Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

> a service that aims to give enterprises plan their strategic projects and workstreams

???

Interesting software. My spidey sense tells me that your team will need at least 1 FTE just to massage whatever kind of workflow is required to get stuff in Jira to play nice with this. These tools that promise insight into what is actually happening within prod/eng teams are always really great on paper but in actuality I have never seen one work.

"Yeah so there is a dusty old EC2 instance running on so-and-so's old IAM role (who is now terminated, but we can't kill their IAM or things will break) running this .jar which tries to take our JIRA stuff from these 3 projects and merge it into a pseudo "fake" project named "KPI BOARD DO NOT EDIT" that gets sync'd with a lambda function every hour to AgileCraft via a Google sheet. If this box isn't running then the KPI reports don't get generated in metabase and the board is going to lose their shit. Make sure to check the disk with df next time you login because it fills up ocassionally."

Not really, it‘s for high-level planning, e.g. for features that involve multiple teams and often multiple companies. Mostly helpful for large-scale organizations. Jira is used one level below that.

FYI it’s Full Time _Equivalent_. E.g a new feature may require 1 FTE for 1 week. That doesn’t necessarily mean 1 person 1 week. It may be 2 people 2.5 days each, etc.

They just don't seem to care. You research something - after hours you'll end up at their bugtracker, where you can read the desperation of others (often some issues are not fixed in 10+ years). I don't understand their priorities. There is to date still no way to restrict visibility of work-logs on issues - a usecase basically every smaller shop has because the client is often participating directly in the JIRA. Service Desk solves that problem but it's quite expensive and you can't mix software projects with service desk projects. So you have to create linked-issues and have yet another layer of indirection :/

We end up syncing projects with another plugin on the same instance :/

Confluence lacking some robust text-only markup (like markdown or asciidoc or whatever) is also more than lame. It shouldn't be that hard because most macros can be configured by text attributes anyway... Expose that Wiki in a readable markdown format and have me let git... like github gist would be more than enough. I despise using Confluence at the moment...

Gitlab could eat their lunch but they also seem to have their priorities off

All this advanced tracking/planning stuff from companies like Atlassian seem to me like some kind of weird, dystopian "C-Suite-Porn."

The going narrative seems to be this idea that companies have, throughout the history of business, been guided completely by the whims and emotional fancies of the leadership team and/or CEO. And now we're adding tools to surface more and more status tracking information up to the C Suite, which is going to directly lead to better decision-making that moves the company forward.

This seems like nonsense to me. Imo, leaders set the culture, network outside the company, and guide longer-term strategic vision, while directors wrangle the people and manage alignment with higher level goals, and team leads make the projects happen by empowering and supporting the IC's who do the actual day to day work.

I just don't understand the value proposition for a company as a whole to putting more data on the plate of higher-ups at any level above team leaders (1st level management, with all-IC direct-reports). We need analysis and summary tooling that doesn't add any overhead to team leaders and ICs, not more overhead on the people actually getting things done. We need better information on the desks of leadership, not more data points. We need more efficient communication tools, essentially "better nozzles," as opposed to higher flow rate in the company-information-firehose.

These products seem to play directly into the psyche of the typical narcissist CEO who wants to know everything that is going on at the company, right now, and micromanage everything directly. The incentives don't seem very well-aligned with things like "servant leadership" and "cross-functional knowledge," because, how do you make those into a Jira ticket that will be tracked towards your performance reviews? If it's cross-functional then which functional task-board does it belong to?