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Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

techcrunch.com

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Re: Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

#21

Post by GordonS »

Benjammer wrote: post #10

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 Su…

> seem to me like some kind of weird, dystopian "C-Suite-Porn."

I hate Confluence and am absolutely stealing that phrase!

Re: Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

#22

Post by emmelaich »

nisa wrote: post #8
keithnz wrote: post #7

I've been really unimpressed with atlassian over the last few years. We started with bitbucket before it was acquired, it was super robust, then once atlassian got it slowly small bug after small bug kept making it into production creating mini headaches and they never seem like its super important to them. We also have Confluence, which is okish, but again, small bug after small bug keeps creeping in, like at the mo…

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. Ser…

I'm not sure whether you'd prefer the alternative -- to not publish feature and bugfix requests. Like many other companies do.

Atlassian should be congratulated for being open!

Re: Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

#23

Post by rmk2 »

nisa wrote: post #8
keithnz wrote: post #7

I've been really unimpressed with atlassian over the last few years. We started with bitbucket before it was acquired, it was super robust, then once atlassian got it slowly small bug after small bug kept making it into production creating mini headaches and they never seem like its super important to them. We also have Confluence, which is okish, but again, small bug after small bug keeps creeping in, like at the mo…

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. Ser…

There is a "suggestion" somewhere that asked them to implement service accounts for API access. They essentially replied with "this is a good idea and we should do this". That post was from 2012 or so, and we still don't have service accounts.

Re: Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

#24

Post by opportune »

whalesalad wrote: post #2

> 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 hav…

IME there are only two kinds of Ops structures. Either you have an organized, byzantine, inflexible system with way too many developers actually working on ops full time, or you have this kind of system which is more flexible in the short term but becomes an operational nightmare as technical debt accrues and accrues. I'm not sure if there is a way to get something in the middle.

The second system is a result of Agile methodology where some dev makes the mistake of telling the PM/management "well, we could get it deployed today if we just do [terribly hacky unmaintainable thing]" and gets the ok because the project is two weeks behind and half the team is going on vacation next month. The first system is the result of the "everything must fit the spec" methodology where you have excessivley long and inflexible iteration cycles, usually because you are an older more enterprisey organization.

Re: Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

#25

Post by jondubois »

My view of Atlassian's project management tools and services is that they can allow terrible managers to become mediocre managers (which is not great but still an improvement) but no matter how much they try, they can never turn a mediocre manager into a good manager.

The value proposition of Atlassian is that their software can give a manager more visibility over the technical/engineering processes within their company; but this improved visibility is useless unless the manager has both a clear vision and a deep technical understanding of their project.

No amount of tooling can match the value of having technical understanding of the project. For example, Jira can generate a lot of pretty charts and workflow visualizations which create a great illusion of progress but this illusion typically comes at the expense of real progress.

Re: Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

#26

Post by drum »

politician wrote: post #20
drum wrote: post #14

After using Jira for the last 2 years, Atlassian has struck me as the 800 pound gorilla that's resting on its laurels. On my dashboard, I'm consistently annoyed by being shown the option of creating a new user account and having to decipher the UI to choose wether my ticket is a bug or feature during mission critical moments. Just give me one big button that says 'Create Ticket', we'll figure out the rest later. Seco…

What's Voltron? Their SEO must be poor because Googling "Atlassian vs Voltron" brings up TFS as the top hit and a page full of Atlassian spam.

Doh! Thanks for asking. Voltron is a white labeled version of Jira (which I did not realize when writing my post). Edited.

Re: Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

#27

Post by naringas »

nisa wrote: post #8
keithnz wrote: post #7

I've been really unimpressed with atlassian over the last few years. We started with bitbucket before it was acquired, it was super robust, then once atlassian got it slowly small bug after small bug kept making it into production creating mini headaches and they never seem like its super important to them. We also have Confluence, which is okish, but again, small bug after small bug keeps creeping in, like at the mo…

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. Ser…

> I don't understand their priorities.

enterprise sales contracts

Re: Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

#28

Post by nerdwaller »

keithnz wrote: post #7

I've been really unimpressed with atlassian over the last few years. We started with bitbucket before it was acquired, it was super robust, then once atlassian got it slowly small bug after small bug kept making it into production creating mini headaches and they never seem like its super important to them. We also have Confluence, which is okish, but again, small bug after small bug keeps creeping in, like at the mo…

I believe this was post acquisition: An old company was on BitBucket (which we called internally “shitbucket” because of the frequent 500s) until we went on-prem to control our updates and mitigate bugs actually impacting us (I think this was “stash”). It was amazing how an “enterprise” system was so unreliable and companies still paid for it.

Re: Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

#29

Post by jacques_chester »

DavidPiper wrote: post #9

I don't read a lot of TechCrunch, but did anybody else find this article quite poorly (perhaps hastily) written? (My apologies to the author for the flippancy of that question) An incorrect word in the opening sentence, a few places where tenses are mixed or incorrect, and generally long-winded sentences... Is this usual for TechCrunch? Regardless, interesting news to wake up to - I'll be interested to watch the dire…

It looks to be a lightly-edited press release. Very common for journalists in a hurry to make quota or get the first link up.

Re: Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

#30

Post by ykevinator »

keithnz wrote: post #7

I've been really unimpressed with atlassian over the last few years. We started with bitbucket before it was acquired, it was super robust, then once atlassian got it slowly small bug after small bug kept making it into production creating mini headaches and they never seem like its super important to them. We also have Confluence, which is okish, but again, small bug after small bug keeps creeping in, like at the mo…

I still don't know why they still exist.
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