Learning is an Art

After looking around for a while for a review of JIRA 4.0 , I didn’t found much of stuff needed seems like people are not talking about it but than I thought lets give JIRA 4.0 much needed review and probably I would be able to help someone and vent out some of my liking and frustrations as one of customware employee and JIRA fan replied to me on twitter

I want to start on happy note so lets start with whats so cool about JIRA 4.0….obvious answer by any big fan will be JIRA gadgets, yes I would say nodding my head in affirmation, gadgets are pretty cool no doubt about them but Atlassian big fat claim that it can work in any social container and any other gadget will work in JIRA’s container is only partly true may be due to some container specific thing or what ever may be the reason for same.

2nd coolest thing is JQL it stands for JIRA Query language, please keep in mind I am calling these things cool and cool is not always the business case, so whats so special about JQL, it allows you to write SQL like queries from with JIRA, which actaully removed alot of or may be all JIRA’s limitation for filtering issues on criteria, now filters in JIRA are much more powerful than ever before thanks to JQL.

I can not control my self and I want to move on to what’s so bad, kindly note my point I am calling bad not uncool to affirm my point that cool is not the business case, first of all the current licensing model simply sucks what costed you $4k earlier now you even get that after paying $8k double appreciation in price in matter of one release, I don’t think any of the Atlassian customers would have ever imagined this catastroph it’s simply ridiculous.

Moving on other perils of JIRA 4.0 is the migration path from 3.13, Atlassian is a very open company they provide alot of documentation helping you in writing plugins and customization you want and than they screw you by breaking the API, I am not a big fan of M$ but one thing I always liked about them is they never break the contract with the developer old API’s always stay. What Atlassian did was just one release and few API’s were gone with the wind without even a single intimation of them being deprecated, I did analysis for efforts required to migrate from JIRA 3.13 to 4.0 for one of my customers and results were not so pleasing from him as they heavily customized JIRA and written around 27 odd plugins and to my surprise none of them worked out of the box in JIRA 4.0 what a crap, I suggested better not to migrate but than Atlassian will stop supporting 3.13 soon than they will be in much bigger soup.

One pending feature for ages better ldap support their strategy on this is pretty clear they want to sell crowd to you and will not add this feature in JIRA, every user comes and reads documentation that it’s planned some where in the road map and buys JIRA in hope he will see it soon but I didn’t got to see it in last 4 yrs , this issue has been recently estimated, I hope it gets completed in this decade, Atlassian has been very prudent in suggesting it’s customers to use crowd for ldap, I liked the business model but I hate it as customer and end user.

I can go on venting my anger on Atlassian but I don’t think they have any concerns about their licensing as alot of people are trapped and they can’t get out of it even they want to, my simple request to Atlassian and all other vendors if you expose API’s to developers than it’s your reponsibility to keep it intact, otherwise better not expose API’s.

PS: Alot of people might ask why I am reacting so late, fact is that this post was in my drafts for quite sometime now I was just not getting impetus to finish it today I had to write something but didn’t had a topic so completed this post

I have been thinking for a while to write about my experiences but was refraining from this for some reason or the other but today something happened that I can’t hold my anger against the shity policies of companies in India; I will illustrate three experiences of my life which forced me to believe that India is still way behind when it comes to serving customers and listening to there problems and promptly providing the solutions.

So I will start with my latest problem which I am facing with Tata Indicom broadband connection; I took a plan of RS 1300 6GB combo so it was all goody goody initially when I didn’t used much of my allotted usage of 6 GB free usage which I had; than this month I had to download some linux operating system from internet that started the nightmare experience it was 3.7 GB of download still less than my free usage and the very next morning I got a call that you have exceeded your credit limit of RS 1700 and you need to make a payment of 3100 I am still trying to figure out from where the hell that figure of RS 1700 came from; if I do a flat conversion of 6 GB of free usage with their rate 0.9/MB it leads out to some where around RS 5000 I was totally surprised with this and in next two days my line was barred; I didn’t had a option there I went to the office of tata indicom and made the payment of RS 3100 and it took them more than a day to restore my line.
I haven’t even realized that my lines are fully working I got another call next day asking me to make a payment of RS 1500 and since I was afraid that my line might get disconnected again which may cause another day of work getting lost so I made the payment immediately but I was even not able come out of two back to back payments I got another call from them today that I have exceeded my credit limit again and I need to make a payment of RS 2300 I was so badly pissed of I called the customer care and asked what the hell is going on and he had more shocking news for me sir your billed amount is RS 7000 and your unbilled usage is RS 11000 I was shocked WTF and than I asked him to check again than he started saying actually the correct unbilled usage will start reflecting in 48 hours that amount is not correct that was some respite for me.
I was told I can check my unbilled usage from tataindicom site but there another tragedy stuck me I had registered to that site already but never received the first time pin I told the same thing to customer support executive, he tried to reset password but it was in vein he kept getting that customer not registered and I kept getting you are already registered and you can not registered again.
He told me sir you will have to write a mail; now I have to write two mails the first one which I had already written for increasing my credit limit and another to fix my account on tataindicom.
I hope they will not f*** any more as I have already given up with them. I am planning to change ISP any suggestions are welcome.

I think this story has taken quite out of me I will write other two experiences some other day, keep watching this space for more bitter realities of customer support in India.

Few days back first release candidate of JIRA 4.0 was announced that means JIRA has moved pretty closer to one of the greatest release in the history of JIRA releases; there was a mixed bag in JIRA 3.13 which people were speculating to be 4.0 at that time but Atlassian decided to mark it as 3.13 as they were planning something really big for the mega release 4.0.

Two features which look killer to me are Opensocial gadgets and JIRA query langauge; I was really wondering why Atlassian went ahead with implementing Opensocial while missing out few popular issues like ldap authentication which has been around for six years now but after pondering on thought of Opensocial  I realized that Atlassian has cooked up something really big which is not easily comprehensible in current scenario of issue trackers what I feel it has a potential to cause a paradigm shift in the way we look at issue trackers and way we use them I can smell something really big coming out of it.

I would loke to end with a not to all those who have AMC to start getting ready for a Opensocial. I am also eagerly waiting for this release to happen.

Google today released windows installer for windows as stated in there blog. It is available for download from the google’s website.

Many people like me must be having this question is this another browser in the race of already packed crowd or it will stand loud and tall amongst it’s competitors like firefox, Mozilla, Internet Explorer to name few. As per google’s blog we can soon expect the binaries for Linux and Mac as well. Let’s take a first cut look into the browser:

•  Downloading the browser is pretty easy you can download it from google’s website; intensity of Google pushing with chrome shows up with the fact that the promotional link for chrome can be found on the google.com page; which has been empty till today; no promotion and ads; break the rules if it serves and I really don’t see why Google should not do it.
• As Google has been adding value to the users with gmail; google suggest to name a few here comes another tool from Google’s arsenal chrome is no exception when it comes to giving the best to users.
• There is something for everyone whether you are end user or a developer
• As an end user you can experience the classic color combination which is soothing to eyes; memory usage is pretty low when compared with firefox; it consumes around 1/3 to 1/4 when compared with firefox.
• As developer you can view source at your disposal; debug javascript and javascript console is also available separately
• It also gives pretty handy functionality called task manager which gives you amount of physical memory consumed by different tabs
• The best thing which I liked is installer asking you to make google.com as your default search engine or choose some other search engine to be made default.
• You don’t need to have separate search box for searching; you can search from address bar itself

If I look at the browsers which I have used Chrome stands a strong chance of success and is a clear winner for me in many aspects; this may embark a new era in browsers history. 

Points mentioned above are not exhaustive neither they cover all functionalities available in Google chrome; this is just a first cut look at the browser. 

In this article I am going to share my observation on a search engine scour.com; which claims to be a social search engine.

I would like to randomly point out few of my observations

• They are try to give a new face to search introducing socialization in searching; instead of reading full clicking on link and reading whole thing I can read comment from fellow users; provided some body has already commented on th result, but again this can easily be spammed with useless and misleading comments I really don’t know how they are going to handle that.
• The search is cumulative of results from scour, msn, yahoo, google that possibly could give you good results but what I got was not always useful; but still it is a good feature to see in place. But I would like to know what they are doing with all these results before displaying it and how they are claiming that result is optimum.
• If you type a string which does not give any result on any of the search engines it goes into unknown state and even does not tell you whats wrong; it keeps on displaying searching; I have reported this to them but no response.
• Time taken for search is higher than any other search engine but that should be expected as it searching three search engines and giving you the results but magnitude is higher than what is expectable; the search which took Google 0.06 seconds scour took around 2.13 seconds and as we say time is money a lot of money is getting lost out there.
• Worst part for me is that while browsing a result you can not find out what page of the site you are as you get a constant link like this http://scour.com/view/result/?URL=http://www.python.org/ this will remain like this what ever page you navigate; this has a reason behind it to enable you to vote and comment on the result but from usability point of view its not good.
• They are trying to buy publicity and attention; they have some point system for different actions like searching, commenting on search results, voting on search results and if you are able to reach 6500 points you get $25 visa gift card; I even read some one complaining of being banned when he was about to reach the mark; this raises some fingers on credibility of the company but I will leave it on company to answer that.

I would like to conclude with a thumbs up to them for the idea but idea can only become great if it can be implemented properly. You can not get success and publicity just by throwing some dollars here and there.