Atlassian products have been down for 4 days
status.atlassian.com
status.atlassian.com
Feeling that even they don’t understand what all their epics, stories and milestones do haunted me all the time. Page load times up to 10 seconds and totally unusable on a big screen (just insanely slow after window size bigger then on avarage laptops).
Convincing my company to switch to Linear was better than any holiday.
Plus no way to open up issue tracking to the public.
Linear was my go-to and I signed up today. I used it at getweave.com and loved using it there
One of the best features of Linear is that it inspires my team to build better software, not just tick feature boxes.
Their pricing and feature breakdown across plans is a joke. Milestones, reporting and roadmap are all top tier features? They're base features on a product like this.
Management products are used by engineers LAST. You project management stuff beyond your own Trello/TODO.txt once someone from management tells you to.
I had the complete exact opposite experience. I actually do wish we are still on jira.
it's slow. It's filters make no sense. It's entire flow make no sense.
What flow? It’s a task management software, not a traffic system. I don’t want it manipulating the flow of anything. It provides swimlanes and that’s more than enough for me. I can move any task anywhere at any time which is exactly what I want out of a software — for it to get out of the way.
That's where you've lost nearly all the people.
Who in their right mind crafts filters. What does this even mean?
It is impossible to tell how many times I tried to filter out something in Jira only to have everything since before the times or absolutely nothing and needed to scratch that and go back to the defaults. Or hunt down the email with an exact link to the issue.
You use simple built in filters like "site:x" or "in: folder". There's no "crafting" or involved.
> You combine a set of available filters to make a composed filter the same way you search anything
This isn't even remotely similar to "anyone who uses a search engine, tries to find an email". Which brings us back to the original complaint, quote: "It's filters make no sense."
If you "have to combine/craft filters to create a composite filter that you then use to search", you've failed. In exactly the same ways that Jira fails at this task.
I never said whether I was or wasn't using Shortcut.
> Use Linear instead, for example, since apparently
I never said whether or not I was looking for an alternative
> don’t pretend like JIRA is the only reasonable option
I never said anything about JIRA except in the following context: "If you <make things complicated>, you've failed. In exactly the same ways that Jira fails at this task." And you are the one who actually mentioned JIRA first.
So how about: you stop pretending I said or implied something I never did?
>I never said anything about JIRA except in the following context
That's exactly why I ended my last comment the way I did ("not saying you were necessarily").
> I never said whether or not I was looking for an alternative
Why are you commenting on this thread? The whole point was to suggest an alternative. You never even suggested another way filters could work. As far as I can tell, the mathematical definition of a filter is that it's composed of sub-filters. So please either admit you're a negativity-spouting troll or contribute something positive.
I responded to this statement: "You craft the filters, so if that makes no sense it’s because you didn’t craft the right thing".
No. No one in their right mind wants to "craft filters". If you require people to "craft filters" or "combine a set of available filters to make a composed filter", you've failed. It doesn't mater if it's Shortcut, or Linera, or JIRA, or any of the dozens of JIRA replacements/wannabes.
That's the thing I'm responding to. An all your examples and allusions only serve to show that you don't understand this simple fact.
For people to want to "combine/craft filters" these filters have to be immediate, smart, autocompleting, and properly predictive. As an example, Youtrack[1] shows how to do that more-or-less properly (though it has other issues). Shortcut can't even complete available states when you type `state:` into the search box.
> As far as I can tell, the mathematical definition of a filter is that it's composed of sub-filters.
Literally no one using project management software cares about mathematical definition of filter. Not a single soul.
You should strongly question this assumption because I am a living counterexample. Before I discovered this tool, I wanted to be able to write the filters so badly I even started to develop a tool that allowed this (called Infinitix) that provided only one basic thing: ability to apply filters on a single list of tickets, and then save or share that filter to other members of your org. Regardless of whether you think "you've failed" if you develop this, I'm sure photographers thought the same thing about Photoshop when it was created. (No, this product never fully materialized, luckily I didn't have to build it because I found out about the existence of Shortcut.) It would have been the simplest task management system possible, in a way.
I don't care if the autocompletions are there, what I care about is having control instead of my system administrator or manager having control, and being able to run whatever query at whatever time I want to. In other words, I want to control the tool rather than it control me, and I also want a tool (instead of TODO.txt, the anti-tool approach to task management).
One counterexample in an ocean of examples doesn't amount to much.
> Regardless of whether you think "you've failed" if you develop this, I'm sure photographers thought the same thing about Photoshop
If only you could have the will to abstain from inapplicable analogies
> I don't care if the autocompletions are there, what I care about is having control
Yeah that's a very shitty control you have. If you really need "mathematical definition of filters", make sure they are, you know, useful. See short video: https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipOFZ9y-R-tu0XCMfOhqdRW_... (switch to 1080p if needed)
You clearly didn't understand what I showed you. Watch the video again.
> There's no limit to the variety of analogies you can dismiss if you simply allow yourself to declare them inapplicable
Of course. Analogies never work they way you think they work. At best analogies are dubious claims that need to be proven. You equated Shortcuts to Photoshop, and that analogy is not even tenuous. It's false.
> As for control, it sounds good to me. Honestly, not being able to run reporting is a feature
WHo said anything about reporting? Oh wait, no one, except you.
We were talking about filters, and this is directly related to the filter functionality that you're so intent on defending.
> I'm a bit done here since you are one of these people who refuse to use analogies to inform their thinking.
I don't refuse to use analogies. However, I refuse to use false analogies, and I also refuse to use only analogies to inform my thinking. I prefer facts over analogies.
> many billions of people over the years have found analogies to be a useful endeavor
And once again you're veering into some completely unrelated tangent that no one is talking about.
> Douglas Hofstadter has a good talk about analogy
If only you had the will and comprehension to keep with the topic at hand without resorting to inventing arguments for other people, overusing false and inapplicable analogies etc.
I've been semi-tracking them because they're a local NYC Clojure shop and had wondered how they were handling the social network name overlap. Glad to hear they're still around.
The primary downside is that viewing history (closed tasks) is complete shit. They have an API, and that's the only way of getting history out in any sort of convenient format to review. A very strange oversight.
I'm also not sure how well it would scale to large teams.
Loading an epic may last 10-15 seconds, triggering the buttons to open the pop-ups menu is sluggish, etc.
I think the main problem is that the browser has to render so many elements, most of them are not even related to the page I am opening. For example, opening a story, it loads behind hundreds of cards before opening the "modal" dialog.
These modal dialogs are the most frustrating experience in SC – they close with the ESC key while you are writing, and it already happened the story I was writing was not saved, despite the obnoxious toast alerts saying the contrary. Modals also often breaks "modals menu" in Safari placing them in random places of the UI. They don't use the whole viewport so there's lot of distracting noise in the whole UI.
Some time ago there was some weird cartoonish animations popping out during my work. What a nice idea to consume even more browser resources and get into the middle of your workflow :(
I’ve seen failing Kickstarter updates with more information than this.
Anyway the title isn’t wrong per se but it might be more informative to say a subset of tenants using Atlassian’s SaaS products are down.
If you use any of their products on prem … they are not down. And if you’re not one of the affected tenants then your Atlassian products are fine. At work we have Confluence hosted by Atlassian and it’s up.
According to The Register:
> We were also told that the incident affects a relatively small number of Atlassian customers: about 400. That's only 0.18 per cent of the company's 226,000 customers, which isn't much consolation to the several hundred who still can't access their data.
(My employer will switch away from Atlassian products once they don't offer on prem anymore.)
And Jira has been really great. The sprint boards, concept of mapping statuses to in progress etc have all been great.
My one gripe (and it’s not a small one) is performance. It still feels quite sluggish. Is Atlassian ever going to address this?
Atlassian absolutely doesn't care about performance, it should've been obvious when they rolled out "new Jira" a couple of years ago and it was just as slow.
Their priority is adding new esoteric settings that their top customers demand, hence why their settings tab is a labyrinth of spaghetti complexity.
I’ve been using Jira for almost a decade now. Pretty sure it gets slower and slower.
Im fairly sure at this point it’s just mountains of intermixed logic and death by a thousand cuts; I doubt they could significantly improve performance to approach something reasonable even if they wanted to.
oh my sweet summer child
I've used several bug trackers including JIRA. Gitlab has been my best experience.
But the reports only do it by open and closed. We only merge/close when we’re releasing the ticket.
Just asking, I’ve never used any of their products
They have decided to treat their customers worse than Oracle does, with nothing but threats that you can make the pain stop if you just go with cloud. They’re an absolutely despicable company.
So after enduring all this, there’s a huge amount of schadenfreude that customers are experiencing watching them be down for so long. They absolutely deserve it.
Wow...
https://architectureau.com/articles/worlds-tallest-hybrid-ti...
Hell of a bet on building more physical space with WFH and other factors making office space cheaper. Plus investing in a new building material concept. This seems like a passion project for someone high up in their food chain.
> expected to cost $546 million and be completed in 2026.
> Construction is expected to create 2500 additional jobs and generate $1 billion dollars in revenue annually.
A quote from the project page: "This project is not just about being green, it’s a whole systems approach to design, construction and habitation. It will demonstrate that change is possible and has many advantages for the planet, our cities and business."
Sounds vague.
You can't self host now, just use their cloud offerings.
Upside, it’s the same code just difference license file, and it enables clustering (plus lots of other artificially limited features)
Downside, it’s a subscription license and it’s insanely expensive.
In ranking companies by "Ugh, your product sucks" many people would put Atlassian pretty high. So if their product sucks, why would their cloud infrastructure be better?
For anyone actually trying to work with it on a daily basis is a huge pain in the ass. Mostly due to the dreadful performance, which was bed enough with the on prem solutions and has now gotten even worse on cloud. Another wtf example is their wysiwyg editor actually has no own markup, it is stored as plain html and has tons of bugs, such that things you edit will return in a different format after you press save, with no way to restore it. This is just so fundamental input form 101 that you wonder what else is equally buggy underneath, especially this being one of their main values. Every one of their product uses a different such editor, all with their own set of different bugs.
Otherwise, you can’t deny that their products are actually very powerful. If only they cared more about basic usability they could have a really good offering.
https://jira.atlassian.com/secure/WikiRendererHelpAction.jsp...
Their API was unbelievably slow but still better than having to interact with the web app. Please Oh Deities, let me be on an hourly contract the next time I have to use their products!
My co-worker once lost 2 hours of work spent on drafting a new JIRA issue (or maybe it was a comment, I don't remember).
There's a feature request in their tracking system for preserving un-saved work. It's been there for almost 20 years now: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-4233
the latter is forgivable, the former is not.
The killer feature, the reason I’ve painfully endured JIRA for about 15 years…
It’s always cited as important but I’ve never actually seen them used in anger.
Guess which one of those two they're sunsetting...
Their software is "enterprise software", in all the bad ways. eg expensive, slow performance, doesn't work properly, products that don't seem to receive updates after their creating company was acquired (eg StatusPage), etc.
But they have a marketing/PR department, which covers over a lot of those problems.
I actually like Confluence, it’s a well done wiki solution.
It's fine. Certainly no worse than any other wiki that just accretes content.
(Then again, we're not doing anything overly sophisticated with it, or relying on any of its features for critical workflows.)
(If there isn't that much content, now would definitely be the time to do this, so you entrench the capability and get everyone to depend on it to the extent that it must be fixed once it can't keep up. :P)
If you use Jira to track sprints, and you want to view the previous sprint, how would you expect to do it? I don't mean a sprint from 5 years ago, I mean the one from last week. Let's say you want to view stories that didn't get completed last sprint, or you just want to see what happened because you're doing a retrospective. How would you expect to go about this in a mature product for which your organization pays money?
You might say "well, there's probably a button on the current sprint that lets you go back in time to the last sprint. Like, some form of pagination. Or, maybe you can even set a date on a calendar and see the active sprint during that date. That would be cool."
According to Atlassian's support forum, there is "no way to currently do this"[1].
[1] https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-questions/H...
You can approximate it by building a custom query, or going into a reporting dashboard (if you have access). You shouldn't need to.
And then a point upgrade removed that support in favor of their own rich text format, so in an instant all our tooling died. We were not happy campers.
I have other thoughts about Jira: https://honeypot.net/post/jira-is-a-code-smell/
Personally I preferred the ability to edit pages as markdown, and we toyed with ways to allow users to edit the rich pages in markdown (i.e. a new transformer from the storage format to wiki-markup, instead of the editor format) - but it wasn't possible to not come up with a diverging solution for the transformations here (at the time, given the time we had spent on it).
Whilst we copped a lot of flack from the die-hard Confluence users when this was done, the vast majority of users liked the change. Also from a different angle, this was a really fun time at Atlassian - we had run out of space in the CornX (office at the time) so we had leased the floors above the pub next door (The Dundee Arms), and there were five of us in there, all with out machines crammed around a single table in this tiny room. Good times.
Good luck finding it ever again unless you know exactly what you are looking for.
You can mitigate the issues in the search if you are organise your content well but the search is still deficient in other ways.
I’ve used JIRA in 3 companies and it was always the worst piece of software I had to interact with. Now we just use Github issues and their “Projects beta” and it’s a huge improvement. Engineer first workflow rather than optimized for creating some pseudo insightful views for useless managers
Compared to decent project management software it has almost no project management features.
Yeah, no.
Are executives just scared of getting fired for moving off of Azure DevOps and Jira? They’re both garbage pieces of software and everyone who uses them knows it.
I’ve learned to translate “We need to buy into Atlassian’s suite” as “our process is broken and we’re blaming the tools.” This has the standard “now you have two problems” punchline. I’ve seen this play out several times at companies of varying sizes. The endgame “fix” is always that one or more people become entirely devoted to wrangling the complexities of the Atlassian stuff, but a dedicated person/team would have fixed the problem with the old tools, too.
i've definitely been using bitbucket and jira for the last four days without noticing anything wrong.
All I was looking for after the slugfest of Jira was fast performance and keyboard shortcuts, and so far linear has been able to deliver.
The top level organization in Linear is a Workspace. As far as I can tell this should be what your entire company falls under. The next and only level of organization under that is a Team. It really needs something in between that.
Teams have their own Issues, Board (singular), Cycles(Sprints), Projects, Ticket workflows. That means a Team must be a very small set of people (<10 people). So for a company with 1000 employees you might have 100 Teams.
Teams are shown in the UI in a flat list in many places. Expanding the list would likely overwhelm your screen.
The Roadmap feature applies to the entire workspace (your company). In medium sized companies you'll have Organizations with many hierarchies below it comprised of dozens of teams. An Org typically has roadmaps of their own that don't necessarily correspond to company level goals. Teams below the Org will also have their own roadmaps that usually fall under the Org's high level roadmap items but again not always.
There also needs to be more company level controls over settings like workflows. A strict company wide workflow for Bugs is common so that all teams have the same expectations around SLAs for fixes.
All that said I think you could make it work with enough filters and naming conventions.
Also holy hell Linear is fast and easy to use. If I was at a startup I would 100% put us on this.
Thanks for detailed feedback and walkthrough! Just to share some context, we do have thousands of customers, ranging from early stage startups to public companies.
I also agree that we should support more hierarchy when it comes to roadmap, teams and even the workspace settings, and it's something we are working on.
> Board (singular)
Board view supported by other views too, like cycles, active issues, projects etc. The "Board" sits in the navigation for now until we can make the view settings robust enough to fully replace it.
Moving us from Jira/Confluence would probably take an act of god, but I could see teams going rogue and doing their internal planning in Linear while still using some part of Jira to ensure they stay connected to the rest of the company process. That way we could maybe do incremental adoption.
Is there any bidirectional Jira <-> Linear support? e.g. Someone creates a bug in Jira for us and it replicates into Linear? When I close it in linear it closes it in Jira.
We do have a bidirectional Jira integration. It pulls in the basic information, and then also adds a Jira "attachment" & link to the Jira issue. If you close the issue in Linear, will also close it in Jira [1]
If you enable the Triage feature, it works nicely in a way that requests from other teams in Jira automatically come to the Triage queue and you can review them there. Same triage queue also works for customer support tools, sentry, creating issues through the API etc.
Can Atlassian’s RDS backups be used to roll back changes? We cannot use our RDS backups to roll back changes. These include changes such as fields overwritten using scripts, or deleted issues, projects, or sites. This is because our data isn’t stored in a single central database. Instead, it is stored across many micro services, which makes rolling back changes a risky process.
Also, screw Atlassian for acquiring Trello.
Apparently some portions of their cloud instances have been down for days.
I'm going to really be sad when I can't limp this server instance forward any more.
I haven't used it in a few years.
On the status updates I guess they can’t say more other than they are working on it. Saying more at this time might open them up to other issues considering a lot of businesses are run off moving Jira tickets around today.
It's build with the vision of what I'd want a project management tool to be. Simple to use, useful to help manage between teammates and ultimately reducing the time I need to spend on it.
* Ticket tracker
* Email workflows
* Project management
* Wiki
* Free open source
Further down they mention Atlassian is affected. Unsure what to make of it
Would be a disaster if come Monday, we also have parts of GitHub's service deciding to go down for an unexpected holiday as well.
Eventually you need to stop blaming the user.
However, pretending that there isn't a mass of programmers who think they know better than everyone else and couldn't benefit from task structure / documentation (be it SCRUM, Agile, whatever) isn't helpful at all.
But they prioritize feature velocity towards being "all things to all people" over usability. This means it's a mountain of inconsistency, bloat, and instability. It's super hard to use if page loads are many seconds long, your favorite button got moved into a hamburger menu to maximize unused whitespace, and their servers are a tangle they can't manage.
Without firing up my work laptop I can't provide a precise number, but when you want to file a new ticket, there are at least a dozen options for a ticket type, and once you've created a ticket you're stuck with the consequences of your selection.
Just give me a single ticket type. Let me create any relationship I want between tickets. If I want to assign one ticket as parent for another one, I should be able to do that.
Or, often as not, I create it on the wrong board and can’t move it.
I am still using it because my team is used to it and I don’t have the time to migrate the 3gb+ Database somewhere else for now.
Whenever possible, I've always used SQL backups (MariaDB or PostgreSQL) to clone or restore JIRA instances. The database information will accept changes in the base URL without issues. It makes setting up testing and mimic environments pretty easy.
When I recently had to move a project to a new instance that I didn't have jira-administrator access to, I had to provide the server admins a set of CSV exports of our JIRA project so that it could be imported over properly. All of the tasks subtasks, and linking had to be provided in separate CSV files because JIRA would fail to export more than 20000 entries in a single file.
It took weeks worth dry runs and checkouts to make sure it would be successful. This was because we had to give this other team a long list of custom fields, workflows, and schemes that represented our software development and program management methodologies.
On the transition date, I was out of the office on a prearranged cancer treatment. I still got texts from people freaking out while I was sitting in the cancer ward getting my infusion. I told them that I couldn't even look it anything until I got back in the office after my treatment and recovery period. Thankfully, they managed to limp along get 80% of the issues resolved within 2-3 days.
Any action you take has a 20-40% chance of not actually committing.
History view in some parts of it is literally useless.
JIRA is one of the main reasons I left let's encrypt. JIRA is also one of the main reasons I said no to two companies.
Life is way too fucking short to deal with this. I think companies don't realize how much devex matters. A big reason of employee attrition in my experience has been shitty fucking tools that never get replaced.
From what I read here things have changed a lot: They force everybody to cloud which is slow.
And the fact that they are higly customizable (adding mandatory fields...) is of course a nightmare in all companies with too many incapable managers, which is probably a fair share...
I use gitlab these days. Its issue management has limitations, but being mostly snappy (despite cloud) and lightweight is a better exeperience than the nightmare I am reading here. I can run my own REST queries if some limitation bothers me too much.
Everyone at my workplace hated jira. We still never replaced it.
But the experience of using it is 100% in the administrator’s control. It works quite well in the default form, but it’s HEAVILY customizable. And that seems to be where most problems come from.
Trying to cram workflows where they don’t fit. Adding tons of extra required fields. Making special rules about how you have to use it.
I’ve certainly seen it go from good to annoying from new people deciding to “fix” some process by adding to it. Including the day you couldn’t create tickets because our admin added a required field that was hidden so you couldn’t fill it out.
Once complexity is added, it’s basically impossible to to reduce it, even by starting a new project with new screens, etc. Because at minimum your issue types will all be infected with complexity. The most competent managers I have seen try JIRA for 2-3 weeks max and then switch to a spreadsheet.
Your description implies that your process is broken, but if your process is broken no Jira can help you. I doubt than even God can help you…
Unfortunately once process stupidity sets in it usually metastasizes and there's no cure.
And yes, I studied programming languages before coming to this particular conclusion.