I've never really gotten into any of Atlasssian's products. It seems like they make tools for managers with bolt on functionality for engineers (which may be why I never caught onto their products). I hope this is good news for Slack, but as a software engineer today, Atlasssian's products are not the first ones I would recommend in any category.
I run the Atlassian stack for my company, so here's some thoughts on this:
- Jira is pretty bog-standard these days, huge installed base. It's a bit weird to administer, and not as powerful in many ways as I'd like (especially compared to a more flexible system like ServiceNow). However, it's entrenched and a lot of people like it.
- Confluence is a top tier wiki. I actually find it very nice to work with, both from an editing, organizing, and also an API standpoint. It's much nicer than MediaWiki or Sharepoint for this purpose, and though it's not ideal for collaboration on MS documents, it's still very solid for working on shared documentation.
- Bamboo is a decent build system. It's lagging behind Jenkins in terms of integrations and support for source-controlled declarative build stuff, but for teams that like to point and click it works well, and the support for parallel builds, branch builds, etc. is all much easier than it is in Jenkins.
- Bitbucket is a reasonable choice for on-prem Git hosting. I prefer GHE, but if you have the rest of the Atlassian apps, there are some integrations that are nice, and it's not terribly expensive, so if you have ops familiar with running Atlassian apps it may be a good choice for you.
That's about it. Not something I love, but definitely not something I hate. Their support is also quite good, and guided me through a painful upgrade of a stack that my predecessors had left neglected for five years with no patching. Can't complain about that!
Every engineer I met dislikes Confluence. Engineers who write most of the documentation don't like using Confluence which lead to out dated, subpar and incomplete documentation.
In my org, I noticed this and created a github repo to push documentation in Markdown. I created initial version of docs and now every engineer in our team uses it because they know markdown, appreciate version controlled docs and can use whatever editor they want to. This repo is now filled with quality documentation for most of our stack and operations.
I don't care for Confluence at all. It feels engineered to death (as does Jira, for that matter)—it can do everything, but nothing well. I've been trying to organize my team's Confluence space but I'm constantly confused by the software which seems to be working against me.
I think my issue with Atlassian software is that it feels so unopinionated—they've added every option and customization because they have such a large enterprise customer base with unique needs—and the result is that it becomes byzantine and unfriendly because it can do _everything_.
I'm an engineer and love Confluence + Gliffy. Writing fully interlinked documentation with illustrations and tables and styling is much easier than with any other tool.
I'll second the love for Confluence as an engineer. Easy to use and navigate imo. Hate JIRA with a passion though, at least the two implementations I've use have been exhausting with fields and options.
I'm an engineer and I like Confluence, especially compared to any other options. And doubly compared to markdown (although I concede I'm probably the only engineer who dislikes markdown)
We've been working on an open source solution for this, if you're interested - markdown or wysiwygy based editing with a hosted option – http://getoutline.com/
Confluence's editor is truly awful. I've spent 15 minutes just trying to remove superfluous newlines -- it's maddening. If you do something like {{fsck}} to create a bit of monospace text, it's totally unclear if there is a space after the text, or there isn't, due to the way the reverse video section is larger than the actual text. God help you if you accidentally backspace into the monospace section, everything you type after that is monospace. It's extremely frustrating.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that many folks when faced with the prospect of updating a document using the Confluence editor will instead just find something less terrible to do.
I often write my entire document first using the old style Confluence markdown, and when done I import it into a new Confluence page. You can't take an existing document and convert into markdown, but if you are the only person working on the document this is a workable approach.
- Jira is tolerable. Many of the more essential features are only available as plugins and many of them feel like ugly bolt-on hacks (looking at you, Insight) to the point that Atlassian won't even investigate your problems unless you replicate them without plugins. But my largest complaint about the system is how dreadfully corporate and boring it feels to me in a very abstract sense. Jira is the least fun I can have with computer.
- Confluence's search is abysmal; fgrep would do a better job. The markup language could use improvement but it's not that awful.
- No comment on Bamboo and Bitbucket. I'm not a developer.
Can you explain why you feel this way? I've felt nothing but frustration using Confluence internally. It seems to continually get in the way and have an obtuse and unintuitive way of doing things.
> (especially compared to a more flexible system like ServiceNow
Oh dear god no. Our company runs mixed Jira and Service Now, and for all Jira's disadvantages, at least I can get a link. to a ticket. To you know, reference or share. Without explaining the awful UI for where people need to put the ticket number in if they want to see it.
I'm in a company which uses the full atlassian suite (on premise) and I find your comment is a very good summary. I always see people complaining about jira on the internet, but in real life, everyone I know seems happy with it, I have no idea where that come from. Maybe it depends on your admin and/or the size/culture of the company
Whenever someone passionately hates Jira my go-to line is "your Jira instance can only be as good as its admin."
IT departments in charge of installing and upgrading Jira don't tend to bother with optimizing it, and most companies don't have dedicated Jira admins.
So you either have a motivated employee that will moonlight as an admin and figure out how to make it better in their spare time, or you just end up using all the defaults, which most projects probably don't need.
Jira was great, ~15 years ago. It was a tool that actually helped development, especially with the GreenHopper plugin
Now almost the entirety of its functionality is to help various middle managers track things that are important to them, while continuously making development slower. Manager 1 wants to track Metric A? Add a drop down. Manager 2 wants to track Metric B? Add a new form to fill out. And tie them all together with workflows so that you can't do your work and mark it as complete until all the boxes are checked and fields are filled.
Those that haven't experienced this probably just haven't worked in a medium or large corporation.
> Those that haven't experienced this probably just haven't worked in a medium or large corporation.
So true, though I expect that of the HN crowd (given it's hosted by YC).
Everytime I hear someone praise Jira, I think "Do you have more than 100 people using the same instance?" Middle manage needs charts and reporting, and that's Jira's strength. It's an absolute disaster to use on a daily basis.
We chose Pivotal Tracker over Jira because we didn't need all that stuff, and PT fit fairly well with our existing workflow. But... is the ability to do those things really a disadvantage? Seems more like a problem with the way these medium/large companies work than with the tool itself. If Jira didn't exist I don't think they'd use something like Pivotal and just do without all the tracking; they'd just have something ad hoc and unwieldy cobbled together instead.
> Now almost the entirety of its functionality is to help various middle managers track things that are important to them, while continuously making development slower.
Amen to that! Both as a user and a developer in the atlassian ecosystem, the experience is like you're 2 decades behind simple basic features with astronomical implementation effort. "Enterprise" has never gotten a negative connotation within atlassian walls it seems.
Stick to github issues or similar. Whatever is closer to the real work and gives you the biggest bang for the buck. Not the most wet dream. You do not need a gazillion of workflows and checks and stories and epics and boards etc. "Keep it simple, stupid"
What I like is to specify dependencies. Unfortunately, the simple ones (Github, Gitlab, Trac) don't have that feature.
The Jira we use at work has gone overboard. There is too many ways to specify and people are confused. For example, we have "blocks" (B cannot be finished without A closed) and "follows" (B cannot be started without A closed).
I would also recommend this. I've been using it for a while and it's amazing. Tightly integrated into version control, great team/project/task management, code review tools, great command line integration though arcanist.
An opinionated workflow of collecting from a development team and its customers potential future efforts, estimates of the cost and value of those efforts, prioritizing based on those estimates (maximize expected value, minimize expected cost), scheduling & forecasting efforts based on a sound statistical model (e.g. estimation error).
You can accomplish most of that with Phabricator[1], except for the forecasting efforts. As for the forecasting; I worked at Amazon which had a dedicated JIRA engineer and that was the best I've ever seen JIRA being run and used. In my time there, I never saw any manager predict anything consistently accurate over the course of a long project with it without actually talking to engineering.
JIRA promises armchair management, but I've yet to see those tools actually work. That being said, you may be a better JIRA user than anyone I know. JIRA has always be promoted as a tool from the top down, never from the bottom up.
JIRA's problem is it's too configurable and popular with folks who are into prescriptive authority, so it absolutely can be worst tool you've ever used, and frequently will be.
