Why did I buy 5 Separate Atlassian products?

[Alan Halls]

I was discussing management headaches with a friend who recommended I use Jira. I had tried it in the past, but the mothly fee discouraged me, so when I found I could host it myself for $10, I was sold.

Then going through the purchase process, I was offered "Add-ons" or so I thought.  They were only another $10 each, and since we used Bitbucket, I figured, why not buy it all so we can have it all in one place....

So... yeah. First, it isn't 1 great product with all the add-ons installed. It is 5 separate products, 5 separate installations, 10 separate ports to configure.

Now I don't really know what Confluence, Service Desk, or Portfolio are, but I figured I didn't want to miss out on any great features within Jira, so I bought them. This feels like a mistake. As a manager wanting to simplify software development, getting my team to monitor a single application is possible, asking them to constantly check 4-5 different ones isn't going to happen. There will always be the, "Oh, I was looking at the OTHER Jira application..." which is now a legitimate excuse.

Seems like if an MVC architecture had been used, they could have developed a single amazing program, add feature after feature, and then enable / disable those features based off what you purchased.

This is only my first day using it, trying to figure out which of the 5 applications I am supposed to use for unit testing my PHP code and running across pages like this: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/confluence/5-reasons-to-add-confluence-if-you-are-a-jira-software-team and wondering if they are like bacon and eggs, put them in the same dang app :(

[Gregory Van Den Ham]

Link the applications.  https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/linking-to-another-application-360677690.html

[Alan Halls]

Thanks Gregory, I was able to kinda link Jira to Bitbucket. I say kinda because I had setup the app to redirect to port 80 and be served through apache, which gives me wierd errors at wierd times. Sometimes Oauth will work, othertimes I have to tell it to go to port 8000, you can't import repositories unless to are using the original port for bitbucket, for me 8010. Still working on it, just surprised that it isn't more seamless.

[Gregory Van Den Ham]

No worries, they're all great tools, each with their own purpose, but do integrate well once linked.