As some of you may know, I'm a quality insurance engineer for the venice project. My job is to make sure we ship a healthy product as a whole. For this to happen I need to read and write documentation and file and track bugs. The tools the company uses are both from atlassian. The documentation tool is Confluence and the tracking tool is named Jira.
Confluence is a wiki based documentation management software. I kind like confluence - the wiki syntax is simple, we can do some queries to Jira and confluence itself. Works pretty well. Print work nicely from within Firefox. I like the integration that can be achieved with JIRA. I wasn't a heavy wiki users before joining Theveniceproject, just did a few edits in wikipedia and on Camino related stuff. I was able to catch it easily and understand how to use it rapidly. One thing I hate is how some of my coworkers link pages inside confluence you can either paste complete link are use internal links which are the the last part of the normal link changed a bit. The good point about internal links is that Confluence knows it's internal, so if you remove the page for instance , the system will list all pages linking to the page you are going to remove - making the maintainance of the data easier.The export to PDF is a nice feature but links are blued like by Microsoft word generated document which I don't like. The only issue I have for the moment is CONF-7405.
Jira is the bug tracking system. You can also track task, travels with it. Since the client is based on Mozilla , I thought that our tracking system would be bugzilla. It was not, so I started using the tool with a slightly bad opinion. Let's start by what I like in Jira. It looks nice - even if sometime you need to read all that page to find the link you where looking for. It as all major features you would want from a tracking system. It understands Confluence's wiki syntax - which make it easy to have nice looking bug reports. It has some nice granularity feature in terms of permissions, on who can do what and how it can be done. It has a nice html auto-linking feature, so if you have bug XXX-ZZZ, and just write that in a comment : JIRA will change that text to an HTML link.But there are some stuff that don't work correctly :
- Jira itself, when loaded fails with Java execptions
- It is slow - meaning that people working remotely have issue using it.
- You can't use internal links to confluence
- You have an attach file and attach screenshot feature - the later is of no use to me (plus the fact it does not work)
- Tracking duplicates does not make it.
- You can add custom fields, but can't search them.
- Searching is difficult has one can't easily do ors and ands. Filters are howevere easy to use and set up
- It's difficult to track client server software due to this
Comments (4)
Hi Ludovic,
Exception in the logs do not necessarily mean that anything is actually wrong with the function of the software - often times just that an exception was thrown, caught, logged and discarded. The JIRA code-base is a large and mature beast that has been worked on for quite some time now, and has is composed of many open source components that have various exception handling and throwing techniques. Sadly the habit of catching (Excpeption e), logging e and returning null is common. This will mean that there are more stack-traces in the logs than strictly necessary, but not that the software is functioning incorrectly.
Often times this results in only us knowing which are important stack-traces and which are known irrelevancies - which is why we encourage you to open a support request and attach the logs. Obviously this means more work for us and we are constantly trying to remove the guff.
Anyway, some of your performance concerns should definitely be addressed by moving to a more recent version, v3.6.3 included significant performance work.
We are looking at the applet problem, I personally haven't seen that one before... Could you possibly provide some more detail on your server setup? Is it Tomcat? Do you have SSL enabled etc.? (The Support team will get back to you with these questions anyway). Most appreciated.
cheers,
- jed.
Posted by Jed Wesley-Smith | décembre 11, 2006 5:28 AM
Posted on décembre 11, 2006 05:28
Done this is JRA-11715.
Posted by Ludovic Hirlimann | décembre 10, 2006 12:37 PM
Posted on décembre 10, 2006 12:37
Posted by Ludovic Hirlimann | décembre 8, 2006 10:17 AM
Posted on décembre 8, 2006 10:17
Hi Ludovic,
I'm a dev from the JIRA team at Atlassian. Thanks for taking the time to blog about your experiences using our products. Feedback is always appreciated - and criticism is actually more useful than praise - although praise is always welcome of course :-).
I just wanted to check a couple of things that don't seem quite right. What version are you using? We are currently at v3.6.5 and v3.7 is coming out real soon now. Some of the things you are talking about sound like things that have been fixed.
Firstly, JIRA shouldn't have exceptions when it is starting up. If you are seeing exceptions in the startup log, please create a support case at http://support.atlassian.com so we can have a look and find out what's wrong. There will be exceptions reported during general use, some of which are problems, some not. Again, if in doubt, please contact our support and attach the log files, we'll have a look and get to the bottom of it.
For a long time the JIRA team focused on features and performance wasn't a priority. In v3.6.3, significant effort went into improving the performance of JIRA, and it is now significantly faster than previously. Further work in v3.7 sees significant improvements in the memory usage of searching and exporting results to Excel, Word etc.
It would be nice to link internally to Confluence. There was an attempt to make this work with is this plugin: http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRAEXT/JIRA+Linker+Plugin but it doesn't allow you to do internal links in comments. This plugin is not an official part of JIRA, although we may address this again in the future.
Could you please create a support case for the Attach Screenshot applet not working. We are not happy sending out software that doesn't work and haven't had any other reports of it not working apart from under certain circumstances pre v3.0 that were fixed 2 years ago. This applet is only compatible with client browsers running on Windows and OSX (not Linux unfortunately).
Tracking duplicates does "make it", you simply link the relevant issues with a "Duplicate" link. The two issues you linked to are very handy usability improvements though, and are hopefully going to be addressed by future UI improvements.
You can search custom fields, but they are hidden in the search screen if the current search scope is greater than the scope they apply to - if you have custom fields A & B that apply only to project X, and you have All Projects selected, you will not see the custom fields in the search. This is not particularly intuitive. In v3.5 we added the a notification to the user when something like the project is selected that the Components lists, Custom Fields lists etc. may have changed, so you can more easily refresh the lists. We have updated the issue you quote to more clearly reflect this, and have linked it as a duplicate of: http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-5484
We agree about the AND and OR, we would like to improve the whole searching UI to allow you to be more specific more easily. We have done a lot of work over the last few versions reducing the dependencies in the Issue Navigator and making everything more robust, and this work is specifically so we can refactor the Search screen more easily. We are getting closer to being able to swap out the filter editor for something much easier to use and more powerful.
Multi-Project versions is a popular issue and is related to the idea of more powerful search capabilities which we are working towards. It is possible to track versions across multiple projects, it just requires manual work to keep everything synchronised.
If you have any other feedback, please do not hesitate to let us know.
cheers,
- jed
Posted by Jed Wesley-Smith | décembre 8, 2006 8:26 AM
Posted on décembre 8, 2006 08:26