why can't I browse to 'atlassian' or 'jira' or 'jira login' or any reasonable seach and see a link to a page where I can log into my jira instance?

Kimball Johnson January 24, 2015

why o why o why?

6 answers

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Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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January 24, 2015

I'm sorry, the question is unclear to me.  What are you expecting to happen?  What is a "reasonable search"?  

If you type "JIRA login" to a search engine, you are very unlikely to get "your" JIRA because there are tens (hundreds?) of thousands of installations available on the internet, and a search engine is going to list all of them and probably isn't reading your mind to the depth where it can tell which one you want.

But I am probably not understanding your question.  Could you explain further?

Kimball Johnson January 25, 2015

Nic,

I can go to the home page  for any (I believe) of my online services and find somewhere on the page a link to login to my account.

Most of the services I subscribe to (there are many and they are all major well-known services) have a prominent sub-link called ‘Login’ on google under their highest level, business, public-facing, most trafficked web site. That link always takes me to a login page that recognizes my username and password and directs me to the primary ‘start’ page for my services in the context of my account with the site. ('3 clicks', you know)

I have repeatedly tried all the links on the first two pages returned from google when  searching for ‘atlassian’ and for ‘jira’. The only links on those pages that are marked ‘login’ take me to the jira dashboard site for (I’m guessing at what I see) the public issues for Atlassian Cloud.

The only other links I can find take me to my administration or is that page called management page (or maybe you would call that one an ‘overview’ page. I have found all those names used for various ‘configuration’ pages throughout jira agile, but without any logic to their various differences or possible different functionalities.) Which is an interesting but dead-end site when I want to use jira, because there are no links on the 'management' site that allow me to browse to the site that allows me to actually USE JIRA!

Now, by looking back in my browsing history, I was able to find a page that had an address that pointed into my functional user pages for Jira. And from there I was able to get the login page for my jira agile site.

However, if you read (even casually) my question, I think I am very clear and specific: that I am asking WHY (why o why o why?) does this situation exist.

So far, the only thing I have been able to discover about the Jira applications UX paradigm is that it is universally inscrutable, context-less, and seems to actually HIDE its functional ui capabilities as much as possible. (example: the little question-mark-in-a-circle that sometimes­­ appears on the rocket-ship-in-a-circle image (what’s that’s supposed to represent again?) that turns out to be a link for something actually quite important… although if I wanted to find the functionality that is about that topic, I would spend hours looking through Jira docs and stack-overflow and blogs and find nothing but hundreds (meaning there exist tens of thousands) of people exclaiming frustration over not being able to find any explanation of how they should discover where Atlassian has hidden the functionality they would have called this or that, but Atlassian classifies according to its ‘first do this, then do this’ naming convention in its documentation.

Case in point: I think my question is eminently clear but because it is not expressed in a ‘how do I go from here to there?’, you are puzzled.

In any case, I discovered that my account login page at jira agile cloud is ‘my-domain.oops-I-forgot-which-of–your-terminologies-is-the-host-name.com’.

But, nonetheless my question, again, is about WHY I can’t find the login page as a prominent sub-link.

Now do you understand my question?

And I hope you will acknowledge all the work I put into answering your question by saying at least, ‘yes or no’ to that last question. (the one that says, ‘now do you understand my question’). Sorry I know it’s not a ‘what is the next click?’ question. But that’s what I want to know. You might call it ‘meta information’.

Thanks,

Kimball Johnson

 

 

From: Nic Brough (Confluence) [mailto:noreply@atlassian.com]
Sent: Saturday, January 24, 2015 4:17 PM
To: Kimball.Johnson@engagile.com
Subject: [Atlassian Answers] why can't I browse to 'atlassian' or 'jira' or 'jira login' or any reasonable seach and see a link to a page where I can log into my jira instance?

 

             

   

                                                                                                             

   
   

Nic Brough answered the     question

   

                                                 

   

 

   

                             

                                 

       

                

       

     

     

why can't       I browse to 'atlassian' or 'jira' or 'jira login' or any reasonable seach       and see a link to a page where I can log into my jira instance?  jira cloud jira-cloud

     

   

                       

     

I'm       sorry, the question is unclear to me.  What are you expecting to       happen?  What is a "reasonable search"?  

     

If you type "JIRA       login" to a search engine, you are very unlikely to get       "your" JIRA because there are tens (hundreds?) of       thousands of installations available on the internet, and a search engine       is going to list all of them and probably isn't reading your mind to the       depth where it can tell which one you want.

     

But I am probably not understanding       your question.  Could you explain further?

     

   

                       

                                         

       

                

       
       

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Kimball Johnson 

   

why o why     o why?

   

                   

                             

     

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Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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January 25, 2015

Yes, that does clear up the question. I think Matt has pretty much answered it though

1 vote
MattS
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January 24, 2015

Google doesn't know which of the JIRA instances out there is yours (yet). Use it abut more and it might?

0 votes
Douglas Bock August 31, 2017

Answer is Atlassian has a a very poor login process with I am sure a complete cluster F%^k LDAP / Active directory quagmire, and they have no idea how to untangle it.

So you guys accusses for them are lame...why don;t you just admit that this is a very poor login implementation for a SaaS family of products.

 

A unique ID and PW should be all a user needs to gain access to a service, and the access point should show up in a google search.

 

This "is" rocket science, but Atlassian should be up to the task. Clearly they are not! 

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
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August 31, 2017

1.  You have not read the question or answers properly.  Again - if I have a user name and password and I want to log into JIRA, which one?  How is Atlassian supposed to know which one of the hundreds of thousands of installations I have an account in?  (Especially the ones firewalled off from them)

2.  In one part of it, Atlassian IDs have changed recently.  You have one login.  You can use it for Atlassian services and access to many Cloud accounts, if the owners let you in.  Which one do you log into if you just know the username?

0 votes
Tom Auger March 21, 2017

Why o why o why!!!?????

0 votes
Tom Auger March 21, 2017

This is the only search result on Google that even remotely addressed the issue I was experiencing and it is exactly Kimball's issue: I'm on a new computer and I want to access my organization's JIRA, Confluence and Bitbucket accounts. Bitbucket is the only one that's easy: type "BitBucket" into Google, or navigate directly to bitbucket.org and there, in the top-right, where we've grown to expect it from every other major service, is a "Login" link. I log in, provide my credentials and bingo.

 

No such love for JIRA or Confluence. As Kimball points out, logging in there takes me to your JIRA for bug reports about Atlassian. Seriously? Are there that many bugs to report about your software that you need to make that a first-class citizen?

 

Consider every other SaaS in the world: each one of them has a customer login to THEIR account right on the home page of the SaaS website. Why (oh why oh why) does your website not follow the same, tried, tested and true convention?

Here's another good one: I discovered my.atlassian.com and was able to log in there. Hallelujia! And yet, even once logged in to "my" Atlassian, there are no links to be found anywhere to the other services that that account has access to (namely, JIRA, Confluence and Bitbucket).

 

I think your web team can do a better job. You have been unified for nearly a year now, time to get some important housecleaning done, don't you think?

 

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
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March 21, 2017

It's the same answer.  You have not defined what you think you are looking for.  When you do, you will realise that you don't really know.

You say " Bitbucket is the only one that's easy: type "BitBucket" into Google, or navigate directly to bitbucket.org and there, in the top-right, where we've grown to expect it from every other major service, is a "Login" link. I log in, provide my credentials and bingo."

Doesn't work for me, I've got 40 of them.  Which set of the 40 credentials?  And that's just the Cloud version, I've got a load more in my password safe.  Add a 0 to the number to get an idea of my JIRA logins.  Which one?

I think you (and @Kimball Johnson ) are right in that you want to focus on what matters to you, but you are not defining which one in any useful way.

0 votes
Kimball Johnson February 7, 2015

Nic, Matt,

Perhaps your confusion is justified on the basis of my detailed explanation. The post medium is designed to be minimal and my viewpoint is that I'm trying to address an overall impact of your site operation.

Perhaps this is a better example: Please see my comment on JRA 20062.

Here's a couple of questions I've asked in that comment:

In the Log Work dialog, the logged work is not subtracted from the original estimate to provide the remaining estimate amount. It is subtracted from 0d. This amount is mentioned in the Edit Work Log dialog as a radio choice for 'existing estimate. Presumably this may be an ambiguous reference to 'original estimate'. But if so, the remaining estimate radio choice of 'adjust automatically' would have to mean something other than its subtext: 'the estimate will be reduced by the amount of work done, but never below it.' because when you leave the 'remaining estimate field' empty with that choice selected, the automatic process is actually to throw an error, not insert a calculated value.

And if you try use the Edit Work Log dialog to select one of the 'remaining estimate' (maybe they could be called) 'calculation methods', then you can make a selection, but only after you have entered a value and saved the estimate with a 0 value as the remaining estimate to avoid the bounding error validation of 'not minus' and 'not empty'. After having saved the original value of the work logged, it is possible to open the Edit Work dialog. But then, if you change the 'remaining estimate calculation method choice' you can close the dialog, but no difference in the values of the remaining work is displayed, and it is not possible to actually return to the Log Work dialog to start the process over. And it is never possible to open the Edit Work dialog until some values are entered into the Log Work dialog. So the whole operation of the dialog has the appearance of being dysfunctional which casts the user into a state of doubt regarding their own understanding of how JIRA looks at the entire estimate/work/remaining valuation and calculation process.

Overall this behavior changes the meaning of 'remaining estimate' away from the expected value of 'remainder of original estimate minus worked'. Then suddenly the two references in the Edit Work Dialog that mention 'estimate' (unqualified) and 'existing estimate' (additional estimate type?) become reasonable options as valid solutions to the overall ambiguity in the explanation of how the programmer is handling the arithmetic, logical, and contextual 'meaning' of the dialog boxes.

This is a multiplication of the ambiguities, not an addition of them. And it again raises the issues I dumped into my comment on JRA 20062: the entire JIRA Cloud interface appears to be a thin covering over the database structure and operations. (actually the character of these issues reminds me primarily of the intermediate stages of a project coded in Microsoft Access more than it does of other kinds of projects.) But professionally, I attribute this kind of code operation to a lack of thorough Business Analysis, QA, and UX processes in your development cycle. What is clear from all the questions I have raised, and every one I have seen asked, is that the application development process lacks a consistent, comprehensive, conceptual perspective of what the values used in the operations actually represent, and what the operations themselves should actually perform. The result is pervasive ambiguity and irregularity in the implementation of not only the individual features, but also unintelligible variations the interaction of operations in one stage of the state process versus interactions in another stage.

In this case, that would be the interaction of the 'original estimate' value in the job board which is required to exist prior to entering effort into the 'work Logged' in an issue, but which is either not used in the calculation of remaining time in the Log Work dialog, or is perhaps related to remaining work in some way that is not clear from the overall perspective.

I have seen many speculations that these operations appear to many to represent JIRA's perspective on how Agile practices should be performed. And I see answers from JIRA staff indicating that the justification for these anomalies is based on JIRA's 'strict' perspective on Agile practices. But frankly, it is much more direct and accurate to describe the majority of those anomalies to an imprecise, disjointed conceptual perspective on the part of the development team. And it really points toward the conclusion that JIRA can be considered 'unfinished' in very obvious ways.

So my 'post level' questions would be:

A. can you explain the ambiguities of the terminology and the operations between the original estimate value, the remaining work value, and the logged work value on just the three dialogs: the job board, the Log Work and the Edit Work? (I'm specifically leaving out the value summations in the hierarchy of issues) 

B. can you compose a search term query for google or for JIRA help (including the cloud specifier) that will lead a user to an explanation of your answer to question 1. ?

And can you confirm to what extent my impression of your development process, with what appears to be its lack of evidence of UX, BA, and QA oversight, is valid?

To be clear, having to deal with these aspects of JIRA are proving to be the most costly overall so far.Sorting out and trying to find any conceptual rather than procedural answers is taking away lots of valuable time and energy from both the management and the implementation effort I have available. And they are preventing me from enlarging my use of JIRA to include the features I recognized as most valuable to me and my organization from the beginning.

Finally, IS that more clear?

Thanks,

Kimball Johnson 

LogWorkError2.png

 

EditWorkDialog.png

LogWorkDialog.png

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
February 7, 2015

Not really, as it's an essay on a different subject (one which has been done to death elsewhere, and explained, and works fine for most people), with only a couple of lines in it referring to the original question, which Matt has already answered in my opinion. You've also misunderstood who we are - we're long term Atlassian users, Matt is an expert admin with more experience than me I think. We both work for Atlassian Expert Partners, not Atlassian, so we have little say in what Atlassian writes or how they work.

Kimball Johnson February 7, 2015

Nic, Matt, Thanks for the orientation. So I guess this is so well known I can move my focus off the subject. Thanks for that! Kimball

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