This month, Atlassian launched the 2.0 versions of FishEye and Crucible, their collaborative software for coders. For those who’re unfamiliar, FishEye is a browser for source code repositories, and Crucible is a tool for peer code reviews.

Both have had a complete UI makeover that shines, but despite a strong track record from Atlassian, there are some critical flaws. FishEye’s new activity streams and profiles are valuable in some respects, but they’re overshadowed by just how cluttered and counter-intuitive Crucible’s iterative code review system is.

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FishEye 2.0

FishEye 2.0 is a lot more than just a browser for source code repository. It’s become a comprehensive dashboard for viewing and analyzing progress on a development project.

New activity streams show commits, JIRA issues, and Crucible reviews. There’s a fresh focus on individuals and projects, with impressive statistical charts to track what’s going on.

Still, tracking all the stats on commits and other activity is a value propisition that’s going to appeal more to those managing teams than those actually doing the work. Instead of the slick new capabilities, the biggest boost to adoption of FishEye is likely to be the beta support for Git, the version control system.

Crucible 2.0

Some of the changes to Crucible will be welcome improvements. Small things like keyboard shortcuts, highlighting of unread comments, and better integration with JIRA are all sure to make the lives of developers easier.

But the core of the product, code reviewing, is problematic in the new “iterative review” user interface. In short, it’s anything but intuitive to do diff by diff comparisons. At this point, free and open source alternatives like the Google-made Rietveld for Subversion, or Review Board present a simpler way to do side-by-side comparisons. That’s regrettable, considering that how valuable Crucible is when used alongside FishEye and JIRA.

Code is Law

Talking with developers about their strategies for code review, we discovered that most aren’t particularly hungry for complex platforms to do the job.

There’s no doubt Atlassian practices what it preaches when it comes to agile development. But the new features they’ve incorporated seems to take the focus off code and put it on people and metrics. No matter how well-executed these releases are, that’s a fundamental problem of strategy that tars the software.

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