DevOpsery-dispenser Atlassian's customers settle into the cloudy subscription world

Atlassian, home of DevOps stalwarts Trello and Jira, has reported over half of its takings from the company's subscription model. At the end of the financial year, the firm chalked up more than $1.2bn in revenues for FY2019. As for the company's subscription model, this time last year, subs had not quite reached half of FY2018 …

[John Geek]

every atlassian program I've had the displeasure of having to use has been worst-in-class. their Confluence 'wiki' is awful, and so is Jira, the worst bug tracker.I've had the displeasure to use. they must have a heck of a sales force to push this stuff into corporate suites.

[Unlimited]

Such as?

Comment is useless without providing examples of your opinion of best-in-class

[T. F. M. Reader]

Re: Such as?

Atlassian's products seem to have been designed by people who failed data structures at college and have very limited understanding of what is important for development. E.g., JIRA stresses the absolutely useless distinctions between "epics", stories", "bugs", and "tasks", even though the actual workflow does not depend at all on whether you call it a "bug" or a "task" (a "bug" is a "task", after all). At the same time, the most important relationship - what blocks/depend on what - is almost completely absent. Oh, yes, for each ticket you can see the blocked and the blockers, but the tree view (this is where data structures would come in) of dependencies that is, IMHO, all important is nowhere to be seen.

The JIRA GUI is awful (Confluence is even worse), horribly slow (at least in the cloudy version), and changes all the time. Notifications come to you over email, but the email format is unstable, making it virtually impossible to filter/score/etc. on the receiving end. Moreover, JIRA is completely incapable of parsing incoming mails in any sane way and add them to the comment trail in a human-readable form (to the point that it does not even respect its own markup!). This means that one gets notifications through one interface, but must switch to another interface to react. Search is horrendous (and I am perfectly capable of writing SQL queries). Automation is hardly possible - I blame it on the aforementioned inability to handle incoming emails and lack of any alternative channel.

The best thing I can say about JIRA is that it is certainly better than having nothing at all.

What is better? How about a very popular thing that does all the things that JIRA doesn't, and does them very well indeed - Bugzilla? I'd take that any time - I am stuck with JIRA and Confluence because of someone else's decision at work. I do not intend to initialize a migration for the whole organization. So all that is left for me is using it and I cursing it five days a week.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Such as?

As a fellow forced Atlassian worker, I share your pain. A few months ago, I got told that we were no longer to write documentation for our projects alongside the code, but instead every piece of documentation must be on Confluence.

However, Bugzilla simply does not have the features that the people who are choosing JIRA are choosing it for (I make correct english? Brillo). Particularly reporting, visualizing case progress, all that jazz. Then you've got all the rest of Atlassian, bitbucket, confluence, opsgenie - all things you can do yourself, like bugzilla, but you really don't want to, because that is resource that could be advancing your goals, and not maintaining all those things.

[cbars]

I like Jira, my only complaint is (when I last used it) the centrally managed model. Projects have their own priorities and dont always follow the same management model as the rest of the organisation, which is not an inherently bad thing.