From $0-100million with no sales people. Atlassian's commandments for startups.

Also, a fresh JIRA install with no issues, projects, or anything has a memory footprint of over 0.6GB.

I don't know why people use it, but people do. My guess is that all the effort it requires provides a simulacrum of control and productivity.

My main memory actually was of poor fit and finish. Just a tiny thing but every time I logged in, no matter how, it offered to remember my login. Every time, I clicked that box in hope. It never once worked.

I had to deal with both products at my last company and maybe it was just how they set it up, but entering a bug into Jira was ridiculous. Finding anything was worse. It was probably the most user unfriendly piece of web software I've ever had to use.

Confluence? Ugh. The WYSIWYG editor was questionable at best. I had hours of fun cleaning up pages with big tables that were edited by multiple people. And seriously, a hierarchical wiki? Do you know what you get when you have a hierarchical wiki? A wiki that has almost no inner links because no one can remember what the path is to any document.

Again, it could have just been how they set it up, but I just feel like they threw every feature and the kitchen sink into that product in the name of "flexibility."

I _LOVE_ Jira - I find it to be the greatest extensible issue tracker out there, and, after extensively using both it, and Remedy (a tool which costs on the order of $800,000 to do an enterprise install, and another $100,000/year to support, and is therefore popular in the enterprise) - I can say with some authority it outperforms Remedy in almost every category.

There is zero doubt in my mind that if someone is looking for a flexible issue tracker, that Jira has to be final-3 consideration in any down selection.

Ask me anything about Jira - I live, eat, and breath the product.

   - time tracking
   - detailed planning/reporting (we use Greenhopper)
   - customer service (hiding projects and fields for internal use)
   - integration with version control

By far, my biggest complaint to Atlassian is upgrades, which are a huge PITA. There has to be an amazing new feature for me to go through that.

Certainly when I read ghshepard's several comments, I think "wow, okay, if you're a much bigger heavier bloatier organization, with much more byzantine needs from an issue tracker, maybe this thing actually has some value!"

I eventually got superuser privileges, and spent a lot of time myself trying to figure out how to beat it into getting out of our way and just tracking some frigging tickets. That's a week of my life I'll never have back, with no benefit to anyone.

At some point, management decided to double-down, and renew our license, to get an upgrade (I think to Jira 4.0, since this decision was late 2009). Oh my god. For one thing, we wasted SO MUCH TIME on that upgrade. And for another, the dashboard started taking 30-60 seconds to load, because it's suddenly full of clever (read: not clever, not performant) AJAX. And I still don't remember getting anything out of it.

Please, Jira, just get the hell out of our way!

At this point, if Jira was the only product on the market, I'd rather use one huge text file to track tickets, shared via svn or git. It would offer less useful features, sure, but it'd also offer way way less pain.

The main argument anyone could give was that it would have features not present in our other issue tracker, RT 1.0. Uh, y'think?

Short summary of my experience: on my small team, in a small company, with no experienced hands to manage it quickly and efficiently, Jira is a big bag of slow-down pain, with nothing to recommend it, and I'd rather use NO tool than use THIS tool. $10 for 10 users sounds like about $1000 too much.

Oh, and don't get me started on Confluence. I mean, less pain than Jira, but ZERO useful features (relative to free pain-free alternatives). Why would you ever choose this over Mediawiki? My new company uses ikiwiki, and that's beautiful, and it clocks in under 25kloc of Perl.

On the other hand, I've never seen an instance of Fisheye deployed for an OSS project that didn't take minutes and minutes to load a single page.

What did you find particularly horrible about them, and what tools do you think do a better job at those aspects?

FWIW, one of the reasons I love both of them is they're the only tools of their type that I've been able to throw a non-tech person at and they can use. When roping the spouses into helping out, that counts for a lot.

We also use Crucible, which is a great code review tool, and Confluence, which I don't really care for, but I don't really dislike it any more than any other wiki software.

We are a manufacturing / media / distribution company with billions in revenue.

Now, Confluence? Not a big fan. Tried it, ditched it.

My FINAL experience with JIRA + Fisheye + Greenhopper + Crucible nearly made me cry. This is on an 8 core Xeon, 12Gb RAM, 15k SAS RAID and Ubuntu 10.04LTS and Sun hotspot VM.

Random failures, null pointer exceptions all over the place that took us out for a couple of days, incredible memory usage, 8xCPUs jammed at 100% due to race conditions, Fisheye only barely just about works in Google Chrome because it's so slow, useless paid support, horridly slow and inconsistent UI, MyISAM tables causing relation failures (!!!!), don't even talk to me about their plugin management - it's a crock of shit.

I couldn't recommend it at all. It's worse than Visual Source Safe.

That's as a JIRA admin. As a JIRA user, I get people saying "can we have Trac back please".

If anyone at Atlassian is listening, please sort your product out. It's not fit for purpose.

Mr Ford's reasons for not talking to customers though is a lot better than "you don't have time"

But my overarching belief about product design: - build stuff you are passionate about because you use it - listen to customers, but don't do what they say

The reason that products all start to look the same is that customer's only experience of 'better' is a competitors product. That's why you have Audi's advertising about their safety record, and Volkswagon's advertising about their performance features.

A great read on this topic is Youngme Moon's book different: http://www.amazon.com/Different-Escaping-Competitive-Youngme...

There are two points that I have taken from the TopGrading process: - hire people who are 'A' players who have succeeded at whatever they have done AND who have a passion for the role you are hiring for - past performance IS the best determinant of future success, and the best way to answer the first question

The interview process generally starts at college where you dig into why they chose their course, the highlights, where they excelled, where they failed, who influenced them and why. Did they take on any leadership positions? Win any awards?

Then for each job they have had since, find out - why they chose it, what they found, what they fixed, what they learnt & what they would do differently. Would their boss give them a reference, and why did they leave.

At each turn, you are looking for: 'were they an A player / had outstanding results' and 'does their career path lead you to believe that they will be passionate about this job'.

There's a lot of nuances to it, but I wouldn't hire senior people any other way. I recently compared our hiring notes to a comprehensive personality test of a new employee, and they matched exactly.