the bugs that annoy people the most. You let them languish for years:

https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/11813/allow-annotat...

https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/5008

https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/11864/ignore-whites...

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