Jira Reviews

We are using the recent version.

We use it for story and sprint planning, as well as for reporting. 

The solution benefits our organization with its agility, planning and visibility in respect of large teams spanning different geo locations.

The tool is well known and popular to use. 

The sprint planning is pretty good, as are the reporting piece, retrospective reporting and the planning board. 

It is a great tool from the planning perspective, such as that of capacity and sprint planning. 

As the solution is highly configurable, it has very poor governance. There is nothing which comes out of Jira to go into the product. It is free for all and anyone can create with it. This means that the responsibility lies with the user community to create some form of governance. 

Moreover, the solution is geared to small teams. It lacks scalability. 

The tool is not good at the enterprise level. This means that, depending on how the person installed the software, the issue of performance may increase commensurate with the number of projects. While plugin for x-ray exists, it is not that mature in test management. Although it's a good tool for many of the smaller clients, once a person goes deeper into it, it's not there, even though it will get the work done. 

It is a less desirable solution in controlled environments, such as science, banking and finance, in which there is a need for certain compliance supports.

The solution is not that great for audit histories. It's a great tool when much integration is involved. With cold products, things can always be achieved through other means. 

When the teams collaborate, they need multiple metrics to be tracked. With this comes the issue of direct impacts, such as the appearance of one's UI and its usability aspects. The screens have changed greatly in appearance over the last ten years. This is an issue which every software dealt with in line with the growth of usage and complexity. 

I have been using Jira for nearly ten years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is good for small teams. It lacks scalability. It does not work well when it must be used across multiple domains and multiple teams which need to collaborate. 

The Atlassian strategy is that the solution be open to all to encourage collaboration. But, this raises the issue of how to control the data input and the tool and all that it comprises in respect of the reporting that is generated. This means that poor data quality in the geo projects will equate with poor reporting on it. 

As such, supplementation by the teams or organizations using it is required. They must come up with their own rules of governance about who can do what. 

The product is not being extensively used at the moment. It is a niche product. I have not seen usage behind it. It involves ID users for certain teams. 

We do not have plans to increase usage. This will depend on the feedback we receive. 

I have not made use of technical support. 

We did not switch to Jira. It is simply one of the products that we also use in addition to an in-house micro focus ALM. 

While I was not involved in the initial setup, my understanding is that it is simple. Atlassian puts out many different products and I cannot say for certain how I would have handled ones which are on-premises, compared to those which are cloud-based or server products. 

I am not in a position to comment on the licensing. 

We make use of the solution on Jira Cloud. 

While I cannot say with certainty, I would estimate the number of users in our organization at a thousand-plus. 

This figure contemplates different departments, such as that involving support. 

My advice is that someone in a large enterprise first give consideration to the issue of governance before implementing the solution. For a small team it is ready to use straight out of the box. One need just try and stay with the default workflows. There is no need to overengineer the product. 

The product is good, stable and very cost-effective for small teams. These are some of its advantages. 

I rate Jira as a seven out of ten. 

We are using it for service management, change management, project management, and tracking the changes.

It is user-friendly, and you can manage your project according to the methodology you want. It is also easy to configure.

The dashboard reports can be improved. Its dashboard reports are good, but you cannot have complex reports. They are currently very basic. For instance, we can only choose two columns for a dashboard, so it is not friendly enough.

So far, I've only used the project management parts. We are examining resource planning and sample plugins for the product. From my point of view, resource planning is a little bit hard to link with project management. Sample plugins are another part of the system, and we need to link it with project management in the BigPicture screen, which is a little bit hard. It would be valuable for us if we can do resource planning in BigPicture as well. Currently, it is another plugin, and you can only plan based on the people and not projects, and you cannot link it, as far as I know.

My company has been using it since the beginning of this year. It has been around six months. I have been using it for three weeks.

It is stable, and everyone generally looks satisfied.

We are trying to settle the project management part and widen it to all countries in our company. There will be many users.

We are working with a consulting company. Technically, we are okay because all of us are using it now, and there is no problem. We just need to see more details of some of the modules of Jira.

For its implementation and deployment, they have been working for one year.

Jira is a big platform, and you can use staff management, project management, and other fields that all companies want to use. If you use Jira, you will see the whole IT governance in one system.

With this solution, we can see the full picture in detail, but it can be improved. Resource planning is not easy for our project base.

I would rate Jira a seven out of 10. It will be an eight in the future. I need more time to work on Jira.

We have been using Jira for schedule management as well as for making updates to our projects. I mention this in my capacity as a project manager. I most recently used the solution this year and did so for scheduled management of our varied tasks and projects. JIRA is actually used to put together an entire portfolio for each one of the teams, meaning for everybody. The solution listed each of our projects individually, with us needing to provide daily and regular updates. 

A most valuable feature involves the ability to customize the entries and to update them quickly. Unlike what was previously available, the solution allows us to create specific codes and symbols for the individual teams. The new version allows one to customize and to use demarcators. There is a code that can be entered in Align upon completion of a project or task and this apprises the project manager that it is time for its removal. 

Something I do not like about the new version is that there is a need to browse all the way back to the beginning, should a person click on a task that is specifically for his group and wish to go back and look at the other portfolios or people. However, I cannot state definitively if this situation owes itself to the way our team put the site together or to something administrative. When clicking the back button it would take the person to the wrong page, not to the one he desires. One would actually have no choice but to browse back to the portfolio and to find his group again and open it. Again, it is not clear to me if this problem lies with Jira or with the way our team laid out the site. 

I feel Jira is stable. The only hiccup which comes to mind is the one I mentioned, although it is not clear to me if this owed itself to the network we were using or to limitations of the application. Except for this, everything about the solution is stable. The only time a person can not look at the information is when the administrator announces his intention to remove it. 

The scalability is pretty good and we started on this process from the moment we started utilizing the solution. While we had only three teams and three sections, between December and January 15th the developers came together and expanded from three to 76 different tasks across the different teams. By February there were over 300 teams. Expansion is easy and did not just encompass our teams but also provided links to others that were outside of our main team set so that there were reference points available.

I would say the tech support is pretty good. I got back a couple of answers in response to an email I sent out. 

It was quite easy for me to set up my own pages. I had a field day with creating my own test pages and was able to play around with them and simply test out the different settings. Pulling in new documentation was very easy. The same holds true with pulling in attachments and it was, consequently, easy to set up. As well, I was able to set up certain sub-pages for our team for going in and checking JIRA.

There were initially eight people involved in the maintenance of the solution and deployment of updates. They had the people to whom they answered. We are talking about a large-scale effort. Without taking into account the Jira support line, I would say there were around 12 people managing and administering this version. For our specific team, there were around three. They were the actual decision makers. 

I am not in a position to comment on licensing costs. 

Our team does not use the solution exclusively. There are multiple ones which do, although I cannot state how many teams are doing so. I do know that the entire section of our agency is doing so and this accounts for a lot of people, well over a hundred. 

The solution is pretty good and is geared towards those with multiple teams who are using it for the same purposes as us. We use it for providing daily and scrub updates, for which it is really good, as it allows one to track every entry and see when it's entered, timestamp and all. So, if a person has a lot of mission-critical or time-sensitive activities, JIRA is pretty good for tracking and helping to keep everything organized.

While I am still biased towards services at the moment, I rate Jira as an eight out of ten, at it is really good and very functional. 

We are using the product for general task management, largely. From a software development community perspective, obviously, we use the task management piece - the foundation to what leads into the development and the CI/CD pipelines and et cetera. Outside of that, it varies widely. At its very core, it's task management, however, then it's used by various functional areas within the company. For example, we have contracting and procurement that utilize it. And we have marketing that uses it and security, IT security, audit, compliance. Various functional areas across the company use Jira. We use it a lot. More and more business teams are using it today than were previously.

We also use it for reporting. With task management comes the Jira out-of-the-box reporting. We had Advanced Roadmaps before it was included in the product. And now that it's just rolled into the Data Center product, you obviously don't have to pay for it specifically anymore, however, that's the most scaled reporting that we have. Then, as far as any other apps are concerned, we really just use time and status for measuring continuous flow and have more of a Kanban approach. Of course, some workflow, add-ons, and things of that nature to add some value such as training for Jira.

I'm less concerned about marketplace apps due to the fact that, whether you go to Azure DevOps or Microsoft, or whether you go to Atlassian, there are countless apps out there that will extend the application itself. 

It's an organized, collaborative, transparent way of working and that's really helped the organization overall. Otherwise, many teams would still be managing work in Excel spreadsheets and/or SharePoint, which is just ridiculous. At least this provides some sort of structured approach that can easily be queried and have data extracted. I use Jira for everything at work. I don't even use email that much. It's through @mentions and all these different things. 

The solution is great for helping teams to collaborate.

There are tons of apps and add-ons for the solution that help you expand its offering via third parties.

The product allows you to become very structured in your approach to work.

You no longer need to email people. You can mention them right in Jira and have conversations there. 

It's easy to extract data and do queries.

The way that Azure DevOps rolled out their boards and made them flexible is something that Jira lacks. You want a workflow and you're configuring your columns and you're mapping status to columns, however, in Jira, you can't have more columns than you do status. Whereas in Azure DevOps from a Jira admin perspective, it's amazing as it doesn't care what you need in terms of what your life cycle is. The underlying process template is very generic. It's just like a to-do, in progress, done ordering basically, except they use the words inprog or active, resolved, and a couple of others. Open, active, resolved, and maybe one more.

No matter what they do to the face of the board, they can create 15 columns if that's what they want to represent their lifecycle, which gives them that visibility and the ability to then report on that. The reports will run off of that, however, they never have to actually reach out to an admin and say, "I need you to build me a workflow." On the admin side of Azure DevOps, they could modify the underlying process template to include things like that would be the equivalent. They refer to them as rules in Azure DevOps, however, it would be the equivalent of post functions and validators and these things within Jira.

The great majority of teams don't care about that. What they care about is just being able to properly represent their lifecycle. It provides a great deal of flexibility and it cuts down a tremendous amount on admin having to build a workflow for each and every team that feels that their process is somehow different than everybody else's. It lets them basically self-organize. Agility, being able to just boom, build out their workflow as they see fit. That's the biggest thing that I've seen so far that Jira could really learn from.

In Jira, say on the team, no matter the methodology, it doesn't matter what I'm practicing, if I am using the tool for a while and I've compiled some sort of history. If I want to change my workflow, say my team is today using to-do in progress done, and tomorrow, I decide I want to use to-do in review and done, and I apply that new workflow, I have just now effectively lost all of my histories in terms of reporting. Now the issues themselves, of course, the activity, the history, all of it is still there, but you lose all your boards. Not the boards per se, but the reporting within them. That includes all of my past sprint burndowns, all my past velocity reports, some of that stuff gets completely wiped away. The only way to restore it is to replace the original workflow. It's insane. It's the way that the application is built and it's all tied in with it. I had it explained to me one time by Atlassian, however, it's just really a bad thing - especially when you're in a large enterprise organization and then you get somebody like me that comes around that they hire to come in and be the product manager. The first thing I say is, "We need some fricking governance. You can't have 100 plus statuses. What the hell is this? Or 500 custom fields that half the people aren't even using."

The statuses in the workflow standardization become virtually impossible as I can say, "Hey. This workflow that you're using is a terrible workflow. Let me fix it for you. Let me give you a better workflow. Let's talk about this. Let's build a really good workflow." We need to go through that pain and then I have to tell them that, "Oh, and by the way though, if you adopt this new workflow that I'm sitting here telling you it's going to be so much better, be advised that you're going to lose all your reporting history." How do you think that's going to go? Probably not so good. That is a huge downfall. 

I'm an avid user of Jira and I've been using the product for at least a decade. At my company, I'm the product manager, however, I'm also the Jira admin support desk, and I wear all the hats for 4,000 plus users. Therefore, I'm very familiar with Jira. 

I'm learning Azure DevOps as well, mostly due to the fact that I'm being forced to. The company is adopting Azure DevOps. I'm fighting to keep Jira around. It still has the value that it adds to the company. The business side of our company is largely embedded in the tool. 

The stability is excellent. I've never had any issues. If anything, it's probably one of our more stable products.

I have found it difficult to scale. With the Advanced Roadmaps, we do have the ability to add additional layers of hierarchy. However, that's been a struggle at our organization as we're trying to adopt a Scaled Agile Framework. Unfortunately, with the Advanced Roadmaps for Jira, the hierarchy is very inflexible, which I've actually opened up a ticket with Atlassian on. 

With the Scaled Agile Framework, you need to be able to move from the program - what was once called referred to as the program layer - and you may have a large solution layer, or you may not. If you don't, you go directly to the portfolio layer. That said, in Advanced Roadmaps, it's very inflexible. You can't skip a level if you want to. You have to go through this regimented hierarchy, which does not bode well for a Scaled Agile Framework environment. I've never been able to crack the code on how to get around that.

Also, the reporting in Jira seems to be very team-oriented. Yes, you can create boards and things using queries and combine items, however, I find it difficult to scale without an additional app or plugin. For example, if you've got a program and you've got a bunch of teams that are supporting said program, I find it difficult to be able to scale and show a program increment, a PI. That level of reporting is lacking. I know that there are apps out there for that. However, unless you're willing to spend a small fortune on a lot of apps, well, the core product doesn't scale above that of the team level.

The solution is extensively used in the company, and we are quite sizeable. We have about just under 4,000 active users. It used to be used it was 5,000 and then COVID hit and we lost a lot of contractors that were cut when COVID hit. It's that mostly and then some of the users are being siphoned out of the Atlassian tool stack now into Azure DevOps.

99% of the technical support staff have been awesome. We actually have premier support. They seem to be very responsive and very helpful. Where I personally get frustrated is if there are issues and we give feedback and advice, and they respond with a "thank you, however, we aren't changing". They will tell us it's not a priority for them right now, and it can be frustrating. 

There's a lot of different things out there that people feel that should be included as basic functionality within the application. Maybe some of those I agree with, some of them maybe not. However, when I see something that I consider a bug and then they tell me that, "Yeah, that's not a priority right now." I find that very frustrating. Just now, I was trying to configure the application for the ability to create or comment on issues by setting up a mail server. And there's a known bug. I don't know if they consider it a bug. However, when you configure that and somebody actually does reply to a system-generated email notification, it will add it as a comment, which is great, yet it will also automatically attach your profile picture to that issue.

Therefore, as many times as you comment or reply via an email is exactly how many times an attachment will be added to your issue, which obviously is ridiculous. That cannot be purposely designed that way. Who wants attachments of your own face added to an issue? And it just takes up space needlessly. Their response to me was, "Well, that's just not a priority right now." Basically, not enough people have complained about it yet and they must not be using that functionality, therefore they're not worried about it.

I wasn't at the company when they originally set this solution up. There are certainly some things that I would do differently in hindsight, however, I wasn't here when they set it up originally and can't speak to what the process was like.

Pricing information you can just get right off the internet. Atlassian is notorious for not negotiating. They have never negotiated up until very recently. They've started to negotiate contracts as they're really trying to push the cloud. They're trying to get people to move to the cloud. In some cases, they are willing to negotiate costs if you're willing to move to the cloud. Not only costs. Terms. They treat everybody equally, which honestly, I respect.

However, large enterprise organizations like the one I work for, hate it. They hate that as they feel like they have some sort of clout or they need to be able to throw their weight around a little bit and they needed to be treated specially. One of the biggest things that hurt Atlassian is its unwillingness to work directly with large enterprise organizations. It works well with smaller companies, however, their approach to large enterprise organizations really hurts them. The Microsofts of the world will send you a whole crew of people that will come in and do demos and meet with your senior executives. Atlassian has that in the equivalent of a TAM, technical account manager. 99% of the time if you call Atlassian, they'll say, "Whoa. You work with one of our third-party vendors." Which, okay, there's a ton of third-party vendors that are fantastic I'm sure, however, people want to see Atlassian. When you get into a larger enterprise organization, they don't appreciate the fact that an Atlassian representative can't come in and take the time to meet with people and do these things when they're spending that kind of money. It doesn't bode well. They really don't like it.

That's largely why they're being pushed out of Jira and onto other solutions. Microsoft, for example, has invested time and energy. Microsoft has also negotiated terms and pricing. Large companies would rather have a relationship with a company like that than a company that doesn't negotiate or come to see you.

I've started to look at Azure DevOps. I am personally the Jira product manager, and what I'm trying to do is have some sort of comparison. It all became very sudden. I was recently asked if, by the end of the week, I could provide a recommendation as to when one team should use Azure DevOps versus when one team should use Jira. I was told to look into why we should use one over the other or if they are so similar that it doesn't matter and we could just get rid of Jira. I've done very little research so far,

Obviously, Microsoft and Atlassian are competitors. Back when Azure DevOps was TFS, it wasn't even a close comparison in terms of boards. Jira blew TFS out of the water. It wasn't even remotely close. Well, then they obviously knew that they needed to improve and they basically made freaking boards look like Jira's boards and made some improvements on top of it in some ways. I suspect that there may be some underlying limitations with DevOps. I know that in Jira you could allow teams to just create the workflows that they want within reason, of course, while pulling from a series of predefined statuses and these things. Whereas, I don't know that you can do that in Azure DevOps. But then again, I don't know that it's necessary since you can already create the boards the way you want to.

I know that some people so far from customer feedback, tend to like the dashboards more in Azure DevOps. They seem to like the reporting options. They find it easier and more intuitive to use, however, I don't really know anything more about it than that. I just need to really know the pros and cons of each of these things. Here's what's surprising to me, if I'm at Atlassian or if I'm Azure DevOps or Microsoft, you would think that they would have something like that. You would think they'd be going, "Who is my biggest competitor? Well, I need to know these things so that I can improve my product and compete with him." However, when I reach out to them, I don't have any real comparison to work off of.

I did find one article online that was written by Atlassian and Azure DevOps versus Jira, however, it wasn't well-written.

We're just customers and end-users.

I upgraded the application back in December, so we're on 8.13 right now. While we're currently on-premises, one of the things that were on my to-do this year was to consider moving to the cloud, which is something that we are very interested in doing.

Currently, we're using the Jira Data Center.

Our company has barely scratched the surface of the power of Jira in my personal opinion as they've just largely tried to do a bunch of customization. There was no governance set when I first joined the organization. People were just allowed to create whatever they wanted in any way they wanted, and it needed to be cleaned up, which doesn't help my efforts of course. 

There might, in the near future, be many people who get siphoned off of Jira as the company already made a decision that Bamboo and Bitbucket are going. They're moving all the software development activities into Azure DevOps. We already know that. That's already been decided. Atlassian doesn't know that, however, it's happening. The process is probably going to take a year, maybe two. We haven't really rolled it out yet or defined or planned it out. That said, it will happen. Whether or not Jira sticks around though, we don't know yet. I'm hoping it will as I love using it.

I'd advise new companies that one of the biggest things to do at the outset is to just put some governance in place before you go rolling out. It's a super-powerful application. However, if you are in a large enterprise organization, you need to establish an advisory board before you go rolling this thing out. Really think about a steering committee. How are you going to handle requests for customization? What will the board handle? What will the board not handle? Or the committee, whatever you want to refer to it as. They obviously did not do that here when they rolled this out. It can be a really great thing if you have that in place. It's not overly cumbersome.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We have different software projects. I primarily use Jira to define and plan projects for agile-based project management. We use different aspects. We have scrum-based management for some projects and different systems for others.

The agile framework works well, and I pretty much live by that. Everything, such as sprint management, is laid out.

It is easy to use and implement. It provides me with pretty much everything that I need to be able to do day-to-day planning, task management, and work log efficacy.

It is a great centralized tool for everything. You can use it for your local team management to communicate with your developers. You can also use it for your management team and for communicating with subcontractors to keep track of work products, work logs, and perform at the minute status.

For how I identify tasks and break down use cases, I wish there was the ability to drill down Stories multiple levels deep. You have Epics, Stories, Tasks and Sub-tasks. Each of which can go one level deep. It would be nice to be able to be able to define Stories multiple levels deep in order to break down super complex use-cases. That is my only pet peeve. Other than that, they've been improving year to year, and each new version seems to have increased levels of improvement.

I use another product that synchronizes well with Jira called Worklog Assistant, by Sohail Somani, which runs separately to Jira. It is a great product that allows you easily keep track of work performed and generate all respective Jira worklogs at the press of a button. I've been using it for years, and it just makes it very easy for me to keep track of what I am doing with an accurate time tracking mechanism. I think this would be a nice tool to integrated with Atlassian Jira.

I've been using it since 2008.

It is pretty stable. They've improved things over the years. Back in 2008, when we were starting to use it, different issues used to come up from time to time. It was still relatively stable. Now, I rarely run into a problem for which I can say that it is a problem with the tool, as opposed to user error.

It is pretty scalable. I was actually kind of surprised at how much data I can put in. It doesn't slow the tool down. It is quite scalable, and it worked well for the projects that we've done.

We're a small company. I can't compare myself to IBM or Raytheon. I can talk for a small company with up to 45 employees with X number of projects. Because of COVID, we've had to pare down, and currently, we have two users who are using it. I myself use it on a regular basis. Four or five years ago, we had subcontractors who used it with us. At that time, we had seven or eight users, including clients and subcontractors.

It is being extensively used at the moment. The only increase in usage would be to include other individuals on it.

We used their support early on, and they were helpful. At that time, we were using the enterprise product, which was a purchased product. So, as a paying customer, you got straight-up support. They were good. There were some bugs and issues early on that were difficult to get through, but they worked them out. Now, we have fewer people, so we use the one to 10 person option, and I haven't had any reason to call support. I haven't had a need to use their support in years.

They self-use their product for defect management. You can always go to their website and find what's going on. They have forums, et cetera.

In the previous company that I've worked for, I've used Bugzilla for defect management. Task management was in-house, but I don't remember the tool that we used to do task management. For building up sprints, etc, we used a Wiki-based system. It probably was TWiki at the time. We had set up our own Wiki-based environments for doing management, et cetera. We also had Excel spreadsheets. I didn't know about Jira back then in the previous company.

We did some research when I started with this company, and we chose to use Atlassian. It wasn't just, "Oh, the company was using it." It was one of the things that I was part of instituting. We did what we call Decision Analysis and Resolution (DAR) to determine what was the best bang for the buck and what covered our needs, and then it evolved from there. After I started using Jira in this company, a lot of things were easy to do.

Its setup is semi intuitive. There are certain things for which you need to look at the instructions. It also depends on how complex your environment settings are.

Initially, back in 2008, it was a little bit more difficult, but they've improved the installation process. If you have a very basic setup, you can just pretty much install it right out of the box with maybe one or two changes. There're certain things for which you need to have some IT knowledge of your environment in order to be able to set it up. Other than that, they have really automated it pretty well. Jira is one of their keystone products.

Its initial deployment took hours or maybe days because there were things that I needed to understand, but they've improved it a great deal. You can pretty much be up and running within an hour, but it also depends on your environment.

Its implementation was an in-house job.

In terms of maintenance, I take care of its maintenance. Its maintenance is minimum, and only one person is required. You can easily run backups. We use Microsoft SQL Server for backend data management, and we automate the backups. We do daily backups, etc. If anything goes wrong with the tool we have, we can just rebuild it from scratch, and we will be fine because our data is there.

They also have built-in backup utilities that you can use. There is an XML-based one, which I do like to use from time to time just as an alternate. So, you do have different options.

We've seen a return on investment when it comes to Jira.

For very small companies, if you have less than 10 individuals, it is $10 a year for each of the products. When we were a part of the enterprise and had more than 10 people using it, or before they came up with this solution for small companies, it was $2,500 a year for the license for Jira and Confluence, and I believe something like $600 a year to perpetuate the license. I can't remember if it was $600 or $2,500 annually. It was for up to 25 people at the time, and this was in the early 2000s and mid 2000s.

There are a number of add-on products that you can sync with Atlassian Jira. Confluence, FishEye, Crucible, and Bamboo are different Atlassian products, but then there are sub-products. They have what's called Atlassian marketplace, and you can buy products for certain needs. Tempo is a perfect product for doing time management and timesheets. It was also $10. So, you have a bunch of different types of add-on products that different individuals have built that work well with the tool, and they are quite stable.

One piece of advice, which they also give in their documentation, is to use your own database management system. They give you something that you can use. It is called HSQL or something like that, but you can use what your company can afford, such as MySQL or SQL Server, and manage that yourself. It will help you to do better data management and backup management. I would use the built-in backup management system as a backup, although I haven't had any problems at all in years. Just for a warm fuzzy, it is always good to have a backup system.

I would recommend looking into primary tools depending on your needs. If you're doing software, FishEye and Crucible are great products to utilize with it. You also have Confluence and Bamboo for continuous build management. Tempo, of course, is good for certain types of management.

I would rate Jira a nine out of 10.

I'm overseeing the developments done in Jira. 

The thing that I do like about Jira is that it is relatively easy to understand. In some respects, you don't have to read a lot of ticket information, and you can start pulling down. Everybody is using it, and it works for a lot of people who are just doing enterprise development, cloud-based development, and things like that. It is built for the general audience. 

It is a good defect tracking tool. It has a lot of capabilities and functionalities. There are a lot of graphs and a lot of tracking. It can be sprint-driven if you want. There is a lot of data that you can pull out for estimations. It has got a lot of out-of-the-box functionalities that are kind of like the Jazz platform for out-of-the-box scrum and other such things. 

It also works well with all the integrated tools that you buy.

One thing that I don't like about Jira is that when you do an export, it only allows a thousand issues. So the export feature needs to be better. 

Another thing that I don't like about it is related to epics. There are times when you simultaneously want to have a story tied to two epics, one driving the content change and one driving the format of that evolution. It is not truly a parent-child relationship. It is a single-parent relationship to the stories. It would be nice if you had the capability to tie in multiple epics to a particular story. It is a rare case, but we have that. 

Setting up and executing a triage board should be simpler in the sense of how you do the admin. I come from a regulated space, and there should be easier control of who approves and reviews a system board to oversee all the defects. It should have easier out-of-the-box solutions to allow us to set up a triage board at the system level, the software board level that reports to the system board, or the test level that reports to the software board at the system level. There should be out-of-the-box solutions to migrate that and say that who are the three people on the triage board and if they have these admin privileges. Software review board and test review board would be another thing.

We have also had a problem with the integration with Bitbucket Pull Request data. It is an add-on to the tool, but it is not fully integrated. It is not easy from my perspective. Jira, Bitbucket, and Xray should be smoothly integrated. Xray is pretty good, but Bitbucket is standalone. So, when you pull out the data from a comma-separated value and want to move it into a new database, you have to reenter the data. You somehow lose that Pull Request capability. Pull Request through Bitbucket and the review of the code should be easier to manage. You could use a software package called Crucible to go ahead and mark how you did the review, who reviewed it, and who is the independent reviewer or subject matter expert, but that also should be easier to set up. If they want Jira to be the one-stop shop of the view of all of your deliverables, not just from a defect tracking perspective, but also from a requirement perspective, a code perspective, and a testing perspective, it needs to pull out more data and work better as an integration tool. 

I'm using Jira for the requirement repository. When I do requirements, it would be nice if I had the capability to say that for your requirement, I'm going to give you traceability to support a traceability report from Xray. I'm also going to give a requirement ID number in the ticket. You could use Jama and things like that, but it would be nice if Jira supported that.

We had on-prem and cloud deployments. We had to go to on-prem because of the security measures that were deployed. On-cloud didn't have the same capability. If you have one database on the cloud and the other one is on-prem, they don't talk to each other. It would be nice if you pulled it in and you could switch and say that I want to go on-prem because I got greater security risk.

When we go into the regulated space, I require a lot more integration and capability for tools. It is very hard to get tools to perform at that level because they're built for the general audience. In the regulated space, whether you're in medical devices, avionics, or any other regulated environment, tools have to be validated. I've worked with some companies in the past that had the capability to facilitate that validation. With one of the solutions, you could go ahead and buy a validated suite or a requirement package that will validate the tool for your use, but it is such a small market for Jira around the world that nobody really cares about that.

On their website, they show a bunch of tools that work with Jira, but it would be nice if they gave you examples and said that if you're a regulated medical device or regulated, here's a solution that could work for you. Here is Jira. Here is Crucible, and here is Xray, and here is what it'll do for you. They could also ask how do you do the requirement management? Do you use Jama that ties to Jira? It would be awesome if they had some use cases that showed people how to use Jira as the building block and how to add something on the front end for requirement management, and something on the backend for testing, such as Crucible for the peer reviews and Xray for the test management. People would see it and say that I want to do that.

It would also be nice if it could provide some lock-out capabilities based on your development and environment preferences. For example, you can specify that no one can close a defect until it has been tested, or until a particular task is complete, you can't go to the next phase. It would be cool if you could have something like this set up versus someone configuring it in the background.

They have got 10,000 licenses of Jira, and they have teams around the world deploying it across multiple geographies. All of that works fine.

I haven't used them because this company has its own tech support. So, I've been reaching out to them.

Most people who turn to Jira say that the return on investment is much better. 

Jira and its solution off the shelf are cheap. It is cheap for startups.

It depends on what you want to use Jira for, and what's the problem you're trying to solve. If you're going to do defect tracking and management of an artifact and you have got requirements, code, and tests, and they all got to summarize, you have to then go ahead and take Jira. You can then buy Crucible for the peer reviews and Xray for the test management and get them to work seamlessly with each other. 

I would rate Jira an eight out of ten. It is fairly cheap. For a nine or ten, it would be like DOORS and Jazz platform, but the problem with that is that it would become really expensive.

We are using it for bug tracking and new feature development. We have its latest version.

Using Kanban boards has allowed us to become a flow-based organization versus a sprint-based organization.

Kanban boards are most valuable. 

The reporting capabilities, specifically customized reports, should be improved. The out-of-box reports don't meet our needs. We are big into customizing our reports, and being able to do ad hoc reporting would be good.

I have been using Jira for about three and a half years.

It has been very stable.

I believe it has been scaling. I don't really work with that group, and I am not sure. We've got at least a thousand people on it, and to my knowledge, it has been fine at least for our needs. It is being used extensively in our company. We don't have any plans to increase its usage. 

I have not had any interface with their technical support.

I have used Microsoft Team Foundation Server in the past. I switched to Jira because of the job change. Microsoft Team Foundation Server had a number of features that I don't see in Jira. It had good visual charting. 

I wasn't a part of that group.

There are some good and valuable tool plugins that make it a much better tool. I've got plugins that cover most of the features that were lacking. There are some specific plugins that are targeted for specific kinds of use cases.

I would rate Jira a seven out of ten. It all comes down to reporting. It should have better and more robust reporting.

We started using it in the eComm team for the website and all the digital projects. At the beginning was Jira for software development and the Confluence to move the communication away from our mailboxes. Now, we're also using it for marketing and campaign management. Confluence is now our single source of truth and, in general, we are using it in much more content-based projects.

In many ways: transparency, governance, new comers have a place where to find everything they need, email communications are kept to a miminum, project management is much easier. Also reporting to top management is improved, as there are a lot of nice features like roadmaps and dashboards that can be used for that.

The Kanban boards have been a very valuable feature because they can be either very simple for non-technical teams, but also highly detailed and data-driven for teams that are technical. We use them for both types of team.

Jira is also widely used, so whenever we start a collaboration with an agency/vendor we don't need to spend any time in deciding how are we going to communicate.

It is very flexible as well.

The next-generation software projects are very easy to use, but they lack a lot, and I found quite a few bugs. There are some really basic things that you still cannot do. For instance, setting a due date for a task that you create as mandatory is still not available. That's a bit of a blocker because people, especially those who are not technical, are not going to add anything if it's not mandatory. It's going to be difficult to teach them that they should do it anyway.

I'm trying to integrate these tools, and I'm trying to open them to different types of teams with different types of people. What I've found is that I read about a macro (App) or about a rule and think that it is what I need, but then find that things are not available for the cloud version. There are some features that are available only in the server version and not in the cloud version. I found a couple of add-ons that we were really interested in, and we couldn't use them because we're in the cloud version.

Sometimes when I tried to set up some macros/add-ons/apps, they didn't work well or were not flexible at all. For instance, you can add only one Excerpt macro to a specific page. And in the that area you cannot have a table, which means you cannot excerpt a table, only content. In general, if you follow the instructions they give you, it works, but when you try to adapt it to your actual needs, it often doesn't work anymore.

I've been using Jira for five years.

We started very small in just one team in the company, and then slowly we've started expanding it to other teams. Now, we are trying to roll it out to all the European digital teams.

We have had some big issues with customer support. Lately we have renewed our contract, and it has taken us two months to do so. There is no way to have a phone call with anybody. The chat is not there anymore. So, the only option is email, and these kinds of things are very difficult to communicate through email.

Two of us were contacting two or three different people from their costumer service till we found the one who was willing to go the extra mile and actually listen to what our issues were.

Try to be tidy from day one because it can get messy very easily. Jira is very flexible, and you can still move and migrate stuff around. However, the reality is that nobody is going to have the time later on to migrate and clean-up. I also recommend starting small because at the beginning it can be scary, especially for non-technical people. I'm thinking about the amount of notifications you'll get, for instance.

I would definitely start small and then slowly, while people are getting used to it, keep implementing it and adding features like roadmaps or dashboards. Try to have a plan or a scheme of how you want it to look before you actually start.

It's a great product and is widely used, so I would rate it at 8 on a scale from 1 to 10.

I work with a credit rating company in the US. As a scrum master and project manager, I have to make sure that all the impediments are removed for the team. I work with product owners to make sure that all initiatives requested by our stakeholders, who are mainly compliance and regulations people, are moving in a timely manner.

I use Jira to make sure that we are capturing all the work that is requested, and it is progressing in a timely manner. I am in charge of a squad called Core Operations Reporting. A squad is usually focused on one or two initiatives. The goal of our squad is to automate regulatory reports as much as possible. I talk to our stakeholders to ensure that any errors in credit ratings are dealt with in a timely manner. A lot of these requests are ad hoc, and we prioritize them in sprints in Jira. 

It was very easy to learn Jira. I can't explain how easy it was. The hardest part of my job is understanding the business and communicating with difficult stakeholders and difficult people on the squad who are resistant to change and agile methodology. The fact that Jira was so simple to understand was a huge boon in my book because I didn't have to waste time trying to learn the tool to get work done and move the squad along. It was very easy to understand.

As a scrum master, I run daily stand-ups, and they are run directly from Jira. During these stand-ups, to make sure that there are no impediments, I run through all of the open issues and action items that the team members have. The feature that I really love in Jira is called Issue Navigator. It allows me to customize how I want to show the user stories within Jira to my squad. 

I can use Jira Query Language (JQL) to write queries to see the stories that are there for the current sprint. I can also sort them by assignment. I am able to call each assignee and have them walk through the status of what they did yesterday, what do they plan to do for the next 24 hours, and if there are any blockers or impediments.

I also use Jira is for burndown charts. A burndown chart provides a visual depiction of how quickly the squad is closing out user stories. It gives us an indication of how efficiently the squad is performing. I also use the Active Sprints function and a feature called Planning Poker. Planning Poker is an add-on, and it allows me to work with my squad members to estimate the complexity of user stories. It allows me to estimate user stories in an unbiased way with my squad members. It is important that people are not piggybacking on other people's estimates, so when a business requests a functionality, I use Planning Poker to have people send me their estimates in an unbiased way. They cannot see what other people have estimated. This way, they have their own unbiased view on specific user-requested functionality and its worth. After that, we end up talking out like, "Why did you think it was a three? Why did the other person think it was a five?" So, it allows an unbiased way of estimating user stories.

One major issue that I, and even our business stakeholders, have noticed is related to Epic Link. In Issue Navigator view, Jira allows you to enter JQL, which is basically like SQL. You just enter a query, and it displays the stories that satisfy the query. There is a field called Epic Link, which is basically a high-level designation for a bunch of user stories with a common goal. Epic Link is typically of different colors. When Epic Link's background color is a dark color, it effectively becomes unreadable. I am looking at my screen right now, and there is an Epic Link called Click View User Request. The background is purple, and the text is black. It is almost impossible to read it unless you click on it or give it an extra minute of viewing. That's basically what needs improvement. I wish there was a way for us to change the text color of Epic Link in the Issue Navigator view.

I've been required to report on metrics, and I don't know if it is possible with Jira, but there needs to be an easier way to capture a few metrics. For a two-week sprint, we are required to report on a number of metrics such as committed, completed, added, and rolled over. There is a way to see the stories that have been added after the sprint has begun, but there is no easy way to aggregate this, which is a waste of time. I wish there was an easy way for Jira to explain to me what has been added after the sprint has been done. Currently, it is a bit difficult for me to tell.

In addition, when rolling over stories from one sprint to another, it is kind of difficult for me to find out how many story points were actually rolled over without going into Jira and doing an analysis. I wish Jira would somehow aggregate that information for me so I can easily report about it. There should be an automatic aggregation of how many story points were added after the sprint began and how many story points were rolled over to the subsequent sprint.

I also wish Jira had an indicator to tell you that you are approaching the limit for the story points that can be delivered during a sprint. Typically, there is an established capacity for each sprint. I take an average of all of the delivered story points from the past six sprints, and I use that number to estimate how many story points can the squad deliver. I wish there was an indicator in Jira that tells you that you are approaching the number of story points that can be delivered during the sprint. I don't think there is an indicator like that, but such an indicator will be very helpful because then I will be easily able to see that we are approaching the limit. I can then talk to the squad members and say, "Okay, we need to remove some story points from the sprint because we're reaching capacity."

My experience with Jira is pretty extensive. I pretty much use Jira every single day and multiple times a day. When I'm not using Jira, I'm using Confluence. I also use SharePoint.

It is 100% stable. Stability is also dependent on a lot of factors. Jira has been down once or twice, and people go crazy. In almost two and a half years that I've worked here, Jira was down only a handful of times, and I don't think that was Atlassian's fault. Atlassian is the company that is responsible for these tools. 

I am not really aware of things in terms of expansion. However, there are some add-ons or extensions for expanding the functionality of Jira. The Planning Poker tool seems to be an add-on. Similarly, there is also another extension or plugin called Structure that was previously going to be leveraged. We haven't moved forward with that because we're using more of a manual solution in the metrics reporting. There is another add-on called Dataplane Reports. So, scalability is definitely there, and there are definitely opportunities to scale horizontally and expand the functionally of Jira through plugins and add-ons. 

In our organization, we only have 5,000 employees, and probably 70% of the company is using Jira. which includes the business as well. The business is also learning how to use it, and they understand that it is a very powerful tool. I would say about 3,500 out of 5,000 people are using Jira.

I didn't have to contact Atlassian. We have an internal Jira support team that answers all our questions. I don't think they have contacted Jira support in a while.

Its initial setup was not done by me.

Its initial setup was done by Jira administrators.

I am not sure about the pricing, but I know its licensing is on a yearly basis.

The main advice would be to just use it as much as possible and try to learn the basics of JQL, which is Jira's proprietary language that allows you to tell Jira exactly what you want to see. It is pretty self-explanatory and not hard to use. There are so many different fields in Jira such as issue type, key, sprint, summary, Epic Link, reporter, assigning, status, story points, and components. You can add the required columns to the Issue Navigator view, and it will spit back exactly what you wanted to see.

You should also learn what kind of value it can add to the organization before just jumping in. Try to talk to senior management and figure it out. You should learn how to read the burndown charts to basically understand how efficiently the team is working. Every organization has an IT organization, and I am sure the majority of them are using Jira.

I would rate Jira an eight out of ten. No tool is perfect, and there is obviously room for improvement.

It is used by the agile teams for product development and feature management.

It provides very good visibility and traceability. You can clearly see each and every part of a process. It is also user-friendly and robust.

It is working well, and there are a lot of add-ons or plug-ins out there that you can use. 

It would be good if we can grant access based on the roles. This is something that Jira can look into. Currently, anyone with Jira access can access everything. Being able to define access based on the roles will give us more flexibility in managing Jira.

I would like to have more reports in Jira. Currently,  eight or nine reports are there. You can use Screen Test to get more reports or data from Jira, but you will have to get more add-ons, plug-ins, and stuff like that. It would be good if they can increase the number of reports.

I have been using this solution for five years.

It is stable. I don't see any instability in Jira.

It is easily scalable. We have around 1,500 users.

I have not directly interacted with Jira's technical support. We have an internal Jira service desk for any issues.

I have used HP ALM, version 11, and it was not so robust. I found Jira to be more robust. In HP ALM, you can define the requirements and test cases and map them, but you cannot see the in-depth requirements, whereas Jira provides more visibility, and you can see each and every part of a process very clearly. It is more open and user-friendly. 

Traceability is very important for the SDLC process, testing lifecycle, and audits, which is one of the key features that Jira provides. It provides detailed traceability so that you can easily know about the sprints and change requests. With HP ALM, you can define requirements only in one or two lines. It is more of a testing tool. It is not a development lifecycle tool.

The initial setup for Jira was done by a third-party vendor, so we did not face any issues. The migration from an older application to Jira was not so easy, and it required a lot of effort.

It was implemented by a third-party vendor. It requires maintenance, but it is not so difficult to maintain. For maintenance and administration, we have an internal Jira service desk.

You need to do upgrades because you tend to have requirements from different stakeholders. You also have different add-ons and plugins, and Jira also keeps on releasing new versions that might be useful.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate Jira a seven out of ten because there are some areas to be improved in Jira.