>great software that people love

As someone who has to use and administer JIRA I'll have to respectfully disagree. The nicest thing I can say about the product is that it was built "by engineers, for engineers". People who want empowering software that gets out of the way appear to have been an afterthought.

As someone who also uses and administers JIRA i'll have to respectfully disagree with that disagreement ;)

The backend application may very well be engineer-focused, but that speaks more to its flexibility than anything, IMO - as far as user experience, it's as empowering and minimalistic as you make it.

One of the few pieces of software I truly love.

Fortunately, engineers are a significant target market.

In the real world, simplistic ticketing systems fail to meet enterprise needs, which are complex and peculiar, arising from weird contract clauses, irrational political outcomes, legacy processes etc etc. JIRA's multi-layered customisability is a huge boon in these environments.

Also, people aren't actually stupid. Yes, even non-engineers can use a complex piece of computer software! A little training goes a long way. Who knew?!

This is not meant to sound challenging, I have used and, both loved and loathed, some JIRA setups. A lot of it might be implementation.

But as for the question, again not challenging, just curious:

What do you suggest as empowering, out-of-the-way, issue tracking software?

I've really liked fogbugz.

I second that. I sometimes wonder why FogBugz+Kiln combination has not 'caught on' as much as other offerings like github, atlassian products, etc.

My only (but major) gripe I have with FogBugz is that it is stupidly hard to insert inline images in cases (compared to how easy it is in a github issue)..and while at it, the entire editor could use a makeover for ease of use/markdown capability

I think it comes down to pricing for a lot of people. $300 a year per user basically and you don't own anything at the end of that term. $7200 a year for 25-150 doesn't seem so bad once you get up to 100+ users. $300 a year might not be bad for a developer who is in it every day, or a PM who keeps track of these things every day, but for that person who gets called in to fix one thing it can be expensive.

The price is steep for the most price sensitive users who probably already have experience in another tracking system. It's hard to get that user to try it the first time. Even the free version is very limited compared to other trials, allowing a total of 2 users, which probably isn't representative of the number of people involved when issue tracking is brought up.

JIRA has got an extremely "nervous" interface where clicking around in innocuous places (like blocks of text) causes strange things to happen, editing modes to be entered, and things to move around unexpectedly. So in this sense it "gets out of the way" nicely.

> They really make awesome products

Oh dear god.

As an employee at a medium sized company that uses Jira and Confluence, I have to disagree.

I'm sure people out there have managed to wrangle and configure Jira into something usable, but it's implementation where I work has been just horrible.

And confluence... Apart from being just slow and unreliable, it's text editor gives me nightmares. I mean, all due respect for building that (it does some pretty powerful and complicated things), but 95% of the time I just want to write an article in Markdown and post it.

I'll be the first to admit that both of those applications are the source of much misery if mishandled. JIRA especially, considering how many layers deep you can go sometimes. This issue type belongs to this scheme which uses this screen in some issue types but not others, that's designed in another scheme... aiya. It gets complicated.

Unfortunately, that's enterprise for you. Basic human logic is often insufficient to handle the demands...

Those applications are absolutely only as good as the time taken to adapt them to the needs at hand and to the team using it.

And +1 for markdown support. There are plugins out there that add that, but... don't get me started on their plugin ecosystem.

Markdown support is not native in Confluence, but they have definitely delivered some workarounds for this:

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.atlassian.plug...

I was not aware that existed! You've just made a lot of people very happy, thank you!

Try out the new versions of Jira and Confluence which seem much better. The user experience depends on how both these are managed.

I do wish Jira had much more powerful query, and support for deeper dashboard customization. Compared to ClearQuest, Jira is very user friendly, but CQ felt much more powerful.

I agree, I've also been at a company which merged with another company; and both were each using their own Jira and Confluence instances along with plugins. Horrible products.

Do you prefer Fogbugz over the Atlassian bug tracker?

So I think the 'problem' with Jira is that it's the SAP of todo lists. We used to use it for non-tech teams in our org to manage their tasks, tech team or organise sprints (and somehow coordinate that with designers), and as well as for issue and bug tracking.

In the end we just scrapped it all and went with Trello. Yes, it's 'less powerful', but we've found that you don't really need much more. For all the features that Trello 'lacks', it makes up for in speed, simplicity and ease of use.

Exactly, JIRA's UX was clunky when I last used it in '09, but after using Trac, Redmine, QC, Bugzilla and (God help me) CA USD, JIRA is far superior. Haven't tried FogBugz but I'm a Joel fan, how does the UI compare?

I prefer postits.

ironically the product of theirs I like the most (Sourcetree) is free. I've heard mixed reviews on JIRA, and Confluence is useful but we certainly have gripes about it (seriously, no symbolic links?!)

Sourcetree is by far the best Git GUI I've ever seen.

I don't work on windows anymore, but Git Extensions is still my favourite Git Gui

https://code.google.com/p/gitextensions/

This. My favorites are the (un)staging by hunks/lines and 'use rebase instead of merge ...' option.

Did you try Tower? That's a paid app though.

I personally use the command line but a lot of my team members aren't comfortable with CLIs so that's why I was exploring Sourcetree and found it to be quite full-featured compared to others I've tried. I've found that Git has so many options, most GUIs barely scratch the surface of what is available.

Thanks for the suggestion though. I'll give Tower a whirl.

50 euros + the price of a Mac :-D

Did they acquire HipChat or was that home grown?

BitBucket and HipChat are fairly recently acquisitions, but fit perfectly in their portfolio. Some of their lesser-used products are also acquisitions.

Many of the products were acquisitions, though often at a very early stage in the product's lifecycle. Off the top of my head, acquisitions: HipChat, Bitbucket, GreenHopper (now JIRA Agile), SourceTree, FishEye, Crucible, Clover, Crowd, Bamboo.

Cenqua is the company that had fishey, crucible & clover. About 5 people when they bought it, and probably their first acquisition.

They acquired Hipchat - https://blogs.atlassian.com/2012/03/press-release-atlassian-...

Both bitbucket and Hip Chat were acquired.

They acquired both BitBucket and HipChat.

They acquired hipchat.