The Atlassian engines stalled long ago but somehow they continue to defy gravity. Bitbucket is years behind GitHub. The last time I used it, it was extremely unreliable. Jira is an ugly and laggy mess. Confluence is crap.
How are they still alive?
How are they still alive?
Now one thing that Github has is integration. You get lots of stuff integrated for free where Atlassian offerings are separate products. And you don't have to configure much.
You can't compare Github to just bitbucket. You have to compare it to a combination of bitbucket, bamboo with Elastic agents and Jira. With a competent admin this is all easily set up and administered. And especially if you are a largish company Jira is the killer vs. Github issues. Especially if said company is somewhat process heavy which Jira is just the best at. So configurable and extensible. Of course a small startup or open source project will prefer the zero fuss Github.
And of course as devs we don't care much about those parts. But you did ask why they are still alive.
The “find file” button which opens a quick open style prompt makes it as easy to find a location on GitHub as it does when I use VSCode
What I personally use the file explorer in a PR for is for various other things.
* Quick overview of the "complexity" of the change. If I see a huge list of files or files "all over the place" that let's my spidey senses tingle. Much more so than a simple "X files changed" bit of text could.
* Navigating around the changeset by most interesting area first. E.g. I might see at a glance that there are changes in three folders of interest and the rest are less important. I don't read PRs from top to bottom like Github tries to make you. I find that unnatural.
* I can also easily, visually, jump around between these areas/files to cross references changes without having to remember their names or scrolling a lot.
* In large changes (lots of files in lots of places - it happens sometimes) I can collapse folders that are not interesting or that I'm done with. The fact that I already opened a file once does not tell me anything really as I tend to jump around between files to cross reference things. In fact one great feature to have is to mark a file as "unread" again. Which IIRC Crucible had.
At a certain point it’s just an abstract spreadsheet with custom rules no one knows how to maintain, and the team ends up praying to the Jira gods like some ancient religion to keep their dev process going.
Anyone who does actually have a handle on it becomes a go-to resource on their team, so they jealously guard their install and never let the company switch try anything else to preserve their status
Jira is the worst ticketing system that exists other than every other ticketing system. Yes you could use Rally or whatever but it's unlikely that migrating to a different tool is going to solve any problems that you have with Jira.
BB is, well... orgs that have BB usually have people who look after BB and don't want you to move, and developers who do want to move, but don't have the heft within their organisation to move to good tools in the fact of demands to push features instead of improve tooling.