Atlassian cripples’ Jira automation for all but enterprise customers

This is more or less my life as well.

The "finisher argument" that gets rolled out is "product lifetime costs". It goes like this.

Open Source Product A will always be your responsibility, which will take X hours off the team's time forever. Vendor Product B will be maintained from the vendor side, thus removing that wildcard of X. Ergo, over the "lifetime" of the product, B will have lower costs than A.

Since this argument has dollars in it, it always wins, and everyone makes smug faces.

I personally think it's almost completely ridiculous to evaluate software with anything called "lifetime costs", and honestly, it's getting pretty close to ridiculous to cite that metric for any complex system, physical or not. But that's just me[1].

I'd be interested to hear what the general readership's opinion is on whether or not the "Lifetime Costs" argument holds water, and why.

[1] In the software case, what's a "Product" "Lifetime"? Is that "the software in its current precise configuration", because then we're talking a lifetime of picoseconds. Or is Product defined so broadly that virtually any software of that class can be called "the Product", in which case you're stretching my credulity to say you're capable of supporting this notion of "Product" for N arbitrary period. I don't think you will make any money doing that. Either way . . when it comes to "lifetime costs" for physical complex systems, there's a supplementary argument, out of scope for this discussion, but still applicable in heavy industry.

We're using azure dev ops and recently started leveraging their Pm tool for our requirements management.

So far, I've been impressed. It took a little time to figure out how to operate within their paradigm. Once we tackled that, I don't see is going to another solution.

For better or worse, 365 is a pretty decent suite. Integration across their stack is a little schizo at times but it works well enough.

The only Achilles heel right now is ms project. They're planning on EoL it but in true Microsoft fashion are cagey when they plan on doing it and the replacement is lack luster at best. We're switching to Wrike instead which has so far been what we want.

In my experience at mid-sized companies the decision is usually made by the development teams themselves who have a choice along a spectrum between a proprietary SAAS solution that may end up costing the company unpredictable amounts of money in the future on one end and a self-hosted open source solution that we have to trust the IT/devops folks to maintain competently on the other.

Also in my experience, the companies that were the most cost sensitive with regard to paying for dev tooling were also the ones with the weakest IT/devops support so you either end up with two good options or two bad options.

Open Source project O will cost your team X hours of time to develop expertise in managing it.

Enterprise product E will cost your team X hours of time to develop expertise.

O requires install time. E either requires install time or integration time.

When O breaks, it is likely that the community has already seen this problem and can provide suggestions via docs, mailing list archives, discussion fora, blogs... Your team's expertise will increase. If your problem is interesting, the developers will likely get involved.

When E breaks, you will open a ticket. Within 24 hours, someone from the E company will try to diagnose your problem, going down a flowchart that they will not share with you. If your problem is in the FAQ or flowchart, it will get solved within a week, probably. If your problem is interesting, it may eventually be solved in a future release. Your team will spend less time working on it, but E will be broken for longer.

You will pay dollars to your team to support O, which will make them happier.

You will pay dollars to the E company to support E, which will make them happier.

The thing that drives me nuts about jira is its gated features and forced way of working. I should be able to turn on the initiative planning and work dashboard for a single project.

Case in point, I spent hours creating fancy new ticket tiers and guess what? They don't appear on the initiative planner because it goes outside what atlassian wants.

I've written this to them but they don't see the point in making an adaptable ticketing system. It is what it is