An app marketplace is something we absolutely aspire to. Our API is a modest start in that direction.
Self-hosting is very interesting and something we hadn't thought much about but all the feedback here on HN has really gotten us thinking. Also interesting in light of the fact that Jira is pulling back from its own on prem offerings.
Regarding being for managers vs. engineers, we're very much determined to be for the whole team. As managers ourselves we want to be 100% extra careful to not make yet another tool that the team thinks is "for us managers". We've never gotten much value from such tools ourselves.
Having such a product would be great but being realistic I doubt it would cover the cases I was talking about. Please see my long response to another comment in the thread. What do you think? Thanks
Then they'd better stop torturing themselves because they don't need Jira. It's kind of product you use only when you have no other choice or maybe when it's the only tool you know how to use.
I'm not sure everyone would agree with you that "made for managers, not engineers" is a positive in the Jira column. I'd really like, as an engineer, to be able to use work tracking software that helped me and my manager do our jobs effectively.
It's neither positive nor negative. That is it depends on one's point of view.
We're talking about company wide project management where engineers are on the bottom. Engineer's workflow is usually quite simple and limited to assigned issues. They'll never be happy with Jira UI as it's indeed, um, crappy but something like a CLI app using standard REST API with zsh completion may be enough to make most of them happy. Engineers mostly don't use Structure, BigPicture, filters, reports, they don't make complex workflows etc. Oh, maybe the kanban board.
And that's exactly the problem with Jira. It's unsexy, the REST API lacks important functionality (like adding a new option to select list custom field, but one can write custom endpoints in Groovy using ScriptRunner and Java API), it's relatively slow, the code base is old, some issues are never going to be fixed etc. But it has the app ecosystem and the community which is really what makes it, sort of, best in class as apps cover most users' cases. The question usually is 'what app can do this?'
I think providing a viable alternative is quite a challenge as that means building an active community and ecosystem. Plus, imagine a company invested quite much into building their processes on Jira with some set of apps. They have scripted custom fields, workflow post-functions, custom events, event listeners, timesheets, planned vs actual reports, time to market reports, SLAs, Structure, custom REST endpoints, behaviors and other ScriptRunner stuff. An alternative would have to somehow provide all that either out-of-box or via extensions, plus a feasible migration path. What benefits would justify such migration?
It seems that Atlassian know that and therefore reshape their business accordingly by raising the prices to cut away the small fish and move such customers to the cloud. They may loose many of them b/c there are better tools for simpler needs but it's really difficult to beat Atlassian on the on-premise cover all solutions market. They've been there for quite a long time.
I think you probably have a valid point that many companies have invested a lot in customizing and tweaking their Jira installs and then built a lot of value on top of that customized and tweaked Jira installation, and convincing those companies could be a real challenge.
But we've also talked to many, many teams that use a relatively vanilla install of Jira just because it's what people are used to doing ("no one ever got fired for picking Jira"). In quite a number of cases, we've convinced these teams to switch to Kitemaker. As we mature the product, improve our developer offering and build out our ecosystem, we're confident we'll convince even more.
Jira is all over, sometimes customized and tweaked, but we could be convinced to switch. Jira licensing has become a big problem.
For security reasons, we have dozens of little disconnected networks. Each one needs a separate server with a separate license, purchased separately. All software updates have to come via physical media, typically a DVD-R. That's way too many enterprise licenses to purchase.
It's like that with all types of software. If we want Ubuntu updates, we mirror the entire Ubuntu repository onto physical media and then carry that into the room. The physical media is then destroyed, even if it is a hard drive. You're not getting info out of that room.
Usually we want to deploy on a plain Ubuntu box. Sometimes we might use VMWare.
Network speeds are normally fast, but sometimes a whole-network VPN (not browser based, not on a workstation) connects sites that are 1000 miles apart. Be sure to always test your software with high network latency.
