Discuss: Introducing JIRA – the new bug tracker

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Acyd Burn
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Re: Discuss: Introducing JIRA – the new bug tracker

Post by Acyd Burn »

nn- wrote:no-store and I think pragma no-cache were gone for a few days, and now they're back. What's the story with them?
Their removal produced severe problems with the software, especially occassional logouts and the non-ability to comment on tickets. ;) We now use varnish in front of JIRA to take care of the caching (varnish in it's default config does not adhere to pragma or no-store).

At the moment i received no further reports about problems.
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Re: Discuss: Introducing JIRA – the new bug tracker

Post by 3Di »

Desdenova wrote:Would it be a bad time to bring this up, as well?

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display ... 2010-04-16

Guys, please...change course away from this and find something else. Something that works.

Yes, the old tracker wasn't what the dev team wanted, but it also took into account the what the individual users wanted as well.
It was something called a compromise.

Disregarding what the users want in favor of what the developers want is fine and dandy on something that users can't access. On things they can, it is downright irresponsible and disrespectful of your very own users to consider ignoring them!

It saddens me to see this very stance being taken with phpBB. I really hope it changes, and soon.
Ditto. So do I.
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Re: Discuss: Introducing JIRA – the new bug tracker

Post by DavidIQ »

Desdenova wrote:Would it be a bad time to bring this up, as well?

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display ... 2010-04-16
What about it? It was patched immediately and actually before the security advisory came out. Meik is on top of this and has made stellar improvements and is starting to look pretty good now. I think you all just need to give it a chance. A few weeks doesn't qualify ;)
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Re: Discuss: Introducing JIRA – the new bug tracker

Post by IPB_Refugee »

I looked twice a the new tracker (about 5 minutes each time) and I don't understand it. Will certainly not use it at all.

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Re: Discuss: Introducing JIRA – the new bug tracker

Post by Phil »

Perhaps if you were a bit more detailed than "I don't understand it" we would be able to identify/work on problem areas and improve it?
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Re: Discuss: Introducing JIRA – the new bug tracker

Post by Jeroen B »

Is the bugtracker offline? I cannot access it :?
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Re: Discuss: Introducing JIRA – the new bug tracker

Post by 3Di »

iWisdom wrote:Perhaps if you were a bit more detailed than "I don't understand it" we would be able to identify/work on problem areas and improve it?
Those areas have been already discussed here..
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Re: Discuss: Introducing JIRA – the new bug tracker

Post by Jeroen B »

Pietje15 wrote:Is the bugtracker offline? I cannot access it :?
I think it's fixed again? My browser said the page was unreachable :)
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Re: Discuss: Introducing JIRA – the new bug tracker

Post by DavidIQ »

Pietje15 wrote:
Pietje15 wrote:Is the bugtracker offline? I cannot access it :?
I think it's fixed again? My browser said the page was unreachable :)
It was down for a bit while further improvements to speed and reliability were done. ;)
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Re: Discuss: Introducing JIRA – the new bug tracker

Post by Oleg »

Two UI questions.

1. Can the text box for adding comments be made larger (initial/minimum size)? When I paste text into it using middle click it does not grow. Thus I have one line of text I typed plus 10 lines of text I pasted in a two line text box.

2. Where does one enter their timezone, and ideally can it be taken from phpbb.com account automatically?

Added:

Oh wow. Comments can be edited. Turns out you need to hover over the comment for additional links to appear. Someone definitely compromised usability for shininess.
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Re: Discuss: Introducing JIRA – the new bug tracker

Post by Highway of Life »

Regarding Assembla, I asked Andy Singleton (Founder) about some of the concerns that phpBB would have. I don’t know if phpBB will still reconsider a different tracker, but I thought it might be worthwhile to post this information here just in case that decision comes up again. :)
Andy Singleton wrote:I'm an outsider in the PhpBB project [...] However, I would like to support it if I can, and I can offer the following thoughts:

1) Assembla doesn't "lock" data. We support a full export of data in the JSON format, and we are happy to help people with migrations. If there is anything I can do to reassure people about that, please let me know.

2) Jira is a good product and very full-featured. It is true that Assembla does not have as many features as Jira. We operate in a slightly different environment. We sell mostly to online teams who want to "accelerate software development" and get started quickly. Jira is often installed typically goes through rather extensive configuration. So, Assembla is more oriented toward out-of-the-box usability. That said, we have been working hard over the last two years (the age of our "Tickets" feature) to answer requests from Jira users and other sophisticated users of larger projects. We believe that we need to be "best of breed" in repositories and tickets (issues tracking). That means that our Wiki feature may not be as extensive as Confluence, but we will be aggressive about developing features for the Tickets tool.

Even now, Assembla does offer a pretty large number of features. If I understand what features are important, I can make some recommendations. For example, we do integrate with Eclipse through Mylyn support. We have more features than Jira in areas that are related to templating, copying, forking, and builds, which might or might not be important in this case.
He didn't mention this, but they also have automatic and manual backups of your entire Assembla account to Amazon S3, they also have the ability to import tickets directly from JIRA.

I’ve made feature requests to their tickets tool in the past and their development team has installed them within a couple of weeks (not that every request would be handled that quickly), I like that kind of development attitude of listening to the community and fast turnaround. :D
They also have a program that allows outside developers to contribute to development fo the Assembla system to make it better, and make money at the same time for their time spent on those features. I mention this because if there is a feature that is missing that would really make it worthwhile or necessary for phpBB to be on such a system, you could either get the Assembla development team to do it, or if a phpBB Developer needs a little paid work, he could install that feature as long as he could program in Ruby.
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Re: Discuss: Introducing JIRA – the new bug tracker

Post by ckwalsh »

So David, I read that to say you are arguing phpBB should move away from github and jira and to assembla? Just want to clarify.

For what it's worth, I think this isn't as big a deal as people are making it out to be. The performance is getting better, and the ui is being improved. I (and I say this as Cullen, not a phpBB Team Member) think everyone is kind of bandwagoning around small problems and condemning the software unfairly.

If you think a specific thing can be changed, make a ticked about it in JIRA: There is a specific tracker for it, and it would make it much easier for Meik to manage/prioritise, and even track what people need/want/are concerned about. nn- has done a nice job with making specific suggestions, as opposed to "OMG! MAKE IT BETTERER!" (yes, there is quite a big of exaggeration with that quote)

If you have an alternative that you believe is better, suggest it in or organized way. Linking to websites comparing issue tracking systems isn't helpful. What are the pros of using that software/system? What does it lose compared to JIRA? What would phpBB have to do to move to such a system? Would it avoid/cause problems down the road? Thank you to David for starting to do that with assembla, but much more discussion has to take place before moving to assembla can even remotely considered.

tl;dr: Chill out, be specific, write up detailed proposals rather than just saying "JIRA sucks"
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Re: Discuss: Introducing JIRA – the new bug tracker

Post by Oleg »

For the record, I even now dislike jira's ui and responsiveness. When I posted my first posts here I thought it sucked big time.

A fundamental problem that I don't see being addressed any time soon is lazy implementation of ajax. Every page must be complete, there is no good reason to return an empty page and load parts of it via ajax. I had this behavior on one of my sites at some point and it's just lazy. But like I said, I don't see it changing.

Then there are many small issues that could be me missing something, so I try to give them the benefit of the doubt, but they do add up.

I guess what I object to most is that all of these issues could have been fixed (easily), as they are not exactly unsolved problems in computer science. But jira being a proprietary product, "we fixed our ajax so that it does not suck so much" is not something that sells licenses. Half of jira's users could be clamoring for these fixes but if these users already bought the licenses and are not going to leave the product the company just doesn't care.
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Re: Discuss: Introducing JIRA – the new bug tracker

Post by ckwalsh »

nn- wrote:For the record, I even now dislike jira's ui and responsiveness. When I posted my first posts here I thought it sucked big time.
Regardless, you have made several direct, constructive suggestions to make it better, And I at least can appreciate that.
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Re: Discuss: Introducing JIRA – the new bug tracker

Post by Highway of Life »

Brainy wrote:So David, I read that to say you are arguing phpBB should move away from github and jira and to assembla? Just want to clarify.
Github, no... and JIRA... well, I’ll quote what I told Rotsblok over twitter:
Highway of Life wrote:I agree with the phpBB Teams that a third-party tracker system should be used. While the existing system has been sufficient, there are a LOT of missing features and functionality in it. (which we discussed with naderman on the @phpbbweekly podcast) The initial thought was for the phpBB Devs to create a new ticket system, however, development is slow enough on phpBB itself, and for the devs to devote any time to a ticket system would mean that the development for phpBB would slow down even further, since it is all done in free time. If any of them were paid, it would be a different story, but free time is certainly limiting, so in this case, it's better to not reinvent the wheel. It's better to use a third party system.

The problem I have with the decision is the product: JIRA, it's not user friendly to a point where end users are not going to want to contribute tickets, (see analysis: http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopi ... #p12604855) which is a huge problem for phpBB. I think if JIRA were used for internal usage, the phpBB teams and Jr. Devs, I think it would be the perfect system to use. But it has to be usable by a lot of people who are not developers. And people who don't need to be discouraged with a clunky and bad user interface.
Brainy wrote:For what it's worth, I think this isn't as big a deal as people are making it out to be. The performance is getting better, and the ui is being improved. I (and I say this as Cullen, not a phpBB Team Member) think everyone is kind of bandwagoning around small problems and condemning the software unfairly.
It is a big deal when you see stats like this. That’s scary. And while I’m happy to see the improvements in speed, it’s still painfully slow. Although slowness is a pain, it’s not the biggest complaint I’m seeing from people about the system. And the slowness could be fixed... right? The biggest problem is the UI, it would need to be revamped completely... the system, while being sufficient for a development team of a company, is not going to be sufficient for a huge open source community of non-developers and end-users who have to use it. Can a revamp of the UI be done? If so, maybe I’ll just be quite and wait it out. :)

I’d like to see phpBB ask the community what tracker they would like to see used, and based on the response, the phpBB Teams choose the system that would suit the needs the best and is requested by the community. I would bet that if you put up a poll with many of the competitive products out there, JIRA would not come near the top of the list for most users. (but please prove me wrong). While I’m familiar with a couple of systems out there (most notably Assembla, JIRA, and BugZilla), I don’t know them all. There is also Trac, Mantis, Redmine, Roundup, Scarab, XPWeb, TrackStudio, ITracker. etc.

I suggested Assembla because it’s extremely user friendly, is open source/open development, and feature filled - it integrates well with Github, Continuous integration, deployment, stream, time tracking, customizable ticket system, milestones, etc. It’s built by Agile developers for Agile development teams. True, it does not contain integration tools to the level of JIRA. But Assembla I think would address every features that phpBB needs. But mostly, Assembla is much much better system for usability. (It’s speed is also significantly faster). JIRA beats most other systems in features, but at what cost?
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