Agreed, Jira is pretty hard to beat for small teams and has a large base of plugins and integrations. This looks really cool but needs something a bit more to really stand out. Maybe at $5/user it could take off.
Open Source full featured ALM, self-hosted or SaaS[2] consistent & easy to go upgrades.
(Disclosure: I'm part of the dev team)
It took a few weeks to get a suitable workflow set up, and in spite of my gripes it's one of the best issue trackers around. I miss working with it on other projects.
What I really want is a fast and lightweight Jira.
If there should be one place in the world where JIRA runs quickly, it should be on Atlassian's own hosting platform, yet I continue to be amazed at how slow it can be.
So they're clunky and slow on any other continent. Including, amusingly, Atlassian's engineering HQ in Sydney.
The config my company is using makes it somewhat more pleasant than stock bugzilla or trac (though not nearly as convenient as github issues was).
The amount of crap you can turn on if you like can make the interface completely unusable, of course. But that's true in anything with a lot of configurability. It's the cost of being able to build your own process onto the tool.
First world problems indeed.
We also use Confluence which also seems to do it's job properly as a wiki.
I'm personally considering using Jira for my own projects in the future.
JIRA is a total nightmare to configure sensibly, and the UX is complex enough that there's a real learning curve to get your team using it effectively.
The kicker is, that once the combination of JIRA, JIRA Agile, and Confluence are setup correctly, and your team is using them well, there's nothing else like it. It's spectacular for:
- tying specs to issues to code
- surfacing status to non-devs sensibly
- allowing interested folk to keep abreast of projects without having to attend meetings
- getting rid of huge messy email conversations
- figuring out "why the hell did we do that?!"
I'd recommend JIRA + JIRA Agile + Confluence to any team with more than 10 members, with the caveat that you need to find/hire an expert to configure the product and help your team use it effectively.
ninja edit: JIRA will allow you to faithfully model+enforce your fucked-up development process. So, badly-configured JIRA can be one of the least fun experiences of your working life.
Please help - where can I learn to configure our setup correctly? I think our Agile is pretty ok but the integration with Confluence is almost zero. Where do I find an expert to help with the setup?
So if a successful & profitable software company is about to hire you but you would decline the offer just because She is using JIRA.
Apparently this also says how hard it is to manage people rather than dealing with just code and tricking the compiler.
Like anything else, there are things we've chosen not to implement in a V1 release, that we will add in later releases. We focused on differentiating ourselves in the market, not just doing a better job of what Jira does.
So, there is hope. :) It's 'real'. It's awesome. And it's just a few months from Release.
Cheers