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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

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.

outworlder 11y ago
> 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.
- mwhuber 11y ago
  We use vanilla Jira and I find it painful - over-reliance on modals, slow JS calls, etc.; I do enjoy Source Tree. As a PM, Pivotal Tracker (used in a previous life) is one of the best work-tools I've ever used.
  - keypusher 11y ago
    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.
    - mwhuber 11y ago
      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.
- omouse 11y ago
  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... ;-)
  - tom9729 11y ago
    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.
Domenic_S 11y ago
Whoever designed JIRA's psuedo-markdown text format deserves a special place in hell.
- skrebbel 11y ago
  The relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/277/ https://xkcd.com/277/
  - buro9 11y ago
    Every JIRA product has it's own special markup. 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.
    - thristian 11y ago
      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...
      - buro9 11y ago
        These things are not mutually exclusive. 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.

outworlder 11y ago

> 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.

mwhuber 11y ago
We use vanilla Jira and I find it painful - over-reliance on modals, slow JS calls, etc.; I do enjoy Source Tree. As a PM, Pivotal Tracker (used in a previous life) is one of the best work-tools I've ever used.
- keypusher 11y ago
  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.
  - mwhuber 11y ago
    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.
omouse 11y ago
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... ;-)
- tom9729 11y ago
  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.

Domenic_S 11y ago

Whoever designed JIRA's psuedo-markdown text format deserves a special place in hell.

skrebbel 11y ago
The relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/277/ https://xkcd.com/277/
- buro9 11y ago
  Every JIRA product has it's own special markup. 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.
  - thristian 11y ago
    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...
    - buro9 11y ago
      These things are not mutually exclusive. 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.