81–90 of 515 posts
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While it is true that Jira is "sticky", the statement was that it did not have a network effect. MS Word, Facebook, WhatsApp, Visa, they all have network effects: every user you add makes your product more compelling, thus creating a virtuous circle. You need to buy their product because other people have their product.
What network effects does MSWord have?
Does anyone actually like using JIRA? Or Confluence? Or any of the Atlassian products?
I hate it. Being forced to document crap in a pile of tens of thousands of documented things is insanity. Nobody reads that stuff, but because it's documented, you can always say: "Wait, did you not read the documentation?" Work goes faster if you keep it in small teams and let them self-organise.
> While it is still used by many tech businesses (including the author’s), it has no real network effect — that is, users can switch to a competitor product like Asana, Basecamp or Monday.com with minimal cost (other than the initial hassle of switching to a new system). Lol. At some companies, Jira workflows literally run the whole company. At my prev job, prod deployments were tightly linked to Jira.
Whilst I LOVE to crap on Jira, it has brought some magnitude of order and civility to the PMO's and at least created a familiar work environment for people.
God help me If I ever have to go back to word docs and sharepoint to manage project work.
> Combined with employing more than 8000 people, this means that Atlassian is unprofitable In 1991, Microsoft had 8000 employees. It was producing DOS, Windows 3*, Office, OS/2, tools and compilers. Windows NT was in development. They did not use Jira. I think the main feature of these tools is to make people, who would otherwise be unproductive, feel and look productive. Maybe those people are managers that should n…
They also built pyramids without excavators but that doesn't mean it's not helpful. Just because old systems could be built without specifically using jira, by itself, is not an argument. You could make the same argument that, clearly, we don't need Java or JavaScript because we also got by fine on Fortran and C in the past. Without doing an actual comparison, it's just as silly an argument as the claim that these to…
False analogy. The point here is that productivity in old Microsoft was far higher, and that the failing piece in modern development might not be the ticket system.
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Yes - JIRA is almost a textbook example of lock in. Moving a large company's workflow would mean months of disruption.
Any tool has lock in. How much work do you think would be involved in moving from perforce to git, or from Bamboo to CircleCI?
Then it took about 36 hours to move the relevant code bases (a few dozen repositories, some of them 20+ years old) over to git, including the entire commit history. This was pretty slow. It could have probably be done faster but we figured, since we only do it once, we don't need to invest too much time. We scheduled it on Saturday morning so it would be done by Sunday afternoon and we had some time to test it before Monday hit the earliest timezones.
We had a backup plan in place in case it didn't work but it wasn't necessary.
The two repos were automatically synced for a while, to allow people who had started work on something on, say, Friday morning, to commit their changes to the old repos, rather than have to replay their work on the new ones. After that the old repos remained read-only, but we preserved them because, obviously, our issue tracker had twenty years' worth of references to old VCS revision numbers.
So it took about 6 weeks of indulgently part-time work (our infra team worked several hours a day on this, I worked... about an hour or so a week?) to plot this daring plan, and about two days to make it happen. The total amount of work disruption was likely non-zero but certainly small enough that most people didn't complain of anything other than having to learn git.
I can't say about Bamboo to CircleCI but, having gone through one of these, I can say with 100% confidence that if you start out right -- that is, your existing repository is not a mess of stale branches and weird merges -- and you don't go about moving fast and breaking things, moving from even an ancient revision control system to git is not really apocalyptic.
Does anyone actually like using JIRA? Or Confluence? Or any of the Atlassian products?
There was little to no discoverability, it was slow as shit and the editing tools weren't that good. The integrations to their other products were at the time pretty much non-existing as well. Always felt like it was really basic which made me wonder how it could be so slow.
Any other wiki software were probably better. Mediawiki is free but people still paid for Confluence.
I don't get why people used it and still use it to this day. I dislike pretty much every of their products though, they all suck in my opinion and I have written several JIRA plugins so I had extensive experience with it.
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Indeed Jira scales a lot (although being slow) and is well customisable and flexible. Its plugin system is also great (although a better documentation of how to develop/maintain one, and of their APIs would grealy help). But in the meantime, it requires increasing discipline and regular revampings of internal processes across dev, product, market teams, and that's a lot of energy to burn to make it "work" across an o…
Which is why Jira continues to sell so well. You simply can't force one way of working on larger companies even if that way is undisputedly the right way. Because a lot of people will need to sign off on which tool to purchase and each of them are special geniuses with their own special genius way of working.
I'm not opposing a single Jira methodology to a myriad of other ones (tools or processes).
I'm saying that Jira, without being constantly challenged for what it is[1] creates its own growing and tiring bureaucracy because companies (even large ones) cannot agree on a right way to work (but will add piles over piles of bureaucracy).
[1] exactly like what Agile methodologies, or some certifications are; where now it feels like almost no one remembers/knows how to organize teams _without_ resorting to anything that Agile-thinking has tainted.
It somehow relates to the fact that, in some companies, more energy and money is burnt over how to organize the work rather than doing the work itself. And it definitely shows.
> 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…
It's tough for me to square with the JIRA hate. I don't mean to simply be contrarian here, I have limited (<6 months) experience. But the alternative horrors I've been forced to use - like Rally or a couple internal tools that were highly neglected - I can't imagine it's really _that_ bad...
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As a programmer, I actually like Jira. It works.
I've tried YouTrack from JetBrains, and I've found its UX quite bad. I've used Asana, Trello, Microsoft (they had/have a tool for project management), Github Project. None of them seemed to work as well as Jira. (My opinion).