
Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M - zhuxuefeng1994
https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/18/atlassian-acquires-agilecraft-for-166m/
======
keithnz
I've been really unimpressed with atlassian over the last few years.

We started with bitbucket before it was acquired, it was super robust, then
once atlassian got it slowly small bug after small bug kept making it into
production creating mini headaches and they never seem like its super
important to them.

We also have Confluence, which is okish, but again, small bug after small bug
keeps creeping in, like at the moment, they have a bug with putting markdown
into pages (it's completely broken ). Their attitude is it's a low priority
fix and they have no idea when it will be fixed.

Bugs happen, sure.... but this kind of thing says to me that they must be so
overwhelmed by bugs that fixing documented features of their product is just
not a priority if it's deemed to be too fringe. Maybe they are just getting
too big and too removed from their customers? Either way, for me it's
triggered a search for alternatives.

~~~
nisa
They just don't seem to care. You research something - after hours you'll end
up at their bugtracker, where you can read the desperation of others (often
some issues are not fixed in 10+ years). I don't understand their priorities.
There is to date still no way to restrict visibility of work-logs on issues -
a usecase basically every smaller shop has because the client is often
participating directly in the JIRA. Service Desk solves that problem but it's
quite expensive and you can't mix software projects with service desk
projects. So you have to create linked-issues and have yet another layer of
indirection :/

We end up syncing projects with another plugin on the same instance :/

Confluence lacking some robust text-only markup (like markdown or asciidoc or
whatever) is also more than lame. It shouldn't be that hard because most
macros can be configured by text attributes anyway... Expose that Wiki in a
readable markdown format and have me let git... like github gist would be more
than enough. I despise using Confluence at the moment...

Gitlab could eat their lunch but they also seem to have their priorities off

~~~
sytse
You mean we're not going after Confluence or JIRA?

Wikis are certainly not a priority for us. I think if you don't separate the
proposer from the person who accepts the proposal the wiki tends to grow
stale. So we're betting on static websites with GitLab Pages.

There is a large market for wikis but you would have to use something easier
than markdown, which is hard for us to get away from.

We're going after JIRA. In GitLab you can have a service desk on a project
with an issue tracker. Do we solve the work-log issue too?

~~~
nisa
Ohh, I really have to stop making snarky comments here :)

So I actually looked at migrating to Gitlab due our JIRA pains but it's not
really possible if you have some already grown setup (it's not exactly easy to
solve so no blame to Gitlab here)

\- no JIRA import (it's possible with some REST-API fighting), but something
easy would be nice: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ee/issues/2780](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/2780)

\- The work-log issue is not solved as far as I understood the documentation,
it's possible to have external users to hide internal projects but once you
are on a project time-tracking information is visible.

\- From a quick glance over the docs it looks like reporting on tracked time
is also not possible out of the box - and probably not across projects - we
use Tempo Timesheets on JIRA for that, the slash commands /spend /estimate are
probably okay for devs but we also have other users that can deal with the
fields in JIRA.

\- It looks like the whole custom fields on issues is still in the works (we
use that quite heavily) and there is no concept of workflows (we also have
some custom setup there)

\- Servicedesk looks neat through.

Don't get me wrong - this reads like: I want all JIRA features in Gitlab -
maybe that's a stupid idea, for a new project I'd probably just use Gitlab and
see how are I come.

~~~
victorwu
Sean already did a great job responding to each point here. Just want to add
one more quick one. We are working on key-value labels right now, and we think
it will solve many of the problems of custom fields. Feel free to take a look
and add some comments. Thanks!

[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ee/issues/9175](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/9175)

------
Benjammer
All this advanced tracking/planning stuff from companies like Atlassian seem
to me like some kind of weird, dystopian "C-Suite-Porn."

The going narrative seems to be this idea that companies have, throughout the
history of business, been guided completely by the whims and emotional fancies
of the leadership team and/or CEO. And now we're adding tools to surface more
and more status tracking information up to the C Suite, which is going to
directly lead to better decision-making that moves the company forward.

This seems like nonsense to me. Imo, leaders set the culture, network outside
the company, and guide longer-term strategic vision, while directors wrangle
the people and manage alignment with higher level goals, and team leads make
the projects happen by empowering and supporting the IC's who do the actual
day to day work.

I just don't understand the value proposition for a company as a whole to
putting more data on the plate of higher-ups at any level above team leaders
(1st level management, with all-IC direct-reports). We need analysis and
summary tooling that doesn't add _any_ overhead to team leaders and ICs, not
more overhead on the people actually getting things done. We need _better_
information on the desks of leadership, not _more_ data points. We need _more
efficient_ communication tools, essentially "better nozzles," as opposed to
higher flow rate in the company-information-firehose.

These products seem to play directly into the psyche of the typical narcissist
CEO who wants to know everything that is going on at the company, right now,
and micromanage everything directly. The incentives don't seem very well-
aligned with things like "servant leadership" and "cross-functional
knowledge," because, how do you make those into a Jira ticket that will be
tracked towards your performance reviews? If it's cross-functional then which
functional task-board does it belong to?

~~~
bshipp
This is a great comment. I'd go further and say that it can actually be
harmful to a business (or government organxation) to put too much "raw" data
in the hands of people who lack the context or training to effectively
evaluate it. the analyst who generated/cleaned the dataset is going to have a
much stronger basis for knowing when to trust the data and when to discount
it.

Once the boss has thrown it through a pivot table and generated their own
conclusions you're now not only fighting to get the correct conclusions
forward, you have to fight management's ego when you tell them they've missed
some important aspect in their analysis.

------
whalesalad
> a service that aims to give enterprises plan their strategic projects and
> workstreams

???

Interesting software. My spidey sense tells me that your team will need at
least 1 FTE just to massage whatever kind of workflow is required to get stuff
in Jira to play nice with this. These tools that promise insight into what is
actually happening within prod/eng teams are always really great on paper but
in actuality I have never seen one work.

"Yeah so there is a dusty old EC2 instance running on so-and-so's old IAM role
(who is now terminated, but we can't kill their IAM or things will break)
running this .jar which tries to take our JIRA stuff from these 3 projects and
merge it into a pseudo "fake" project named "KPI BOARD DO NOT EDIT" that gets
sync'd with a lambda function every hour to AgileCraft via a Google sheet. If
this box isn't running then the KPI reports don't get generated in metabase
and the board is going to lose their shit. Make sure to check the disk with df
next time you login because it fills up ocassionally."

~~~
yuchi
For the uninitiated in Enterprise-talk, FTE stands for Full Time Employee.
_flies away_

~~~
yaseenk
FYI it’s Full Time _Equivalent_. E.g a new feature may require 1 FTE for 1
week. That doesn’t necessarily mean 1 person 1 week. It may be 2 people 2.5
days each, etc.

~~~
Waterluvian
Or 9 women to birth a baby in a month.

I don't like being reduced to a quantifiable amount. You end up with crappy
managers who have secret multipliers for every employee to try to make their
crappy estimates work.

Nothing makes your colleagues dislike you more than it accidentally slipping
that your manager sees you as worth 2.5 of them.

~~~
tomrod
Truth. Even saving their bacon, time and again, doesn't help.

------
013a
Much like Oracle or IBM; they're a company that had some very interesting
products and ideas in their day, and eventually just decided (or was forced,
for internal reasons) to rest of their laurels. Today, they produce products
that are purchased by people who don't actually use them, because the people
who use them hate it. And, well, they pursue growth by acquisition. It's
honestly a sad story, because they could have been so much more. Maybe they
still can, but my faith dwindles every year that goes by.

I have more and more respect for Microsoft, who had every opportunity to go
this route (and, really, did for quite a while), but was able to right the
ship and continue to produce products that people actually want to buy.
Sometimes they're buggy, and bloated, and strange to use, but they listen to
their customers and continue to push improvements. That's why they ate IBM's
lunch back in the day and have become the world's most valuable enterprise
software company.

------
drum
After using Jira for the last 2 years, Atlassian has struck me as the 800
pound gorilla that's resting on its laurels.

On my dashboard, I'm consistently annoyed by being shown the option of
creating a new user account and having to decipher the UI to choose wether my
ticket is a bug or feature during mission critical moments. Just give me one
big button that says 'Create Ticket', we'll figure out the rest later.
Secondly, why aren't tickets shown on the dashboard by default? When I log in,
I'd expect to see what's going on, not have them tucked away in the nav menu.

Recently during a mission critical ticket, email responses to Jira threads
were not creating new messages in Jira, creating massive delays in
communication with the team until we figured out messages weren't posting.
Diagnosing the issue later, it seemed to be due to file attachments in the
email responses.

~~~
politician
What's Voltron? Their SEO must be poor because Googling "Atlassian vs Voltron"
brings up TFS as the top hit and a page full of Atlassian spam.

~~~
drum
Doh! Thanks for asking. Voltron is a white labeled version of Jira (which I
did not realize when writing my post). Edited.

------
neovive
Contrary to some of the other commenters, I've been quite happy with
Confluence over the past 8 years. We use Confluence heavily at our institution
(higher-education) and it's been well-received by both technical and non-
technical staff. It functions extremely well as a knowledgebase and is part of
the daily workflow for dozens of staff. I also use a separate Confluence Cloud
license for my personal knowledgebase and journal--I find it more productive
than my previous Markdown+Git workflow for notetaking.

The only negative experience so far was the big price jump a few years ago for
the higher-education license that forced us to reduce our licensed user count.

------
DavidPiper
I don't read a lot of TechCrunch, but did anybody else find this article quite
poorly (perhaps hastily) written?

(My apologies to the author for the flippancy of that question)

An incorrect word in the opening sentence, a few places where tenses are mixed
or incorrect, and generally long-winded sentences... Is this usual for
TechCrunch?

Regardless, interesting news to wake up to - I'll be interested to watch the
direction of both product suites after the acquisition.

~~~
jacques_chester
It looks to be a lightly-edited press release. Very common for journalists in
a hurry to make quota or get the first link up.

~~~
freddie_mercury
It may be common for other journalists but I don't think that's the
explanation in this case. Every acquisition I've been part of, we've briefed
journalists beforehand (almost always someone at Techcrunch), they were under
an embargo, and the article was pre-written.

~~~
jacques_chester
> _a service that aims to help enterprises plan their strategic projects and
> workstreams. The service provides business leaders with additional insights
> into the current status of technical projects and gives them insights into
> the bottlenecks, risks and dependencies of these projects._

These are not words I would expect a journalist to spontaneously generate.
This is presser fluff.

~~~
freddie_mercury
You seem to still believe that Techcrunch is journalism? I thought everyone
learned a decade ago that it is a PR content farm thinly masquerading as
journalism.

Almost certainly the journalist for this is known to someone on the Atlassian
media relations team[1], assured them friendly coverage in (unstated, quid pro
quo) exchange for future access and exclusives, and then the PR team provided
them some copy as "background" for the article.

[1]: We can check this guess by looking at his previously publications about
Atlassian:

\- He announced the "next generation of hosted Jira Software"

\- He announced new & improved integration between Jira & Github

\- He announced the acquisition of OpsGenie

\- He announced the launch of Bitbucket Pipelines

He's almost certainly been "friendly" with Atlassian marketing for at least 5
years, based on his publication history. So they call him whenever they have
something new to announce and he publishes some click bait. It is win-win.
After all, this is the article that made it the front page of HN...not any
other article about the acquisition.

~~~
jacques_chester
Are we angrily agreeing? Because I feel like we're angrily agreeing.

~~~
freddie_mercury
I'm not angry. Are you angry? Let's sing kumbaya till no one is angry.

------
arthurcolle
> Atlassian today announced that it has acquired AgileCraft, a service that
> aims to give enterprises plan their strategic projects and workstreams.

Whatever happened to editing in Journalism?

~~~
Benjammer
delta in ad impressions for being first to publish >>> delta in ad impressions
for having poor copy-editing

------
jondubois
My view of Atlassian's project management tools and services is that they can
allow terrible managers to become mediocre managers (which is not great but
still an improvement) but no matter how much they try, they can never turn a
mediocre manager into a good manager.

The value proposition of Atlassian is that their software can give a manager
more visibility over the technical/engineering processes within their company;
but this improved visibility is useless unless the manager has both a clear
vision and a deep technical understanding of their project.

No amount of tooling can match the value of having technical understanding of
the project. For example, Jira can generate a lot of pretty charts and
workflow visualizations which create a great illusion of progress but this
illusion typically comes at the expense of real progress.

------
MediumD
"The price total of the acquisition is about $166 million, with $154 million
in cash and the remainder in restricted shares."

Is it normal to have nearly the entirety of the acquisition be cash? I would
have assumed the standard would be shares with a new vesting schedule to
incentivize the founders to stay on board. To my uneducated self, this seems
like the founders can basically immediately walk away with very little money
left on the table.

~~~
rozenmd
Typically if a firm has the cash lying around, it may as well deploy it.

They get around the founders leaving issue by adding earn-outs and various
contractual clauses to make it in the founders' best interest to stay.

------
jupp0r
I feel like all Atlassian products I’ve used so far have been made for winning
feature checkbox comparisons. They all get the job done somehow, but nobody I
know would actually choose them over tools whose makers actually care about
their users instead of users IT departments.

~~~
shimms
Genuinely curious - what would you choose over Jira for agile/product planning
and work item tracking?

I’ve been increasingly falling out of love with Jira, but all the alternatives
lack core features.

