Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M | Hacker News Reader

Atlassian Acquires AgileCraft for $166M

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121 pointszhuxuefeng199478 comments

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.

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

> Confluence lacking some robust text-only markup (like markdown or asciidoc or whatever)

The really irony here is that it used to have that! That was the only way I edited Confluence docs back in 2012 (and before) until they took the feature away. For a while you could dig into it, but pretty much any change you made not using the WYSIWYG editor broke the whole page.

I think the real irony for me is a company that promotes software development tools and agile software development seems to not do it. Things that were working break in production, so clearly no intergration/regression testing (if this happened as an oops! once in a while I wouldn't mind so much ), and they are not working at a sustainble pace. Very hard for them to keep their product rock solid, then intoduce new things, and keep it all rocksolid, and they seem to not mind.... my guess is some kind of classic management probem where given 2 of the following 3 choices :- quality, time, features.... manamgent choose features and time but pay lip service that they should maintain quality, it's not a first class concept at a management level, just a detail that the devs somehow have to deal with because they really want features by a certain time.

I still run the Confluence 3.5 version (off the open net). The WYSIWYG runined Confy. It's an awesome, easy, fast wiki if you just stay at 3.5. And you edit it all in text.

I'm not sure whether you'd prefer the alternative -- to not publish feature and bugfix requests. Like many other companies do.

Atlassian should be congratulated for being open!

There is a "suggestion" somewhere that asked them to implement service accounts for API access. They essentially replied with "this is a good idea and we should do this". That post was from 2012 or so, and we still don't have service accounts.

> I don't understand their priorities.

enterprise sales contracts

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?

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

- 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.

Hello! I'm an engineering manager working on the Plan stage at GitLab, which covers all the areas you're mentioning here.

> if you have some already grown setup (it's not exactly easy to solve so no blame to Gitlab here)

Thanks :-) We do intend to offer a good solution here, so these are valuable points.

> - 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

We added a very basic issues import from a CSV file recently (https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/issues/csv_import.ht...), as a sort of basic MVC of this.

I've asked the product manager in the issue you linked if we're considering this in the medium term.

> - 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.

That's correct. We have https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/27204 open for this if you'd like to contribute there, or even just add a thumbs-up emoji.

> - 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.

Also correct! We have https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/54118 and https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/3803 open for this, but I'm not sure if either exactly meets your needs. Feel free to open a new issue and ping me (@smcgivern on GitLab) if they don't.

> - 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)

For workflows you can see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/2059 and specifically https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/2059#note_148.... We do intend to cover this area, we're just quite there yet.

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

At my clients, they swear by jira workflows (that's the name, right?). The mindset of "customize everything" seems to be impossible to impact. A strong second is managerial heaven plugins with unlimited ways of clicking and visualizing other peoples clicks. Not sure how to compete with that; it's basically disagreeing about the curvature of the earth.

The service desk feature is nice, but maybe having a form for people to fill out to file a support request would be even better. That way, people can file requests without directly opening their email client.

Just a small thought :)

Jira Service Desk does come with a portal and forms to create requests (in addition to supporting email).

I was talking about Gitlab Service Desk.

Thanks for the idea! We have the idea logged here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/1734. Feel free to add comments there. Thanks!

try using the keyboard to copy paste on confluence. atrocious piece of software. its a matter of time someone else replaces them.

I believe this was post acquisition: An old company was on BitBucket (which we called internally “shitbucket” because of the frequent 500s) until we went on-prem to control our updates and mitigate bugs actually impacting us (I think this was “stash”). It was amazing how an “enterprise” system was so unreliable and companies still paid for it.

I still don't know why they still exist.

Atlassian software clears the good enough bar for me, functionally.

But it’s all _so slow_. Every action in the cloud UI takes 2 seconds. I would prefer any other product that was snappier.

We run JIRA + Confluence on a dedicated server and it's good enough for us - give the JVM enough memory (4-8GB) and use HTTP/2.

I think the Devs are too busy writing JavaScript libraries. Annoyed at how slow Jira has become, I opened up Dev Tools and checked what was happening: the page size was nearly 30MB! Sure a lot of this is cached, but it's still insane.

I'm amazed bitbucket still exists considering both gitlab and github are so far ahead of it. I have to use it at work and its missing half the features I need.

Curious, what features do you need that are missing? We use bitbucket but honestly I never log into the interface (because it does seem just like an unnecessary visualization of what I can see on the command line). It's mostly just a hosted backup for our repo.

So maybe I'm missing a ton of awesome features that github/gitlab provide?

The change review interface is awful: no way to indicate when its done and needs to be cycles from either end. I loathe the way in which navigating histories and contexts for changes don't work: if I want to search for a past change by commit message it is grep time.

Atlassian more or less gives bitbucket away, so it checks the box for management who care more about license cost than developer happiness/productivity.

I'm only a Bitbucket user because it's the only way I can get hosted Mercurial repositories. The Mercurial workflow is a lot simpler than Git and was much easier to learn. Git expects you to want to mess with history and accumulate changes into a special "staging" changeset before committing which just felt odd compared to Mercurial where I can commit and then keep amending the same commit.

You can amend commits in git. But it sounds like you're doing it wrong anyway. If anything you want to make more numerous, smaller commits, and that's what staging is good for.

I've had far better success introducing Mercurial to developers new to DVCS - anecdotal only.

Mercurials phase system is really nice, but with git you can selectively push branches. However simple this might seem, it's the cause of quite a bit of friction.

TortoiseHg makes visualizing the tool and repository quite simple, and it covers most of the day-to-day work.

I now have multiple developers able to manage advanced workflows, and unfuck a repository if someone did something braindead. After 1 year with git I was still the only person able to unfuck repositories, and it happend a lot more frequently than with hg.

True. I've never tried hg or tried teaching it to developers but I am still the only one able to unfuck a repository after trying to teach people git (the DAG) many times. I think it's probably because of my background in C programming and having the idea of pointers/references so deeply embedded. Programmers who don't know this already can't seem to get it.

To be fair, hg and git are so similar that you can convert between them almost 1:1. But something about hg just makes it work better for devs new to version control in my experience

Maybe it's time for me to sell. I've had their stocks since IPO. The only reason why I'm holding on is because they could be potential buyout candidate. Their current valuation is pretty silly, but then again, it's always been pretty silly.

Currently the markdown macro kills itself when you try to use it. You have to clear your browser localstorage to recover (from the console error it seems to contain a malformed json).

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?

> seem to me like some kind of weird, dystopian "C-Suite-Porn."

I hate Confluence and am absolutely stealing that phrase!

I think he/she was commenting more about JIRA.

Confluence is actually pretty useful.

In your opinion. My own experience with Confluence is that it's essentially write-only memory. So much documentation that goes in to my companies Confluence becomes outdated _very_ quickly, but is rarely, if ever, actually kept up-to-date. This leads to a system whereby people appear to be generating a lot of functional utility for our company and our documentation purposes but it's little more than noise when you are actually trying to find that utility.

Still better than emails and office documents scattered around the internal network.

I'll absolutely grant you that it's better than internal networks. No arguments there. I think that I do prefer e-mail, though, because, at least with Office 365 and Outlook, the search function is actually useful compared to my experiences with Confluence.

Don’t forget about the search that is only ever useful when you know what’s on the page you’re searching for.

I do (obviously!) hate JIRA, but I just don't like Confluence. It feels like where documentation goes to die, the search function is useless, and I find myself constantly hunting for tiny little buttons and links to attachments.

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.

Your comment has given me a lot to think about.

I think you distill the real responsibilities of different layers of an organization really well.

> 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

Or a future AI "CEO" that is optimizing across a portfolio of companies.

I do not believe that the tradeoff you are making by optimizing around data collection rather than getting things done will ever pay off, regardless of how perfect the top level algorithm is. Call me a pessimist. Maybe when we also have AI programmers at the beck and call of this AI CEO then it might be fine.

Essence of your post is so well reflected in the video on the bottom of this page.

https://agilecraft.com/

So much mumbo jumbo that says absolutely nothing.

I was going to use a throwaway but f-it. You, sir, are literally 100% correct.

My day job is working for a company that competes with Jira. There is a huge trend in the enterprise space to replace their PPM tools with something that is "more agile but still has accountability".

What has happened is enterprises realize they need to change how they do business in order to compete. So, they implement agile, slap a new "trendy" software on top of it that isn't Planview and BAM! We're in digital transformation mode - right?

Here's a super dirty secret that will come as no surprise to folks in this forum: organizations that do this see, quantifiably, very low change in velocity. They see higher levels of accountabilty which, a nasty byproduct of this, is siloed teams and company politics (ever heard "that's not my job"?). In fact, people who institute software like this experience an increase in overhead for creating decks, dashboards, and the like to report out on how "accurate" their timelines are. Guess what? The project timeline rebase rate for MOST enterprises is still the same or higher.

What I do find fascinating is that there is a small subculture of companies who are getting that it's not the software that makes them better - its the culture. And the culture starts with their managers. To further this, the ones that we see become most effective that that BS term "digital transformation" and ultimately more competitive/innovative, are the ones who get rid of their managers and hire leaders who can lead a culture, lead teams, inspire them, push them, and GTFO out of their way. In our research, teams and organizations that focus on outcomes instead of deadlines produce faster, higher quality, and measurably larger ROI than ones that don't.

Anyway... sorry for the rant. This is a sore topic in our company right now because we tout that we're helping shape the new world of work yet internally we do the same stuff we've always done.

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

no matter how good the software is , the people using it can make it suck , especially something like communication software

Ive said that things like jira are all about clarity , organization and making process strict. If you dont have that then the tickets become a bunch of unproductive threads.

Also with enough determination you can turn an excel/google spreadsheet into a good bug tracker

I think their software is pretty good , but bad PMs bad process and it doesnt matter. If you managers cant decide a consistent way to run a sprint youll never be able to efficiently record and track it.

Its like we are putting the cart before the horse. Before we can create a good organization tool we need people that want to be organized.

> 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."

For the uninitiated in Enterprise-talk, FTE stands for Full Time Employee. flies away

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.

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.

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

Not really, it‘s for high-level planning, e.g. for features that involve multiple teams and often multiple companies. Mostly helpful for large-scale organizations. Jira is used one level below that.

Reminds me of the dumpster fire that is 'Portfolio' - https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/portfolio

Yikes! Not every place is like that, thankfully.

IME there are only two kinds of Ops structures. Either you have an organized, byzantine, inflexible system with way too many developers actually working on ops full time, or you have this kind of system which is more flexible in the short term but becomes an operational nightmare as technical debt accrues and accrues. I'm not sure if there is a way to get something in the middle.

The second system is a result of Agile methodology where some dev makes the mistake of telling the PM/management "well, we could get it deployed today if we just do [terribly hacky unmaintainable thing]" and gets the ok because the project is two weeks behind and half the team is going on vacation next month. The first system is the result of the "everything must fit the spec" methodology where you have excessivley long and inflexible iteration cycles, usually because you are an older more enterprisey organization.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

A lot of web journalism is like this now... whoever published first gets all the link traffic, so its often a (literal) race to the bottom.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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

> 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?

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

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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