Yet FogBugz still feels way easier to use. Every time I'm in an Atlassian product, mainly Stash and JIRA, the UI sucks. I use them several times a week and still get lost. Maybe I'm dumb, but I don't seem to have this problem on other systems. But hey, at least JIRA isn't the craptastic laggy pos that is Podio.
Certainly right that I've never seen FogBugz outside of myself or customers. Also, I think the name must hurt them. It feels dumb bringing up "FogBugz yeah with a z". As silly as a reason that is, I think it carries some weight.
Content marketing may have helped them with SEO, no? Not that it SEO alone would close large enterprise deals.
Oh and the plugins on FogBugz did suck. I remember setting up a hosted account, and wanted to plugin to Github. Support sorta mentioned being able to custom hack something up, but IIRC, didn't actually give us any simple way to achieve it. (This was several years ago so perhaps I'm mis-remembering.)
I've used both, and I can only imagine your complaints about JIRA's UI are due to how it's been configured for your use.
The out of the box user experience is the best I've seen for a web application. A robust yet easy to use 'search' feature is at the heart of many things, like the scrum and kanban boards, as well as widgets that can be put on your own personalize dashboard. You get a nice visual designer for setting up workflows, and you can easily create new fields for issue types and have workflow depend on those fields.
I also find Stash to be well thought out and easy to use if your use-case is a pull-request workflow tied to JIRA. Sometimes it's not intuitive how to navigate around if you're just trying to view source, but that's not the selling point. If you're trying to navigate source history, use your local source control client, that's what it's built for.
> I've used both, and I can only imagine your complaints about JIRA's UI are due to how it's been configured for your use.
Exactly. There are some companies that go so overboard with Jira customizations that a single "create new issue" requires hitting page down three times to get to the end. And they arrive at that by adding a field here for the QA team, a field there for the Sales team...
In the end, you get a monster. New users will be exposed to that monster, not the vanilla Jira installation.
Right and now think about who is going to control the JIRA install: the manager or VP or CTO.
Fogbugz's interface prevents this kind of crazy customization and thus it acts as a defense against the craziness. For a custom workflow with Fogbugz you have to grab a plugin. To get my manager to install a plugin for JIRA took weeks (and I still never got access to the REST API or approval for one plugin months later). So Fogbugz is developer-friendly because it makes it harder for a manager to go in an lock things down and mess around. With JIRA, the micromanager seems to be bundled with JIRA... ;-)
Managers find a way. They will just use (or invent) another tool that lets them do it how they want. Now you have two tools, and some poor schmuck (or the developers) will get stuck with the job of keeping them in sync.
Pivotal isn't really a bug tracker though, is it? It's more for tracking project tasks. On some projects, these might be similar things, but when you have a large QA team and customer support teams, I don't think it's going to cut it.
It just depends on the process you put around it. Our team wasn't huge - ~13 if you include QA - but effective use of labels and "task" state management made it great.
I can never remember how to write code into comments or titles. It literally changes from product to product and yet all of the products orchestrate together so that if you do happen to use Stash, JIRA, Wiki, etc all together, then you encounter as many different markup languages as there are Atlassian products.
It really is hellish.
I hope there's some good reason why they can't provide one "comment markup" language to all applications.
So far as I can tell, they did have one common markup syntax for all applications... but then Confluence users wanted a WYSIWYG mode, so Confluence now uses an XML-based format internally, and Stash is a Git tool and 90% of the Git ecosystem loves Markdown, so Stash had to use it too...
Markdown embraces HTML, and so a WYSIWYG mode based around HTML is compatible with Markdown.
Markdown's weaknesses for table design, image insertion, and complex layouts is all handled by HTML and WYSIWYG tools that edit that directly.
That would have solved the Git scenario, and the Confluence scenario, whilst having a single highly predictable markup across all of their platforms.
The problem really stems not from these problems being addressed per product as if they existed independently of all other products. But that's a terrible approach, as few people buy just Confluence without JIRA or Stash, people buy Atlassian because a consistent suite should work better than many myriad tools that don't quite know how to interop. Atlassian's strength is the consistent and integrated approach, so the UX should be focused on strengthening that.
I actually misread the URL as https://xkcd.com/927/ (having memorized that number like everyone else here, I'm sure) until I saw your comment. #277 is definitely not right.
#277 sure seems to me like a reasonable reply to "Whoever designed <such and such> deserves a special place in hell", which is what it was posted in response to.
Atlassian products tend to make me SO mad in this way. Confluence, can I just use markdown? No! Forget that I used it in so many other places. Oh but wait, someone may have built an importer... try to get that installed.
Confluence used to use markdown and wysiwyg, and about 5 years ago abandoned markdown to reduce development costs. They have a lot of non-developer users using Confluence, who aren't good with things like markdown. Our shop didn't like it, of course, since we were all capable of markdown and wysiwyg is never actually wysiwyg.
I could be wrong, but I think it used textile (I believe Confluence predates markdown). I'm not sure it matters a whole lot, but if you wanted markdown it's likely you would have felt underwhelmed with textile.
I fully agree that it's well past the time to switch to Markdown. That and the dropdown things are my main annoyances with JIRA.
It does make sense when you think about the context though - JIRA pre-dates Markdown by two years (according to Wikipedia) and Markdown has only got really popular in the last five years. Back when Jira's text formatting came in, everybody was doing their own thing...
I dunno, I had the opposite impression. I worked at a company from 2005-2007 that was evaluating FogBugz as a bugtracker, and found that (at least on Linux, which we were using) it was very unpolished. At the same time, some of our dependencies used Jira for their public issue tracker, and I recall looking at it and thinking it was the only bugtracker I'd actually like to use.
Nowadays I'd probably just use GitHub Issues - looking at Jira now it feels incredibly dated, but back then its only serious competitor was Trac. (Where is Trac, now, anyway? I haven't met someone who uses it in a while, but when I was founding my first startup in 2008 it was considered best-of-breed.)
Trac is still around, Django still uses it. I thought rtorrent was using it too but a google search seems to indicate they migrate to github.
Company I work at was founded in 2007 and we used trac up until around 2009 I think, then we switched to jira.
I am a big fan of jira. It's definitely more complicated than a simple bug tracker like bitbucket or github issues, but it is waaaaay more powerful than those.
We use JIRA and I'm really disappointed with the user interface.
One of the simplest examples I can give is the inconsistent dropdown list. For most (but not all) dropdowns it lists all of the items except the one you currently have selected. This is a departure from every other system I have ever used and find it annoying.
The Jira and Stash (now Bitbucket Server) UI has come a long way in the last little while.
I think I have our company's Jira set up quite nicely, and really the only things that annoy me are the dropdowns (why isn't the selected item shown? Super confusing...) and not switching to Markdown for comment formatting.
Came here to say this (about the name). What corporate pointy eared would buy a product called FogBugz over one called JIRA? I mean really. No contest right there.
That's interesting - I wonder if it's just because I've used JIRA so much and I'm more familiar with it but I find Redmine's interface super frustrating to use and it just feels unpolished.
Certainly right that I've never seen FogBugz outside of myself or customers. Also, I think the name must hurt them. It feels dumb bringing up "FogBugz yeah with a z". As silly as a reason that is, I think it carries some weight.
Content marketing may have helped them with SEO, no? Not that it SEO alone would close large enterprise deals.
Oh and the plugins on FogBugz did suck. I remember setting up a hosted account, and wanted to plugin to Github. Support sorta mentioned being able to custom hack something up, but IIRC, didn't actually give us any simple way to achieve it. (This was several years ago so perhaps I'm mis-remembering.)