Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrmondo | Hacker News Reader

Every time I come across one of their products I am underwhelmed. Jira and Bamboo both feel half a decade behind the game and are each clearly large, fumbling beasts that seem to get in your way more than they do assist you. Their ecosystem is very closed and you can feel the pain of this when you visit an organisation that's drunk their cool aid and is now locked in. I'm making it all sound a bit fire here - which it's not but I really just don't think that they're good, modern products.

View on HN

I'm curious which products you would recommend for bug tracking. If they have testcase management, even better.

I run a managed hosting company that hosts a fair number of Atlassian instances. We have our complaints about Atlassian and our customers often experience sticker shock when upgrading past the 10-user licenses, but we've had trouble finding other issue trackers with similar functionality, flexibility and market acceptance.

The same goes for Confluence as a wiki. While not perfect, most other products seem unable to do things such as access controls easily.

If there are other mature products out there that people are using we'd love to take a look. We do support Bugzilla and MediaWiki as well, but this is usually a different market segment from what Atlassian serves.

At my workplace (going on two years at a startup) we were saddled with bad I.T. (every service was accessed by its IP address, no DNS lookup), hosted TeamSite/Sharepoint for engineering document management (with absolutely no imposed organization or hierarchy (though P.M. kept their stuff together well there) most things ended up being thrown around in email), Bugzilla, and Subversion.

After some organization changes -- long time coming -- we switched to hosted Confluence, JIRA, BitBucket/git. The transition has taken some time but communication is going so much more smoothly since.

Confluence especially has been great. Designs/how-tos/best-practices are so easy to write. Permanent records of discussions and decisions are so easy to track. I made sure to collaborate with a few others to establish the skeleton of our Confluence -- without a good skeleton it would devolve to chaos. But Confluence is so much better than Word docs floating around ... and I haven't seen any other Wiki tool that is so rich in authoring ... Confluence has:

  * great search capabilities
  * easy to organize
  * easy to create links to other relevant content
  * great text styling
  * great tables
  * plugins/macros for displaying PDF / Word / Excel inline
  * linking with JIRA
  * great diagramming tool Gliffy
  * easy cut-and-paste-of-images -- capturing screenshots is fast
  * (unfortunately to get GraphViz diagrams you need your own server, hosted version doesn't allow for that)
  * good export
  * and plugins for almost anything you'd need

We're finding all kinds of great ways to use Confluence. I'd been pushing Confluence for my whole time at the company because we had no institutional memory. Confluence is helping us build that. I haven't seen any other tool for the price that comes close, but I admit limited exposure. That's my experience.

If you are after "enterprise" grade solutions that cover the core of issue management, tasking, ticketing and testing -- take a look at Countersoft Gemini.

We compete routinely with Jira and win deals by providing fully loaded 50mb zipped solution that runs on Windows servers, integrates with AD/Outlook/Exchange, etc., custom Apps Framework and obligatory RESTful API. Just the things that "demanding enterprises" look for.

No idea if this helps you.

I can assure you, worse tools than Jira populate the project management space - Jira is definitely one of the better options in the space sadly.

It's true. It's safe to say people that disparage Jira have never tried Pivotal Tracker, for example.

Funny -- I find Pivotal to be hands down the best tracking tool I've ever used. You have to conform to it a little more than Jira can conform to you though, but it's not bloated.

The challenge for enterprises is that each one has slightly different needs, and enterprises are rarely able to conform to their tools.

The challenge for enterprises is they all believe they are special snowflakes and that the way in which they diverge from best practices is a 'market differentiator'.

Most enterprises would do well to look at how enterprise products have been shaped to work and to conform to it, because there's a reason those tools work that way...

That used to be the SAP sales pitch.

Rumor has it SAP has lower than 50% success rate on their implementations.

Their software is plenty good enough and it's cheap -- particularly their starter options, which are in the neighborhood of 10 users for $10 per year.

Everything installs and runs easily (usually "untar and run the startup script") and it all integrates together easily (i.e., give product X the URL to product Y) and deeply. That's what gets people hooked.

It could be better, but it is SO MUCH better than everything else which came before them. Confluence and Jira are pretty decent. I've never used Service Desk -- I think it's ok in-house but not really ideal for a public-facing support org. The best thing about the entire suite is it can be self-hosted; cloud versions of these tools are non starters for most organizations I come in contact with (somewhat self-selected).

Hipchat is an abortion/abomination/anthema, but was an acquisition.

BitBucket is pretty sweet IMHO, but then again it was an acquisition. I completely agree on Jira and Bamboo.

Meh. In my opinion, Jira is pretty awesome. It's got irritating quirks in places, but so long as you spend the time to configure it in a manner that's suitable for your organisation, it doesn't get in the way.

I'm not really sure that there are better alternatives out there.

Jira was a godsend compared to the shitty BMC ticketing products it replaced, but it now the shitty product that needs replacement. Atlassian make some great apps, like SourceTree, but they're like Microsoft Office: popular, and still selling loads, but having lost much of their edge and influence. Next step is Lotus-land, where the once-dominant product becomes completely irrelevant.

All I know is that my organisation recently replaced some horrible SAP-based things with some faster, neater, clearer Atlassian-based things.

And the Atlassian things don't require launching a virtual Windows machine on my mac every time I want to use them.

Maybe there's better solutions than Atlassian out there, but Atlassian is still a helluva lot better than what a lot of companies are actually using.

At my office we're using IBM Jazz, which is like Jira, only even more clunky. They all suck, but these tools aren't for software engineers, they're for Project Managers.

Yes and no. They're primarily used by PMs but the developers certainly have to use them to work on bugs, features, etc. and update status.

Show me an alternative that is (a) able to be hosted and (b) isn't designed for startups.

There are lots of agile tools but most of them deliberately ignore the enterprise space.

I believe VSO would fit your description. You can utilize it as a Hosted or an On Prem deployment, and it's _certainly_ an enterprise product, being heavily intertwined with its TFS roots.

Disclaimer: MS engineer, these are my own statements etc etc.

I've been looking hard at JetBrains' YouTrack.

The bug/issue tracker we're currently using is not terrible, but it's a little painful. However, we've just barely gotten people trained to use the current system. I can either accept the current, somewhat clunky system, or go through another year of retraining and hope the slicker tool and the additional features are a net win.

At least JetBrains actively works on their products. Our current tool hasn't changed in three years, and that was just a reskin of the UI to a more bootstrappy css.

My day job / team uses YouTrack. We'd love to replace it (because the admin side of running an instance is pretty terrible), but it's been by far easier for people to use than anything else we compared to.

Huge downsides:

- Doing centralized authentication in a large-organization environment is basically impossible. Its LDAP implementation is broken for anything else than a couple very standard schemas that they've tested against & you can't make it authenticate using a Windows domain. They've recently split out the user management, etc., components into a separate product called Hub, but it's the same code and suffers from the same problems. [NB: Hilariously enough, other JetBrains products work just fine in this regard.]

- The thing uses some custom proprietary database. Integrating backups into your normal workflow is painful. Upgrades are VERY painful (oops, the old version had a database that didn't enforce some constraints that the new one does, please go fix all your issues by hand), although there's some auxiliary API and tools for exporting individual issues as -- if I recall correctly -- JSON objects that was an 80% solution.

Upsides:

- The UI does the expected thing by default in all cases we could find. It is also fast & responsive, relatively uncluttered, and doesn't have a bunch of extra things to click in order to create/comment on/edit issues.

- Searching for issues is very fast and powerful.

- Batch updating issues (which we tend to do a lot) is extremely easy. Make a custom search describing the issues to update, then update all of them with a couple clicks.

The admin downsides were (for us at least) bad enough that I'm not sure I'd recommend deploying it if you already have a working, integrated system. If you're starting from scratch, though, or committed to replacing another system for whatever reason, it's a pretty good choice.

Thanks, good to get some real impressions from someone who has used it. We already use TeamCity, which is why I was looking at it in the first place. I guess they haven't quite rolled the two together yet, so I might wait on that.

Upsource also looks very interesting, is that also something you have used? We don't really have a good tool for doing code review at the moment. Also, the VCS browsing capabilities look to be miles ahead of what our current setup offers (almost completely unusable, hijacks the browser back button, no searching, definitely no chance of static analysis, links sent out in email notifications constantly pointed at the wrong thing, etc.).

Upsource is good for browsing. We're still in the process of finding a "good" tool for code review (using a bunch of in-house stuff at the moment which is great for review, but bad for branch management). It uses the same authentication stuff, Hub, as YouTrack does.

Currently we're looking very hard at Critic (https://critic-review.org/ is a demo site, code's on github) because it looks to offer the closest workflow to what we use.

We're specifically looking for something sorta similar to Gerrit as far as how reviews work, but while actually supporting a feature-branch-heavy workflow where we tend to review branches rather than individual commits, and frequently rebuild/rebase feature branches.

Obviously, if your workflow is different then your needs for a review tool may differ wildly.

If your code is on GitHub, you might be interested in Reviewable (https://reviewable.io, disclosure: I built it). It's made for incremental full-branch review (though will also do per-commit if you wish) and deals gracefully with rebasing. As a bit of social proof, Mozilla's Servo project (https://github.com/servo) moved their code review process from Critic to Reviewable a couple months ago...

Anything where we can't host the tool and point it at git repositories on a server we control is a complete non-starter for us, unfortunately. This is mostly because our development and test environments are not connected to the Internet.

Other than that, I took a quick look at your product and it's feature-wise close to something I would want to use. Only comments I would make would be that non GitHub projects generally want the review tool to handle the branch management (a.k.a storing pull requests, flagging their status, etc.): of course only focusing on GitHub lets you not worry about that and get a product running much sooner... You should spend some serious time looking at your page load times as well - I'm 10msec away from your server and the demo code review at https://reviewable.io/reviews/Reviewable/demo/1 took nearly three full seconds to load, even with most static assets already cached since I didn't timeline it on the first attempt.

Thanks for taking a look! Unfortunately, developing self-contained tools that customers run behind a firewall is a complete non-starter for me. ;-)

Developing against the GitHub API does carry some non-trivial advantages: among other things, I never actually clone any repos. This wouldn't be possible with a raw git repo. I'm considering adapting the tool to AWS CodeCommit, though, which might be a decent middle ground. Making my own equivalent of pull requests is actually the least of the changes I'd need to make, though.

And yeah, performance is a never-ending battle... But considering that all the work is done in the browser (fetching sources, diffing, formatting, etc.) I think it's actually not too bad. Again, like running in the cloud, it's a trade-off of in favor of flexibility and development speed.

See my comment above, but take a look at Countersoft Gemini. Enterprise flavored, all-in-one type approach that can be self-hosted.

The gotcha? Runs on Windows Server which probably doesn't compute for startups but works well for typical enterprise shops that have stacks of Windows Server.

Self-hosting is still a huge market but one that is more and more under-served.

I'd be interested in what products you use? There are so many bug tracking products - even researching them can be hard work.

You must have never used BMC Remedy or HP Quality Center. At one client, they call the latter one a "web based solution". WAT?!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com