It’s Tuesday, so that must mean I’m in London, for the inaugural UK Atlassian User Group. At time of writing there were already 91 people signed up, so I look forward to seeing what people are doing with Confluence and JIRA. It will also be a good opportunity to gauge reception of the new Atlassian products.
Sourcesense have done some pretty cool things with Confluence and JIRA in the past, such as automated defect tracking (pushing issues into JIRA from a validation service) and automated quality assurance documentation for large Italian telecoms companies. One of the Sourcesense investors even uses JIRA for company-wide project management and business planning.
Update: ok, the event seems to have been a huge success. A great turnout, and the talks were all quite interesting. Some of the upcoming features in Confluence and JIRA look like real life-savers, and it will be interesting to try out Crowd (single sign-on) and Bamboo (continuous integration) to see just how good they are. In principle, they could be killer apps, but a lot will depend on the implementations.
In particular I’d like to see Crowd handle Shibboleth gracefully – I’m really not sure the world needs another “from scratch” SSO solution. The Atlassian guys suggested checking the Crowd FAQ for information on that, but I don’t see any information there so far.
The networking after the talks was a good opportunity to catch up with people, and I heard about some pretty innovative uses of Atlassian products. For the second time in two weeks I bumped into Lloyd Davis, too, and I was quite impressed by the work Headshift and Lloyd did for BP. Nice to see social technologies being applied proactively in large corporations.
I’m still very unsure why people are so excited about atlassian. Jira is (just barely) useful as a bug tracking system, but Confluence is still one of the worst wikis I’ve ever used. (and it’s also about as stable as the average drunk person on a monocycle).
I think the key thing about JIRA is that is’s a barely useful BTS in a field where most competitors are not at all useful. And actually, once you climb up the learning curve, I’ve found it to be really quite powerful. I’m open to suggestions for alternatives, but all the ones I’ve tried so far (Bugzilla, Scarab, Trac, etc) I’ve found to be less user-friendly and more of a pain to get working. IMHO, of course.
As for Confluence – yes ,there may be better wikis technically, but Confluence seems to somehow capture the imagination of non-technical people very quickly. I must admit to confusion sometimes when working with it, but again – best of a bad bunch. The widest, deepest feature set with the least amount of pain. And for most users, that’s what it’s all about.
Meanwhile, it seems the Atlassian guys are aware of the limitations and flaws in their products, and are actively working to rectify them. And some of the new stuff coming down the line seems genuinely useful, too.
Of course I’d love it if Atlassian open sourced their code and used my preferred frameworks, but pragmatism wins the day here.