The closer you are to agile the more basic your ticketing system needs and vice versa.
You could probably do without one at all even.
You could probably do without one at all even.
My impression was that this level of transparency was extremely appreciated by customers, even in cases where bug fixes were marked as "won't do", usually with a workaround of some kind. This in itself also becomes an invaluable knowledge base over time, not to mention all the other benefits you get from support and engineering tracking their work in the same application.
But of course, like all good things it didn't last, because the company was bought by some other company that thought it was absolutely insane to publicly admit that your software had bugs.
Do some of your users need the $99 Ultimate plan, and GitLab salespeople couldn't meet you at workable pricing for your users who mostly only need to use Issues?
In the case of GitLab, their pricing page has the usual easy ordering buttons for each pricing tier, but the $99 tier button also has a prominent "Contact Sales" link right below the button. https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/
Once you're already paying sticker price, and have invested in using it (i.e., moving to a competitor is a lot of work), your negotiating position will be different, but the vendor can still lose the account, if customer is unhappy enough to eat the moving costs.
I'm aware of some systems that try to tack issue tracking onto Git in a similar way to Fossil, but they just aren't as good as a proper issue tracker.
That said, Jira is a terrible issue tracker. I do not understand how it is so bad given that it is literally its only job.
I used Phabricator for issue tracking in my previous company and it was so far ahead of Jira... It makes no sense.
Something as basic as parent/child issues is barely implemented in Jira. You can only have 2 levels of hierarchy.
You can't put a task in your sprint unless it matches the task filter for that sprint, which means you can't easily track the work of people that work on multiple projects.
You can't even put tasks from multiple projects into one sprint. Realistically you should have a single project for everything.
They haven't even got basic stuff like "refresh the page when information on it changes" working.
And that's before you even get to the core flaw of Jira which is that it encourages product managers to overcomplicate it.
But just because Jira is awful doesn't mean issue trackers in general are. Phabricator's is great. GitHub and Gitlab are basic but decent. I haven't got experience with any others but I'm sure there are great ones.
You get 3 levels if you include Epic (Epic > Task > Subtask).
You can set up a sprint/kanban board filter to cover multiple projects, so this does actualy gives you multiple projects per sprint.
I do agree that it's slow and doesn't update itself to reflect changes.
The two groups of people who hate Jira the most are (1) those who can't get it to work how they want it to and (2) those who have to deal with someone else's mad/broken custom workflow.
We appear to have four levels of grouping above "Epic", albeit none of them are even visible in our sprints.
Indeed but that's still an artificial limitation, and subtasks are not really fully featured tasks.
A client of mine decided to ditch Jira last year. Now what they do is use a much simpler system but with a ton of manual wrangling going on constantly. Lots of duplication across boards, most tickets are in the wrong state, nobody knows who's supposed to be handling any given task. I'm mostly trying to stay away from it.
Your theory works if there are only developers, and they are all competent. Throw the usual mix non-dev staff into the mix along with the and it's a mess.
I can show you plenty of repos where people do silly things with Github and Gitlab tickets in a quest to better track all the work that will never get done.
my team just merged with another, larger team.
before this merge we operated off only github issues and never had problems with it
now we have length jira planning sessions, new meetings every 2-3 weeks on updated jira expectations, and a whole group of people whose job it is to track our jira usage and let us know if we aren't using it correctly / meeting standards
under one system we always finished work ahead of time and could actively pursue more projects
under one we are constantly behind the "estimate" for our assigned work
care to guess which is which?
Planning schmanning!