Why Fogbugz lost to Jira • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#181

Post by Strom » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 2:17 AM UTC

philliphaydon wrote: post #169

manicdee wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if your installation is set up that way. Here's how I create a Jira ticket in my organisation: 1. Click "Create Issue", 2. type in a summary (the headline), 3. type in the detail, 3. Click "Create" If you have more stuff to fill out, that's an issue with your local configuration. Blame your Jira master, not Jira or Atlassian :D

Jeez so many replies to jira hate with. Oh buts how you configure it. Oh its this. It's that. Stop apologising for a shitty product. If a user find it hard. It's failed. End of story.

There is no universal solution. Every product will have users who find it hard to use. Speaking out about the fact that you find it manageable is valuable information and may show that there are more users who find it easy to use than not.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#182

Post by rsobers » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 2:21 AM UTC

Won based on what criteria?

Atlassian has over 1,100 employees. When I was at Fog Creek we had ~30.

So if we're talking about profit per employee, I can assure you the people who built FogBugz don't feel like they've lost anything.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#183

Post by dwd » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 2:40 AM UTC

Surprised no mention of Kiln which was a really nice product when I first used it back in 2008. The ability to inline comments in a code review that then hooked back to the job in FB was fantastic.

GitStash is getting there now, but the Jira integration is still a little lacking.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#184

Post by toyg » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 2:43 AM UTC

lmm wrote: post #122

I don't think it was Wasabi so much as Windows. You didn't have to use Wasabi to write plugins for FogBugz, but you did have to use .net. The kind of people who read Joel's blog run on *nix, and probably have some Java in their stack; if you give them a .war that runs on Tomcat then they know what to do, and if they don't know then there are plenty of open-source tutorials. If you're giving them a .net product to dep…

>"The kind of people who read Joel's blog run on nix, and probably have some Java in their stack"*

I'm afraid you're really off-base there. Spolsky is a MS alumni and his core followers have always been people living in the MS ecosystem. The forums he kept for a while were overwhelmingly populated by people talking of VB and then .NET. StackOverflow was clearly dominated by .Net questions for the first few years.

His choice of platform, when it came to developing his own software, was never really in doubt. Note that FogBugz was not even the actual product he started the company for; that was a proto-blogging publishing platform called CityDesk, which was Windows-only and meant for the general public. FogBugz was an internal tool that he pivoted on, thanks in great part to the cred he had built by blogging candidly on software development matters (at a time when this was very rare).

If you now see his customers as "running on *nix", it's because the world has changed. Now the bugtracker is looked after by devops, people who started working after the wave of cheap Linux server that built the modern web had long settled.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#185

Post by lugg » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 2:56 AM UTC

brazzledazzle wrote: post #131

lugg wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still going to blame Jira/Atlassian for making that workflow possible. My work flow is exactly the same as yours, yet it still feels clunky, and is quite correctly, a total dog. Much like, you know, going to the DMV.

You only have to enter two fields in your workflow and it feels clunky? This doesn't jive with my experience at all but perhaps you're on an old version or it's resource starved. Once you start beating up jira or confluence you have to start tweaking defaults and jvm settings to get the most out of it.

It's a managed account.

The 2 fields workflow doesn't feel too clunky, but the interface certainly is, and the speed, oh dear lord, the speed. Its just sooo slow.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#186

Post by jeffmk » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 2:57 AM UTC

xrstf wrote: post #141

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/

We used Redmine for a while, but never got the Ruby stack to perform good (we are a PHP shop, so..). I remember the insane version dependencies ("redmine revision x to y needs package P in revision a to b") and that it seemed to stagnate in its development. In the end I'm happy we ditched it in favor of Trello.

Love Trello. I'd like a locally installable version of that integrated with something like Gitlab (maybe this already exists, I haven't bothered to look).

It always seemed a bit slow to me as well. The dependencies issue may be fixed with modern usage of rvm-/rbenv-type things, but I haven't messed with Redmine for a couple years. It's funny you mention the pace of development too; the community actually forked at once point [1], I believe due to frustration with how the development community was being handled. That fork is dead now though.

[1] https://www.chiliproject.org/

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#187

Post by meshko » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 3:03 AM UTC

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!

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#188

Post by retrogradeorbit » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 3:10 AM UTC

iwwr wrote: post #107

codeulike wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you find that this really works out, in practice? No. Good luck persuading the management to try something else!

There may be a niche for enlightened managers or startup funders to promote such a thinking. If successful it will lead to a clear competitive advantage.

This is true. But there is no competitive advantage in going and broadcasting to all your competitors exactly how you achieved the advantage. So the development shops that succeed using this will keep it tight.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#189

Post by mangeletti » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 3:14 AM UTC

What about the name? He could have potentially left out the most important mistake Spolsky ever made, which is to name a product Fog Buzz. He might as well have named it Rain Smelt, or Lamp Shade. It sounds terrific once you use and like the product, but it doesn't sound remnisent of any kind of successful brand ever. Even the use of 2 words is a departure from the norm. Most of the big brands have 1-word names, and this is not s coincidence. Even Facebook was changed from The Facebook. Brand matters, and names matter.

To play devil's advocate with my own argument, 37 Signals is a bit different as well and people (perhaps more so in the tech community) loved the brand, but the thing is, they used "Basecamp" as their product name.

Re: Why Fogbugz lost to Jira

#190

Post by baus » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 3:16 AM UTC

Vendan wrote: post #145

spolsky wrote: post #121

Sorry, Prashant, you lost track of the plot of the story somewhere along the way. (creator of FogBugz, here) FogBugz won and Jira won, but they were playing different games. I wanted to make software development better for programmers. When I started creating Fog Creek Software in 2000 programmers were treated like typists. They were not paid very well (my starting salary was $33,000). There was almost no thought aro…

wow, $33,000 15 years ago? That really puts a spin on me making $36,000 6 months ago, working in 4 languages and 2 platforms to build a really complicated SPA web app and mac flash content player system. Glad I got out of that job!

From my own personal experience, things weren't bad in the late 90s up to the point of the .com crash. Starting salaries in valley were $45k-$55k. There was a lot of competition for strong candidates, and working conditions were pretty decent. I do commend Spolsky for providing good working conditions in a market like NYC where the current trend seems to be to jam as many people in a space as possible.