What comes after jira?

[JamieA]

Right now jira seems to have the market pretty well sewn up for bug trackers, at least in the enterprise, but things change and that may not be the case forever.

I was a ClearCase/ClearQuest guy, and of course I eventually dumped them, but I stayed in that area for waaaay too long. I don't want to make that mistake again.

Has anyone got any opinions on what might be the next big thing?

[Norman Abramovitz · Accepted solution]

I have not seen the next best thing in issue tracking yet, but I know it will be different from today's Jira

1) It will be more distributed like the difference between subversion and git.
2) It will support multiple(parallel) workflows based upon the groups of people using it. You will not need to have separate issues because you need to support different workflows.
3) It will support logically inifinite issues within issues.
4) It will support fields by defining more metadata, so we do not end up with hard coded fields like the resolution field.
5) Fixing field discovered issues will be fixed instead of waiting for years.
6) Old ways of doing things will not be dropped because someone thinks something is else is cooler.
7) The system should model the way people are working verses forcing people to work like Jira.
8) Security will be central to the model verses an afterthought.
9) Designing workflows will be central verses an addon, it should be easy to modify to meet company goals.
9) etc

I am still a big fan of Jira, but to incorporate most of these ideas into Jira would require a rewrite.

[Radu Dumitriu]

Time for a change ?

Being an old developer (but relatively new to JIRA) I really think Java (and all the JVM-related languages) are doomed in the next 10 yrs

Look: functional programming. The kids are very happy because they reinvented pointers to functions ! Damn C had it from the very beginning. This is not going to last too much, IMHO, the frenzy will eventually stop (this crisis is good and will last: at some time somebody will recognize that wasting cycles on GC or memory on a very complicated 2 way memory reference system is in 90% cases a waste of resources).

I made - some time ago - an experiment (actually it's a very good idea, IMHO). https://github.com/rdumitriu/agrade-yahsrv

Let me quote myself:

 [...] although I hate comparisons, it has > 2x more speed than Java using less than 1/3 of  resources; what's more important, the performance is predictable.

So, I do not have any advice but to say it's not going to be based on Java. No way.

[Pepe]

I think Atlassian is the next big thing for a while to come (I'm an expert/partner so I'm kinda banking on it). I started using JIRA 10yrs ago when it was clearly something new and fresh. It has remained so despite having grown up a lot. Certainly for issue trackers, I haven't run across anything better. This support forum is just one of the many things I love about Atlassian. I've solved a lot of problems with the help of answers.

[JamieA]

I like to think of myself as an expert too, though not in the Atlassian Expert (TM) sense of the word. But I was also a ClearQuest expert, and for that reason battled against change too long.

Don't get me wrong though, I have as much a vested interest in Atlassian as you do. I just have some fears given the price hikes, some-time IPO, and lack of ELAs that the big corporations may start looking for something else.

[CelsoA]

Hi Jamie,

JIRA is always being improved with customer suggestion and new support to keep up with market.

JIRA today is the biggest Atlassian product, and we are always trying to make it the best choice.

You can also check how we work to implement new features in the document bellow:

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DEV/Implementation+of+New+Features+Policy

Regards,

Celso Yoshioka

[Ivar]

"How we work to implement new features" is basically "we implement what we like to implement". Ref. comments on the same linked page.