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Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

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Re: Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

#61

Post by mansilladev »

applecrazy wrote: post #48
sytse wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean we're not going after Confluence or JIRA? Wikis are certainly not a priority for us. I think if you don't separate the proposer from the person who accepts the proposal the wiki tends to grow stale. So we're betting on static websites with GitLab Pages. There is a large market for wikis but you would have to use something easier than markdown, which is hard for us to get away from. We're going after JIRA. In…

The service desk feature is nice, but maybe having a form for people to fill out to file a support request would be even better. That way, people can file requests without directly opening their email client. Just a small thought :)

Jira Service Desk does come with a portal and forms to create requests (in addition to supporting email).

Re: Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

#62

Post by rfc »

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…

I was going to use a throwaway but f-it. You, sir, are literally 100% correct.

My day job is working for a company that competes with Jira. There is a huge trend in the enterprise space to replace their PPM tools with something that is "more agile but still has accountability".

What has happened is enterprises realize they need to change how they do business in order to compete. So, they implement agile, slap a new "trendy" software on top of it that isn't Planview and BAM! We're in digital transformation mode - right?

Here's a super dirty secret that will come as no surprise to folks in this forum: organizations that do this see, quantifiably, very low change in velocity. They see higher levels of accountabilty which, a nasty byproduct of this, is siloed teams and company politics (ever heard "that's not my job"?). In fact, people who institute software like this experience an increase in overhead for creating decks, dashboards, and the like to report out on how "accurate" their timelines are. Guess what? The project timeline rebase rate for MOST enterprises is still the same or higher.

What I do find fascinating is that there is a small subculture of companies who are getting that it's not the software that makes them better - its the culture. And the culture starts with their managers. To further this, the ones that we see become most effective that that BS term "digital transformation" and ultimately more competitive/innovative, are the ones who get rid of their managers and hire leaders who can lead a culture, lead teams, inspire them, push them, and GTFO out of their way. In our research, teams and organizations that focus on outcomes instead of deadlines produce faster, higher quality, and measurably larger ROI than ones that don't.

Anyway... sorry for the rant. This is a sore topic in our company right now because we tout that we're helping shape the new world of work yet internally we do the same stuff we've always done.

Re: Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

#63

Post by scruple »

pcurve wrote: post #56
GordonS wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> seem to me like some kind of weird, dystopian "C-Suite-Porn." I hate Confluence and am absolutely stealing that phrase!

I think he/she was commenting more about JIRA. Confluence is actually pretty useful.

In your opinion. My own experience with Confluence is that it's essentially write-only memory. So much documentation that goes in to my companies Confluence becomes outdated _very_ quickly, but is rarely, if ever, actually kept up-to-date. This leads to a system whereby people appear to be generating a lot of functional utility for our company and our documentation purposes but it's little more than noise when you are actually trying to find that utility.

Re: Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

#64

Post by sbergot »

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…

Currently the markdown macro kills itself when you try to use it. You have to clear your browser localstorage to recover (from the console error it seems to contain a malformed json).

Re: Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

#65

Post by jschwartzi »

ndnxhs wrote: post #51
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'm amazed bitbucket still exists considering both gitlab and github are so far ahead of it. I have to use it at work and its missing half the features I need.

I'm only a Bitbucket user because it's the only way I can get hosted Mercurial repositories. The Mercurial workflow is a lot simpler than Git and was much easier to learn. Git expects you to want to mess with history and accumulate changes into a special "staging" changeset before committing which just felt odd compared to Mercurial where I can commit and then keep amending the same commit.

Re: Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

#66

Post by pjmlp »

scruple wrote: post #63
pcurve wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he/she was commenting more about JIRA. Confluence is actually pretty useful.

In your opinion. My own experience with Confluence is that it's essentially write-only memory. So much documentation that goes in to my companies Confluence becomes outdated _very_ quickly, but is rarely, if ever, actually kept up-to-date. This leads to a system whereby people appear to be generating a lot of functional utility for our company and our documentation purposes but it's little more than noise when you ar…

Still better than emails and office documents scattered around the internal network.

Re: Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

#67

Post by jupp0r »

I feel like all Atlassian products I’ve used so far have been made for winning feature checkbox comparisons. They all get the job done somehow, but nobody I know would actually choose them over tools whose makers actually care about their users instead of users IT departments.

Re: Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

#68

Post by jupp0r »

scruple wrote: post #63
pcurve wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he/she was commenting more about JIRA. Confluence is actually pretty useful.

In your opinion. My own experience with Confluence is that it's essentially write-only memory. So much documentation that goes in to my companies Confluence becomes outdated _very_ quickly, but is rarely, if ever, actually kept up-to-date. This leads to a system whereby people appear to be generating a lot of functional utility for our company and our documentation purposes but it's little more than noise when you ar…

Don’t forget about the search that is only ever useful when you know what’s on the page you’re searching for.

Re: Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

#69

Post by scruple »

pjmlp wrote: post #66
scruple wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your opinion. My own experience with Confluence is that it's essentially write-only memory. So much documentation that goes in to my companies Confluence becomes outdated _very_ quickly, but is rarely, if ever, actually kept up-to-date. This leads to a system whereby people appear to be generating a lot of functional utility for our company and our documentation purposes but it's little more than noise when you ar…

Still better than emails and office documents scattered around the internal network.

I'll absolutely grant you that it's better than internal networks. No arguments there. I think that I do prefer e-mail, though, because, at least with Office 365 and Outlook, the search function is actually useful compared to my experiences with Confluence.

Re: Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

#70

Post by shimms »

jupp0r wrote: post #67

I feel like all Atlassian products I’ve used so far have been made for winning feature checkbox comparisons. They all get the job done somehow, but nobody I know would actually choose them over tools whose makers actually care about their users instead of users IT departments.

Genuinely curious - what would you choose over Jira for agile/product planning and work item tracking?

I’ve been increasingly falling out of love with Jira, but all the alternatives lack core features.

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