221–230 of 515 posts
Does anyone actually like using JIRA? Or Confluence? Or any of the Atlassian products?
You could see PRs related to a given ticket, see tickets in wiki, I'm sure it integrates well with CI (Bamboo/Pipelines?), etc. It might seem small, but such integration makes work more pleasant and comfortable.
> users can switch to a competitor product like Asana, Basecamp or Monday.com with minimal cost That's just plain nonsense. I dislike using Jira as much as anyone, mainly because it's so excruciatingly slow. But there is no competing product (suite) that offers comparable functionality and provides the same long-term flexibilty. Many companies have built entire workflows (not just development related) around Jira, an…
> Confluence is actually fine Confluence is the single, worst Atlassian product, in my opinion. I describe it as a wiki written by someone who has never used a wiki. It seems like everything about it is wrong in some way, and it's painful to use.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The alterntive for companies with many departments is usually using a variety of tools that all need to be in sync. Jira can be the one point that handles all workflows for all projects.
Latest versions of YouTrack come with a knowledge base and pretty flexible workflows support. I'm curious why YouTrack never seems to be listed as a Jira+Confluence competitor, given the similar target markets.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pre-coffee early morning spitballing so be kind… But what about storing documentation as flat files in version control? What about even storing tickets as flat files in version control?
If the entire company was just you and me, that'd be very tedious but otherwise fine. But even software companies have non-software people on their staff, who are less likely to know how Git works, but can spot some problems we developer folks can't see. We'd want them to tell us about it, but if we add too many hurdles they won't.
I agree that any approach should not have many hurdles!
| Unprofitable Companies 2021-2022
| Airbnb | Dropbox | Uber | Lyft
| Zillow | Peloton | Pinterest | Snap
| Cloudflare | MongoDB | Slack | Spotify
| Elastic | Okta | Fastly
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...and have huge knowledge bases in Confluence. I like to call Confluence a knowledge cemetery - in the huge datasets you have in mind, finding the page you are looking for is more a matter of luck than anything else. And once you found it, you can never be sure if it's still up to date. > Anyway, they have 8000 employees... they can always drastically downsize and refocus, the company will be around for a while. I…
Pre-coffee early morning spitballing so be kind… But what about storing documentation as flat files in version control? What about even storing tickets as flat files in version control?
It eventually got replaced by some JIRA-like monstrosity, I don't remember which. All the text-based goodness was lost. The excuse for the move to a different system was "performance", which was half true. I'm guessing that nobody wanted to go fix it.
The point behind all this rambling is that yes - flat files can be made to work in the way you mention. It just isn't an approach that is cool enough.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...and have huge knowledge bases in Confluence. I like to call Confluence a knowledge cemetery - in the huge datasets you have in mind, finding the page you are looking for is more a matter of luck than anything else. And once you found it, you can never be sure if it's still up to date. > Anyway, they have 8000 employees... they can always drastically downsize and refocus, the company will be around for a while. I…
> I like to call Confluence a knowledge cemetery [...] Spot on from my experience using it in big orgs. The issue IMHO is that organization of knowledge is not following any system and/or no system that could be followed was ever set in place by the organization when they bought into Confluence. It's kinda like ordering an Airbus because they're a reliable plane. Then you sell tickets and everyone is board of course…
As someone who spends a lot of his work life administering Jira and Confluence, I disagree. The problem is that these products try to be everything to everyone and as a result users have a massive degree of freedom with what to do and how to order things.
With that amount of freedom you just have a bunch of end users, many of them non-technical, who have no idea how they are SUPPOSED to use it. Especially because they don't want to spend a lot of time learning the right way to use the tools. They have a bunch of other things to do and just need to interact with this tool to complete their current task and then move on.
You are right, a sort of Wiki-Master would help. But, at least in my organization, we don't even have enough capacity to do all the basic administrative tasks required like setting up projects, workflows, custom fields, screens, etc. We can't also manage the content inside. The users are on their own in that regard.
If you are not willing to hire stuff with the sole purpose of managing the content of your Jira and Confluence instances, a more opiniated, rigid product is probably a lot better for your organization.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Massive pile of garbage is more like it. As a developer, the only thing slowing me down from getting work done was waiting on JIRA and being told to use the crap they call Confluence to document things.
What do you recommend instead? JIRA & Confluence seem to be the best of a bad bunch. I do miss the self-hosted option.
> users can switch to a competitor product like Asana, Basecamp or Monday.com with minimal cost That's just plain nonsense. I dislike using Jira as much as anyone, mainly because it's so excruciatingly slow. But there is no competing product (suite) that offers comparable functionality and provides the same long-term flexibilty. Many companies have built entire workflows (not just development related) around Jira, an…
> ...and have huge knowledge bases in Confluence. I like to call Confluence a knowledge cemetery - in the huge datasets you have in mind, finding the page you are looking for is more a matter of luck than anything else. And once you found it, you can never be sure if it's still up to date. > Anyway, they have 8000 employees... they can always drastically downsize and refocus, the company will be around for a while. I…
Of course it doesn’t apply just to confluence, but to the whole paradigm of uncurated, informal knowledge dumps.
Unless there is a real process around documentation, it just rots, and the key problem is you can tell what’s fresh and what’s rotten.