Speed Contest – Win a Free Copy of Jira!
Filed Under Announcements
This contest is going to be super simple and super quick.
Like I said last week, free software is on its way! Atlassian was kind enough to give away a free copy of their flagship bug tracking software – Jira.
This is the only thing you have to do to enter – in the comments below argue your case why you are in most need of a new bug tracker.
Tell me your horror stories with your current bug tracker.
Tell me the new and creative ways you would leverage software like Jira.
Tell me why winning this issue tracker license is the only thing that will keep you at your current job.
The comments will be open only for a few days, and the winner will be announced on Friday. Be sure to spread the word – anyone linking to this contest will be linked back on Friday!
Good Luck!
P.S. – Already have Jira? Atlassian has a ton of software development tools, I am sure Jon would work something out…
12 Responses to “Speed Contest – Win a Free Copy of Jira!”
I could make up a funny, entertaining story, but I’ll tell the truth instead. We do not have a bug tracker that can be called decent, much less comparable to JIRA. We are (ab)using a service request router software from IBM that was purchased by God-knows-how-much and clearly doesn’t handle the basic software development workflow (or at least it has been superbly misconfigured). Bugs get assigned and people don’t get the expected notifications. The application is a Compulsive Button Clicker’s heaven. It doesn’t work in Firefox (not even the anchor tags!!!). I’m not even going to try and be creative, c’mon, I’ll be happy to simply have the basics in place to begin with. Creativity will follow, I’m sure. You have to help me! 🙂
Oh the timeliness of this post, thank you Max.
Currently we are using a homegrown bug tracking system that was originally developed by some interns and has been monkey patched ever since.
It was built to track bugs for a single product, but all the other products get forced into this other model because its the company standard, but they wind up with a bunch of irrelevant fields and workflows that don’t make sense.
In order to use the site you must use IE because it needs custom unsigned ActiveX controls to do some nifty things like send an email, or update the list of options in a dropdown list based on another dropdown list.
Comments must be plain text and are always displayed in a nice concise 300px fixed width box. Which makes it just idea for copying and pasting a chain of emails into (which was where any real discussion happened anyway) And searching those comments? Ha, forget it.
There are currently hundreds of open bug reports on the bug tracking software, but no one will fix them because it takes a lot of daring to try to change anything in the mess of classic asp code that is our issue tracker.
Our current bug tracker is bugzilla. I would rather have an in house app than this piece of crap. At least we could fix the thing to do what it should. I think the developers laughed when asked if they could make it customizable.
If we had Jira, we could then finally have funny things like user stories, and deal in points (omg estimation!!!)
Maybe our managers would finally see how hard each bug is and how much we need to put in to every bug and that each bug does in fact take different amounts of resources.
I don’t know if not winning this copy of Jira is the only thing that will keep me at my current job, but it sure has heck will help. We could even use Jira as a chance to teach the rest of the dev team what agile development actually means.
I see this as an opportunity to improve the entire development process at work. It would be one step (one huge step) in the never ending struggle to bring us up to speed with the rest of the industry.
Please oh please have mercy on this code monkey’s soul and provide him with a ticket to bug tracking bliss!!
Mine is simple:
-I have no bug tracker
-I have never used a bug tracker
-The bugs are all kept in my head
-I have dreams about software bugs
-I drink to keep the dreams away
-My liver left me for another host because I drink
-If I start using bug tracking software I may be able to convince my liver to come back to me
I work at a startup giving me the perfect chance to create a nice clean process for development, with no legacy burden to think of. I could start with a great bug tracker that helps puts us on the right path to a flexible, agile process.
OR I could just fly by the seat of my pants and go for a waterfall process, our product could fail, I would get fired, I’d lose my house, my wife would leave me and take my daughter, my dog would run away, I’d end up living under a bridge in sub-zero arctic temperatures using the heat from my laptop to survive (of course I kept the laptop).
I’d eventually start losing a grasp on reality from the isolation. I’d start yelling out numbers from the fibonocci sequence at the joggers running past my bridge like some kind of extra on Lost. When the police come to investigate the complaints they’d find me half-naked carving golden spirals into the bridge supports, mumbling something that sounds like, “As a [type of user], I want to [do whatever], so I can [achieve what goal]”.
Searching my scattered belongings the police find index cards stuck to the underside of the bridge with what looks like pigeon dung. They find things written on the cards like: Find Pants (1), Steal New Dog (8), Buy Macbook Air (21).
I find myself comitted amazingly fast.
In the hospital, I demand having standup meetings every morning, much to the agrevation of the other inmates who would rather start a game of cards (I, of course, suggest a rousing game of planning poker to estimate our daily chores – they decline). The doctors and nurses avoid conversation due to an insistence that my progress is communicated to me through burndown charts.
Soon, they begin heavily medicating me to keep me quiet…
Late at night, In the brief moments of lucidity between psychedelic dreams, the janitor can hear a faint statement from my room … “If only I had won that copy of Jira”
Bug Tracking…. you mean hunting through past email archives looking for complaints you filed away because at the time you didn’t have time to put it in your corporate tracking tool? Oh ya.. and that tracking tool being EXCEL!! Oh wait… then the joy of the multiuser use of excel works out nicely too… DOH!! Oh to kill excel as a tracking tool could only be a dream…. maybe the solution could be here with a copy of Jira??
I’ve just started a new job where they do not have Jira (as opposed to my old job).
All I can say is that it is far worse to have Jira-ed and lost it than to never have Jira-ed at all.
No funny story to offer but I am doing some development work on the side and finding that even small projects with flexible time frames need great bug tracking. And besides, my wife is doing the QA and needs a place to put all the bugs she likes to find in my code!
[…] any cross promotion with other development sites on Simpltry before, but I wanted to mention this contest on codesqueeze to win a free copy of Jira, because everyone can use a good bugtracker. The rule(s) is/are simple – leave a comment on why you […]
We’re old skool on two homegrown MS Access bug databases, there’s nothing better … Here’s how our developers work with the MS Access databases.
1)They don’t. If it doesn’t plug into Eclipse it doesn’t work and isn’t worth the time of day.
2)They remove rows from the database to resolve issue and bugs, this also gets them bonus points from the Project Manager who sees less on her outstanding issues report.
3)They stop a release when they’ve had enough and then hack the SQL to ‘cook’ the completion report
4)They guess the content release note. With statements like I think thats in this release, or was it the last one, or is it due for the next release.
5)They change the version of reappearing bugs to the version they think they fixed it.
6)They don’t run reports because they take longer than the software development task and still look sh**te
7)They leave unallocated bugs to the previous release because nobody understands the SQL to move them forward
and finally …
If the development is going badly wrong its easy to trash MS Access, blame it all on Bill Gates and go down the pub for pint!
Life couldn’t be better as a developer … well JIRA would help 😉
We are a startup company and have needed to spend our IT budget on people and hardware instead of software process tools. We have tried open source bugtracking software tools including ITracker, and Bugzilla and it has been painful at best. We have a distributed development environment where our QA Lab is located in separate city from our main Development Office and we have outlying engineers in other locations. QA includes both seasoned QA engineers as well as non-technical user-based testing as the QA Lab sponsors a local college MBA program in teaching software process management. Currently they are learning QA/Requirements software processes utilizing Bugzilla, and the cumbersomeness of that product for non-technical users leaves much of our requirements and enhancement process to be managed over MS Word/Excel based over email/wiki.
Utilizing Jira would allow us to combine much of our requirements and bug tracking needs and provide a unified view of our development process for our distributed team. It would also allow us to train the MBA students using a much better methodology for managing software life cycle requirements, issues, and enhancements.
Truth be told, I’m almost certain these are not pimples, and I’m pretty sure they are some type of insect bytes, so I obviously need this de-bugger. It’s about time the Internet offers us an online solution to those pesky little critters.
I could track these bugs, and then find a way for them to publicize my blog.