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Comment by r0m4n0 | Hacker News Reader

Having used many different bug tracking, help desk, and ticketing softwares… Atlassian does a dam good job. Totally customizable screens, fields, and workflows with a modern UI. A decent webservice API I’ve integrated a few external tools into without much difficulty. I’ve also written a few gadgets and plugins and received a decent amount of attention through their plugin marketplace. Maybe the admin that setup your install or business workflow did a bad job?

I don’t think you say the same about other competitors right now… ServiceNow? HP SMS or ALM? ClearQuest? I’ve used those and if you consider Atlassian terrible, I’m not sure what words you would use to describe them…

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> Maybe the admin that setup your install or business workflow did a bad job?

I think this is key. There's so much customization allowed that its easy to get wrong. Your experiences can vary drastically between a well configured instance and a poorly configured one.

I'll also add it's not always obviously wrong when it's setup.

For example, of course only QA people can use "Testing passed" transition. Of course there should be x, y, z fields filled out to be able to create the ticket. Well we're at it, let's make sure only the product manager can close a ticket with 'wontfix', and only the release manager can change a fixversion.

This is a really common problem with any workflow tool, where well-intentioned control points get in the way of actually Getting Things Done, both from the perspective of not thinking through all the complex scenarios (what? I have to fill out 5 fields before I can close this as a duplicate??) and from not trusting your employees (don't worry, a jr. dev is not going to re-assign a fix version even though they can -- or at least, they won't do it twice).

For you, there is Github issues. Have fun, cowboy.

More seriously, there's FogBugz, which intentionally is not very customizable to avoid the issues the above poster was referring to.

In my experience, FogBugz is a little too limited, so I do prefer Jira, but only when used by competent people who understand that the customization should not get in the way of getting things done and it should not be used to institutionalize a lack of trust in employees.

Having used HP Quality Centre, JIRA and Team Foundation, I think your snark is unwarranted and there is a middle ground to be found between very basic issue tracking and something completely overbearing like QC.

It's been years and HPQC still gives me nightmares.

I think another thing people get wrong is before even using it they assume they've got to dive into a ton of custom workflows.

I've had some fairly large teams able to use JIRA without a single workflow customization (especially with Agile). We've added custom fields and such along the way for better reporting and such but there is definitely some mileage you can get out of the box with it.

That's one of the reasons why we're switching to a cloud model in addition to the self-hosted server model. Some people wanted an easier more straight forward experience.

We use ServiceNow at work, and it's absolutely horrible. Introduces so much red tape even to do simple things like become an administrator on a virtual machine requested against your account .

How do companies end up with the Service Now cancer? Are their sales meetings just hooker and coke parties? I've used it at two different companies and I wondered how anyone could look at it and think 'ok let's buy into this pile of horse shit'. My cat could do a better job.

You obviously haven't seen Remedy.

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