

Get JIRA for $10 only - shuron
http://alexander.holbreich.org/2010/05/use-jira/

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kemiller
I'd need to be paid a lot more than that to use JIRA.

~~~
ghshephard
So, the one painful part of Jira, that Atlassian really needs to do something
about, (And I say this as a Die-Hard Jira fan with four years of absolute
devotion to the product) is the simplification of their field-issuetype-
screen-schemes, as well as the myriad other schemes. It took me over a year,
and at least five or six sessions of sketching it out onto paper, before I was
able to mentally map Custom-Fields, Screens, Issue Types, Priorities,
Resolutions, Statuses,workflows and their various schemes in my head. One part
that makes it problematic, is Jira is not _consistent_ in how you map schemes
to collections of atomic elements like Statuses or Resolutions (Their are no
IssueType-Status-Schems, or IssueType-Resolution-Schemes, but there are Field
Configuration Schemes, and IssueTypeScreenSchemes)

But, with that one exception, the software is a delight. Fast, even on a tiny
platform. Takes 3 minutes to install (The hardest two steps are setting your
JAVA_HOME variable and mapping your Server Directory in a config file) - works
on WIndows, Linux, Mac with zero issue. Very extensible, great plugin
community. The new 4.x JQL makes sophisticated queries against your issue
database a dream.

And it scales well - Our three Gigabyte Memory, 12 Gigabyte Disk VMware
Machine has added 18,962 issues this year, and continues to feel light (Now
totalling 68,495 issues).

I can type a query like "+VPN +Bandwidth" - and get an answer back in about 2
seconds (Thanks Lucene!) - this with a full text search of all the comments,
descriptions, and summaries.

I love the product so much that I even enjoy the people who have issues with
it - Nothing better than to have someone point out a problem, and then come
back with a 15 second solution that also provides the foundation for solving a
whole host of other problems.

It has my recommendations with only minor reservations regarding the
complexity (and inconsistency) of their schemes.

Remedy, on the other hand, gets no recommendations whatsoever for their out-
of-the-box implementation. I'd love to find someone who has anything to say
something good about that product.

~~~
kelnos
> Fast, even on a tiny platform.

Really? We have it running on a 2x4 core Opteron 2.2GHz system with 4GB of
RAM, supporting barely 60 people, and page load times are slow as hell. And it
was even installed and set up by a consultant.

> Takes 3 minutes to install

Sure, if you don't mind that the default install uses (and warns you about!) a
non-production-worthy database to store your data.

------
kelnos
Ugh. Pass. We use it at work. It's a very frustrating piece of software. I'd
actually prefer to use Bugzilla, for all its warts. Jira's interface is a pain
to use. Changing anything about the bug involves loading a new page, and then
saving to get back to the original page. Even worse, the edit page has a
completely different layout from the view page, so you have to figure out
where everything is twice.

Conflict resolution is nonexistent:

1\. Users A and B click to edit a bug at the same time. 2\. User A changes the
assignee and clicks save. 3\. User B changes the priority and clicks save. 4\.
User A refreshes the bug page to find that his assignee change has been
reverted.

This is pretty basic, people.

The regular search page is a little odd. If you have multiple 'projects', and
click on one to filter by project, a little DHTML bit pops out that asks you
to reload the page to make sure all the other fields are up to date. Ajax,
anyone?

The hierarchy is a bit overdone: Projects, then Components, then Component
Modules, then Component Sub Modules. And you can't set default assignees for
CMs or CSMs, so they're really pretty useless, aside from wasting people's
time trying to figure out another level of granularity as to where to file the
bug. To be fair, they're optional, but...

On the plus side, I really like the advanced search query language: basically
just a bunch of boolean and comparison operators, with decent autocomplete
functionality. Quite powerful, and not at all hard to use.

~~~
shuron
I'm with you by liking bugzilla. It's also my favorite after JIRA. But JIRA
better for people with few IT background. Sometimes we do organize project of
non IT context or involve people which are not familiar with IT and tracking
systems. That people liked JIRA more than bugzilla.

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peterbraden
get trac for free and save yourself the headache

~~~
watty
or Redmine... it's worked great for us so far.

~~~
ghshephard
or RT (issue Tracking), or my Favorite, Jira... Oh, wait. :-)

