The problem with Jira is that we don't have many alternatives at enterprise level. Maybe for smaller teams (<1000 engineers) something else is at table. It's also interesting neither of FAANG - except for Netflix - are using Jira, they are all on something home-grown AFAIK.
I had a lot of hopes for Github Issues [0] but since they announced the product on last year's Universe event, there were not many news. Maybe this November they will come back with an update.
At this point, I feel Jira is like WordPress. It maybe slow and overbloated, but you can have absolutely any plugin and/or integration you can think of.
It's really hard to find any product or suite of products that replaces Atlassians offerings. Sure you can easily find a issue tracker product, but can it be a service desk at the same time? Bitbucket, Confluence and Jira also integrates really really well. You can have entire workflows that just makes sense, link to documentation, pull-requests/commits and tickets. I've frequently used this setup in a ITIL environment, entire workflows where you have tickets for test, staging and production deployments, the production deployment is a ticket that have the relevant pull-requests linked and the documentation is automatically updated because everything works together.
There's a number of companies offering "Jira replacements" at it's either just service desk features or a ticketing system, almost as if the authors never really used a full-blown Jira (/Atlassian) setup.
People complain a lot about the UI and speed of Atlassians products, but on-prem isn't really slow, even with a ton of plugins, but you do need trained staff to manage it. The UI is because of Jira doesn't really impose much in the way of restrictions on how to use it. You can basically mix and match anyway you like, service desk tickets mixed in with SCRUM workflows... doesn't mean you should, but you can.
You can configure JetBrains TeamCity to be a service desk and competent issue tracker, it also has a Confluence-style knowledge base in the latest versions.
Grafana Labs is using Github Projects and Issues for ~500 engineers that we have and the extended FOSS community contributing to projects like Grafana, Loki, Mimir, Tempo, and Pyroscope.
It is possible to do, I ack that we're below your 1k engineers threshold (though the OSS side is way above), but the problem isn't Github it's whether you (as an org) dictate a single SDLC that you enforce via a tool and as we aren't doing that and we're not yet encountering difficulties (beyond culture shock when people onboard and can't find what they're used to elsewhere, being Jira). By working with autonomy, and in fact embracing OSS and the community (meaning we can't hide info in internal Jira instances), it's easy to avoid Jira.
That's the rub though, many places do not want to give engineers autonomy like this.
At the enterprise level, I suppose you could be looking at IBM Rational or Microsoft Dynamics. I'm surprised ServiceNow isn't trying to break into this space. But with the amount of customization that ends up being demanded, I'm not surprised the big companies start rolling their own.
For smaller companies, there's so many choices out there, I can understand why it's hard to decide on one.
> I'm surprised ServiceNow isn't trying to break into this space.
Last time I ran SNOW a few years ago, it was slowly but steadily heading into the SAP trajectory - highly-customazible per customer needs, expensive to pay and even more expensive to migrate onto. And it doesn't seem to prioritize any developer-oriented features to appeal to that crowd.
ServiceNow’s current CEO is one of SAPs former CEOs. It’s become very heavy on sales culture. On the other hand, they’ve been trying to get customers to stop customizing core functionalities and adopt the platform’s processes. That’s probably not a bad thing overall.
Specific to this thread, though, they have much broader Github integrations available as well, including using git to manage apps authored in Studio, although there are some pain points.
More broadly, I wonder if anyone _really_ wants to be in this space if they’re not developing products specifically for developers as a core line of business. Dynamics and ServiceNow and other platforms and ERPs are great for reporting and tracking, but they often work in completely different ways than developer tooling does because they’re developed for fundamentally different roles.
> It's also interesting neither of FAANG - except for Netflix - are using Jira, they are all on something home-grown AFAIK.
And that might just be the sensible thing to do. I can imagine that from a certain size, the effort of building it yourself can payoff. Especially if you take into account all the lost productivity caused by Atlassian products.
I had a lot of hopes for Github Issues [0] but since they announced the product on last year's Universe event, there were not many news. Maybe this November they will come back with an update.
At this point, I feel Jira is like WordPress. It maybe slow and overbloated, but you can have absolutely any plugin and/or integration you can think of.
[0] https://github.com/features/issues