[kiaulen]

This doesn't refute the GP's point though. I've done both the very light management and very heavy Jira, and Jira makes it easy to track what's actually going on. If you want to know what a coworker is doing, you can just check Jira. If you need more work, you don't have to go to strategy and take their time, just look at the backlog.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> Jira makes it easy to track what's actually going on.

No it does not, and I said that above more than once. it makes it easy to track what's in JIRA, that's all. To the extent that it's accurate, it constrains what's "actually going on".

[turbinerneiter]

Exactly.

What's going on is commits and merges.

They live in GitLab. There is also tickets in GitLab, which all developers are happy to use. There is a wiki as well, which, gosh, is just markdown in another repo! Markdown you can build beautiful PDFs from! And websites!

But nope, we need JIRA and confluence, because for some reason GitLab isn't good enough. Now the tickets are separate from the actual work, there is another platform with a complex and slow ui, and our docs formerly markdown are now in some proprietary confluence RTF, which can export to word and PDF - with no custom styling.

[novok]

I haven't used gitlab's wiki specifically, but the reason why you would use something like confluence is because you get a wiki with a wysiwyg editor, so less technical people can use it without having to learn markdown and there is less friction to making docs. It's not specific to confluence.

Hell google docs would probably beat confluence in a corp if they let you make a wiki structure out of it vs. it's current 'pile of documents' organization model because it has a better wysiwyg editor and inline comment system.

[turbinerneiter]

I'd argue that Markdown is easier to learn than confluence wysiwyg, and also more useful in the long run. Especially as there are many GUI Markdown editors with buttons and preview windows, that give you best of both worlds.

[pm90]

The constraint for the org I work in is that GitHub has a per user license fee that makes it difficult to justify getting a license for everyone in the org since we have a lot of non developer staff. But everyone has access to confluence/JIRA. Does Gitlab also have similar license restrictions?

[turbinerneiter]

GitLab is an Open Source software that we host ourselves, no BS pricing scheme that silos the company unnecessary.