back to article Atlassian: Look at our ginormous Jira revenues!

Atlassian, the collaboration outfit responsible for inflicting Jira on the world, has announced a jump in revenues for the first quarter of fiscal 2019 and an equally eyewatering jump in losses. A specialist in getting developers to collaborate through its Jira issue tracking and Confluence document tools, Atlassian snapped up …

  1. Ramlen

    it all sucks balls

    I hate Jira. It just does not fit for non devs.

    Add to that I hate confluence too. It is the most non intuitive piece of crap I have ever used

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: it all sucks balls

      It doesn't fit for devs either, but as a developer, save yourself.

      Learn to use the rest api, and wrap it into a small script so you can open / close/ list and manage tasks / tickets without leaving the comfort of your vim.

      This chap makes bobswift.atlassian.net available which wraps the rest api into a CLI jar

      java -jar ${LATEST_VERSION_PATH}/lib/${LATEST_VERSION}.jar \

      --server "$server" \

      --user "$user" \

      --password "$password" \

      "$@"

      for example java -jar xx.jar --server https://jira.example.org/ --user johndoe --password "s3KURe!" --action getServerInfo.

      I literally have never logged into the jira web interface since.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: it all sucks balls

      hate Jira. It just does not fit for non devs. Add to that I hate confluence too

      Ditto here. It may be the go-to tool for DevOps, but having had a look at it I cannot really fathom why.

      For starters, they insist on sticking new names on things you've been using for ages (for instance, you don't have "folders"). Secondly, it is not usable out of the box insofar that you have to get used to the user interface, and God help if someone accidentally switches on the page update alerts because the whole thing will slow to a crawl while it is working through the whole message queue that creates, not to mention the wasted staff time zapping all those incoming emails.

      Learning to use it merely adds to the pain because it has a UI that makes the Microsoft Office ribbon appear a model of usability.

      As far as I can tell, it's really only for devs. It's not really usable for others.

      However, guess what? Naturally they already spent money on licenses, so now we're stuck with it..

  2. CelineDion69

    Just here to say Jira is hot garbage

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Why the hell

    ... has nobody written a Jira alternative that isn't hot garbage, isn't written in Java, isn't slow, doesn't have a cloud version that's underprovisioned and isn't generally rubbish?

    Jira is crap. But unfortunately it's the defacto standard for this. Surely Google could buy them and rewrite the thing?

    1. Ben Liddicott

      Re: Why the hell

      Bugzilla was better.

      1. JimTheKnife

        Re: Why the hell

        and bugzilla was awful. JIRA suffers from bloat and the UI? Once upon a time it was a simpler beast and then QA and Project Management.

    2. Nick Stallman

      Re: Why the hell

      Check out Phabricator. It's the closest thing yet I've seen.

  4. Ben Liddicott

    Jira is a Golf Course Sale

    Everyone who uses it hates it.

    People who buy it, don't have to use it.

    Nasty, poorly designed, poorly implemented, slow, memory hog.

    Jira is bad software made badly by bad people who drink bad coffee, dress badly, and are bad at their jobs, and should feel bad.

    And their dogs are bad dogs.

    Seriously, no full text search over all fields? WTF? That was old tech in 1975.

    Stop trying to design software. You are no good at it.

  5. Michael Hoffmann Silver badge
    Meh

    Could be great

    I deal with this stuff every day and while I'm not quite in the "hot garbage" camp, Atlassian software is like "there's some good stuff screaming to be let out".

    The problem seems to be that it all should be torn down and rewritten, instead they just add yet more layers of enterprisy Java/Tomcat/Catalina.

    Their QA is absolutely atrocious, I've had to deal with two showstopping regression bugs between *minor* version upgrades just in the last 2 weeks. Rollback without also rolling back the home directory and database is largely a lie (the supposed ability to do so is documented as "should work, no worries").

    Functionality that used to be or should be built-in is increasingly outsourced to the marketplace - where you pay extra to third party vendors or Atlassian.

    In 2018 you still can't execute fully unattended automated installation ab initio. The convolutions I - and others on the Atlassian forums - have had to do to get around this (especially for cloud deployments of the server products) are just frightening. Sometimes I look at my Cloudformation templates and weep.

    Bugs and badly design configuration makes encryption-in-transit and at-rest a nightmare to set up. Another "forget about automating this".

    ...

    OK, so maybe it *is* hot garbage.

    Can't put my finger quite on it, but the downward trend seemed to really start - and accelerate - when they went public.

    There is one exception: I love Bamboo! It kicks Jenkins' balls, it kicks CodeBuilt/Deploy/Pipeline to the curb. I've evaluated the lot like 3 times in the last year (there's a lot of pressure to go Jenkins) and every time I've come up with "out of my cold dead fingers".

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Could be great

      Jenkins is okay, provided you do the sane thing and run actual shell scripts from an actual git repo, so the only thing provided by Jenkins is credential/parameter injection.

      Ultimately, C/I needs to work in plain shell with the C/I system doing setenv(3). so C/I simply records the value of the previous variable invocations thusly "env > env.txt", allowing local debugging by simply sourcing the env.txt in a clean shell, e.g. env -i sh -c ".env.txt && ./ci-script.sh"

      Jenkins just makes this apparent earlier, having played with bamboo, I was curious as to what features caught your eye as they seem fairly interchangeable for me.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    JIRA is a crime against humanity

    The worse thing ever. Vile vile vile.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Seems this thread had been invaded by Microsoft.

    as clearly TFS is thge big stinking turd here, that is desperately trying to play catchup to JIRA and only needs another 5 years to get there.

    a properly setup and configured JIRA with workflows that suit your company is a really good product, and the Agile and Kanban boards work really well. If you have suffered TFS and JIRA, you will know how far behind TFS is.

    I'm also surprised the Microsoft shills brought up performance, we host ours on a very modest server spec, with no performance issues whatsoever, and it's loaded up with plenty of add-ons for time-sheet management, portfolio planning, and application links to source and build servers. We have 100% uptime, it only needs rebooting when installing updates, which we do frequently, and never have upgrade problems, they are totally painless.

    If someone genuinely does have issues with JIRA, it likely more reflects on your admin doing a really bad job of configuring it, and it's workflows, than the product itself

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Seems this thread had been invaded by Microsoft.

      I'm a *nix man, and I vote for none of the above.

    2. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Re: Seems this thread had been invaded by Microsoft.

      I'm also surprised the Microsoft shills brought up performance

      To be honest I don't think the complaints are from Microsoft shills but from people using JIRA which is either incorrectly configured or unsuited to their project. I've seen companies buy JIRA so that they can host it internally and force it on to project managers leading understably to complete clusterfucks and resentment amongst users. But I also regularly see project management by MS Word and Excel which I find much, much worse.

  8. bd1235

    price rise

    They needed that price rise. The lads at the top, Mike and Scott, have recently bought adjacent properties with waterfront to Sydney Harbour. How much did you say? One was about $70 mil and the other was a little higher at about $100 mil.

  9. steve11235

    Worst software ever...

    Except for the rest. It's not as bad as the other comments indicate; it gets the job done, sorta. It could be very good, except that it's missing the small things that would make it truly usable, and it is slow and bulky. I do wish there was an alternative.

    1. Dan 55 Silver badge

      Re: Worst software ever...

      There is, it's called Bugzilla, but that doesn't include the buzzwords for PMs and workflows that go round in circles before shoving you into a dead end that nobody can do anything about.

      1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

        Re: Worst software ever...

        There is, it's called Bugzilla

        Not really comparable and, depending on who you ask, equally awful: I personally hate it but YMMV. JIRA is very ambitious attempting to support the whole agile approach which means configuration and training. It's certainly too much if all you want is a bug tracker and, in common with lots of project management software, fails to take into consideration how fallible the meatware is.

        Because all I need is an issue tracker and pull request tool, I use Bitbucket for my projects on a daily basis and find it perfectly ok but I do resent the recent attempts to appify everything by injecting 10 MB of Javascript into every page.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Worst software ever...

        Bugzilla, are you serious????

        Epic Fail.

        1. Dan 55 Silver badge

          Re: Worst software ever...

          And yet I'm more productive than using Jira.

  10. Darn_Tootin

    Micromanagement

    Our team has switched to jira for no good reason except to justify the position of a new employee who seems to do nothing but micromanage our bug tracker. We get flooded with notifications for every little adjustment, whether the manager tweaks the labels or blows his nose. The interface is crap with poorly labeled gray-on-gray buttons (which turn the mouse cursor into the type-text cursor when pointed at) and the gray-on-gray text is hard to read, flooded with garbage comments like, "Collin made (unspecified) changes 5 minutes ago."

    Jira has made our productivity plummet.

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