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?