I don't understand any of this. Every atlassian product I have ever used has been terrible. All their software is full of performance issues, uncountable UI bugs, and every time we upgrade it's impossible to tell whether we lost any data in the process and several times we have lost data. Their continuous integration server, Bamboo, is pretty to look at but unusable except for the lightest of use cases. The message broker between master and slave constantly goes down, publishing artifacts is hit or miss based on various network conditions that are mostly out of my hands because we're in AWS and I think they use chunked encoding to transfer the artifacts.
Honestly, if they're worth $3.3 billion then the software industry is doomed. Maybe that's a bit over the top but the quality of the products based on what I read doesn't add up. How can you do so much R&D and still have a product that's so unstable and can't handle simple network hiccups?
Sorry to hear that you are having trouble with Bamboo. I'm Product Manager for Bamboo at Atlassian, so I'd be interested in looking into the problems and use cases you are having issues with. Feel free to drop me a line at james@atlassian.com and ill setup a time to give you a call.
Any basic functionality found elsewhere would be helpful really. It might integrate nicely, but it can't do much past running a script that would take care of everything (build-wise). Variables? Not really. Conditions? Not at all. Final steps? Nope.
Documentation (at least of API) is not that great. If it is available since atlassian's Confluence seems to be down most of the time. The API itself is pretty weak as well. And weird too.. getting an HTML error response on json request? Yay!
All in all, it's one of the worst tools I had to use in the recent years. It looks like a dummy product, just for the sake of it. But at least it's fast I guess. Or I don't get its purpose.
Generally they seem good at convincing management they offer some business like value add none of the users actually want. I've been at companies where we had to switch to their really poor wiki product, Confluence, instead of free and better alternatives because Confluence allowed management to lock down editing permissions on individual pages in a more detailed manner. Note that I then spent weeks trying to get access to write to a page whenever I needed to add something to the company wiki, and weeks trying to get an admin to install a plugin to allow some HTML syntax we needed. So the experience from the user side was absolutely terrible, but it made management happy they got to micromanage all the page write permissions. That's all you need to do to make money in enterprise.
Actually, they seem to be taking 'enterprise' seriously now (JIRA Data Center and Confluence Data Center are in beta currently).
Promoting their Enterprise Advocate to Enterprise Czar (or BOFH) would be good, so that person could finally force the dev teams to think of scalability first.
Honestly, if they're worth $3.3 billion then the software industry is doomed. Maybe that's a bit over the top but the quality of the products based on what I read doesn't add up. How can you do so much R&D and still have a product that's so unstable and can't handle simple network hiccups?