Most comments revolve around JIRA as an issue tracker. I think those miss the point. Atlassian products are never best in any given category (in my opinion); however, they all integrate easily and (almost) out of the box. Choosing JIRA over another product might not be meaningful, but you need source control, chat, build servers, etc. Having them play nicely together without fiddling with tricky settings is a huge benefit.
I've developed against JIRA and used JIRA pretty heavily at several companies now. JIRA is a really nice product, but one's experience with it heavily depends on who "owns" it.
In the eary days, Jira was an awesome bug tracker (free for OSS), compared to Bugzilla or Trac. But they focused on adding lots of features without much thought on the overall user experience. Their latest UI revamp only made things worse.<p>Somehow, they managed to accumulate the negatives of a flexible product (resulting in poor/incoherent UX) and the negatives of rigid assumptions regarding workflows (try modelling staggered deployments in different datacenters/environments spanning multiple sprints... good luck!).<p>Going forward, I expect Atlassian to cater to rigid organizations and neglect those who design their own processes (whether lightweight ad-hoc or complex custom ones that don't fit what Atlassian Sales can understand).
Growth is great, but I've never met a single dev that is excited to use their tools. Management loves their app because they can spit out numbers, and don't care how good or meaningful those number are.<p>Jira is a painful to use, especially compared to trello. They own trello now, so I hope they don't mess it up.
Some facts in the article that was linked are definitely not correct. Fogbugz was out there before JIRA. Spolsky wrote about JIRA multiple times, yet the article never mentions it.<p>So what is this site anyways? There's no About page, no contact, no ownership information, no author, nothing. Looks like an advertisement to me.
> While a lot of companies make acquisitions, most don’t execute well on integration.<p>I have a theory that much of the success of web-based companies isn't due to the internet's reach itself, but because they can actually harness programming to business. Make something happen; check for something; modify everything. Of course, there's always problems with programming but it's so much easier than doing it any other way.<p>But traditional businesses cannot reap these benefits, because they cannot make IT central. They can't be IT first. And they lack the talent and experience to handle all the problems of programming. Therefore, it is the new web-based companies that know what they are doing (with programming) that win this.<p>The quote above is a great example: it's hard to integrate acquired businesses, they usually just become a messy "conglomerate". What if you could actually integrate other products and services <i>into</i> your products and services? With programming, it is <i>possible</i>, whereas it wasn't really before.<p>There are still problems - and other commemts highlight how the UI has suffered. Indeed, enlarging a codebase inevitably has much in common with a messy "conglomerate". But it's so much easier than doing it in any other way than with programs (i.e. traditional businesses).<p>(Atlassian's products also help other businesses run on programs, but that's not my focus here).
we just moved from jira hosted to jira cloud and it is, shockingly, worse! As a user I've always hated JIRA and as an admin it is shockingly bad. There must be some alternatives that are still viable.
Having worked extensively with JIRA in the past, I will say that whoever designed it had to have done it with clear intention.<p>JIRA has an uncanny way of attracting to it a very specific (and valuable) person inside organizations.<p>I mean the person who is obsessed with the creation and quantification of knowledge worker processes that are subtly complex. This complexity naturally gives plenty of fodder and massive surface area for engagement and features —- one can spend hours tweaking JIRA workflows, running reports, and playing with the query builder. And we all know that once a user is engaged past a few days you’ve got them, almost like a kind of pair bonding. They have bonded with your software, and they’ll be forced to spend their days in it. If there is some ritual like work involved all the more better.<p>I’ve seen these guys come in from other organizations where they’ve used JIRA and the first thing they do is push for its adoption and use. There could be plenty of other things to tackle and I’m not here to make the case JIRA is or isn’t a good tool, has value, or is more or less important, I’m just sharing my observations. When you’ve literally made it your job to be the JIRA master, you are in fact more concerned with the performance of the work than the actual work product itself. It’s like the difference between introverted and extroverted personality types. Some people come in and want to get their hands dirty with the product and code, while others want to setup JIRA and start tweaking workflows.<p>Another brilliant thing I noticed they did was to optimize the scrum display for large TVs. Many issue trackers and other tools simply don’t look good (not readable) or are not functional on a massive 70” screen. The purpose of this is clear: for standups and planning meetings where it is used in a group setting (usually by the JIRA advocate/master).<p>Another big thing is the daily e-mails. It’s a way to show your boss and co-workers you’re doing something without telling them directly. And it makes people feel good to see activity, regardless of what is actually being done, it’s often times more important that people are working together, as 90% of all work done in JIRA is irrelevant anyway.<p>People talk bad about JIRA and despite its flaws you’d do well to study its workings if you are at all interested in building a similar B2B or enterprise app that requires a certain manipulation of the end user.
> <i>The thing that made the product challenging to learn was what developers loved most about it—that it did everything needed for issue tracking, and they could customize it to work precisely the way they needed it to for their specific teams and projects.</i><p>I don't believe this. There were plenty of competing Open Source tools out with the same problems. I hated every single one of them and so did other developers I know. Perhaps developers preferred Jira because the management could be told they'd have to pay a qualified contractor for customization instead of torturing the developers with that kind of work?
What differentiates JIRA from other issue trackers is that it's very popular with Chip/Asic companies; they have support for all chip design phases, which other issue trackers lack.<p>in other words, they found a market need others ignored, and they served it.
The amazing part Jira is most basic tool many of us use daily . As evidenced by huge number of posts here people really hate it yet there is no good alternative. So instead of uber for pancakes maybe someone will be inspired to build one :)
They sure did outsourcing well, I wonder how has that contributed to their success. There's a big dev shop in Poland maintaining and developing large bits of their core offering - Spartez.
The more interesting question is "Who can beat Atlassian in productivity market?" What properties this product should have? What Atlassian weaknesses should it attack?
As an unhappy Bitbucket user, I have my fingers crossed for better Github enterprise pricing (does not scale for dev agencies with many repos), but mostly for AWS Code Commit.<p>It's somewhat scary the breadth that AWS has in their ecosystem now; however, Bitbucket is wrought with issues like:<p>- no large file collapsing, i.e. lock files<p>- random downtimes ( I wonder if they actually meet their SLA )<p>- feature requests on boards where Atlassian members ask <i>why x is needed</i>, followed by a slew of +1's, to only see someone ask 3 years later, "where is this at?"<p>I'm a jaded Atlassian user who believes they buy competition and then stagnant the product's evolution.
Funny, they don't mention Bamboo CI. But probably for the better since there are tons of better tools out there like CircleCI, Shippable, and even Jenkins.
The title, mentioning $10B, is misleading. As of 2017, Atlassian revenue is $620 million.<p>Source: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlassian" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlassian</a>