Jira Reviews

JIRA gives you all the features you need for organizing your work within one team and across teams in a very efficient and structured way. It is more than just a ticketing system and more than just a project management tool.

It is very user-friendly and very structured which makes it very easy to ask people from non-technical departments to come and join you within JIRA projects.

The amount of plugins is astounding, and many of them have a surprisingly high quality. While some are free, some other plugins are very expensive, but at the same time worth the money (at least this is what I think).

JIRA could be basically used to organize the work of a whole company, which is why it is so valuable.

JIRA helped us to work across teams and sites, while staying efficient and reducing communication overhead to a minimum. Since it plays very well with other Atlassian products, you can make sure that other members of the staff find JIRA issue related information much faster than in the traditional way (e.g. asking, search engine etc.).

JIRA is written in JAVA and therefore a bit hard to trouble-shoot. It also is very expensive once you have a lot of users. And since it is very flexible, it can also lead to situations where you loose overview of permissions, custom issue types etc. It also takes too long to create your own custom fields and issue types since you have to work yourself trough many layers of abstraction and features. But this is a well-known downside of flexibility and openness.

I have been using JIRA for more than 2,5 years.

No, deployment and upgrading was always straightforward.

Sometimes, it seems that JIRA gets a little slow. But is is very hard to say if the network connection, the underlying system or JIRA itself is the one to blame.

Not yet.

I used a heavily modified version of Sugar CRM, which was basically a custom solution. Never again.

The initial setup was very easy.

Since JIRA gets really expensive when having a lot of users (and maybe plugins), you should try to avoid letting everyone in by default. Maybe it is better to only give those users access who really could benefit from this product.

In terms of requirements management, the ability to write the descriptions and acceptance criteria are helpful. We can also group the stories by epic and associate stories by themes. There are tags that help us categorize stories. We can attach documents such as use cases and spreadsheets for detailed information as well as link to other stories.

We are able to track the development work for a particular story or set of stories through the Kanban board easily. The tool helps with team collaboration and raises visibility to the backlog of work to those who are interested in the project’s requirements.

We spend hours and sometimes days looking through completed stories in order to determine how to manage a defect in our existing system. We used to use Word and Excel for requirements documentation, and thought primitive, still, I was able to find specific requirements for just about any topic in a matter of minutes by using various searches and by simply knowing that a requirement probably resides in a specific document. I would ask that Altassian improve its keyword search capability and provide reports that could group information in the way I want it grouped for re-use by maintenance and production support teams when troubleshooting an existing system.

We've used it for three years for managing the product and sprint backlog of our agile projects. The product was never designed for requirements management yet our organization still insists we can and will use it to manage requirements. We considered some add-ons to the product but so far.

I am not aware of any issues with the deployment.

I am not aware of any issues with the stability.

I am not aware of any issues with the scalability.

From what I can tell the technical support is adequate. I do not deal with Altassian so I cannot provide a valid answer.

I was not involved in the decision to use this product. Our Product Owner team made some recommendations for add in products and stand-alone ones; however our recommendations were rejected due to cost considerations. Previously we used Excel, Word and Visio to represent the requirements. We stored the documents in a common share and versioned the documents each time changes were made.

We have a complex implementation. I do not know if the initial set up was straight forward. We have many, many teams across the country using JIRA. Since we have a single implementation used by all teams. I can see all the projects and the stories etc. by logging in with my credentials.

1. "Start watching this issue" which sends updates to a user who has subscribed to this JIRA when there are changes made
2. It provides us with a view of historic changes that are recorded
3. It allows universal searches, even across multiple projects in JIRA, when we want to find the JIRA where a keyword was referenced

We use this as a primary tool to record all requirements and changes. This product is absolutely easy to use and does its job perfectly. 

My opinion of this product is that it is quite complete - from a QA standpoint.

I've used it for four years. We have this integrated with SpiraTest, so all incidents raised in SpiraTest are replicated over to JIRA and vice-versa.

JIRA was the solution we used throughout. It had no competition.

This is a good product, and I would back it every time.

JIRA comes with a workflow designer which allows to design and keep track of execution of pretty much any process (similar to what a BPM solution would do but cheaper). In the new or existing workflows you can define new "statuses" which you can use as "Queues" to handle your process status or requests.

In principle, JIRA was designed to follow software development projects, but we are also using it as a solution for our call centers to follow on "Learning Administration System" processes.

It allows you to extend and define any new entities (record types), define sub-tasks, links between records as well as define new fields, screens and customize your UI based on your needs.

It also integrates very well with other applications thanks to its Restful API. In my case I integrated with JIRA from Webmethods EAI middleware as well as from SQL Server 2014 SSIS.

JIRA has a marketplace where many plug-ins are available (some for free) to extend any missing features, as well as it comes with an SDK to create your own one if needed. In fact, this is one of the biggest potentials from my point of view.

Among others Atlassian (JIRA's company) has two powerful plug-ins

• Service Desk (to control SLAs in top of your processes) - actually not a plug-in a product on top of JIRA.
• JIRA Agile which allows to follow Soft Dev Projects using SCRUM or KANBAN methodology.

• We deployed JIRA and JIRA Agile plug-in to keep track of our software development cycles using SCRUM methodology.
• It has been our product of choice for some time now in order to deploy Learning Administration Systems for our customers.

I strongly believe that ease of use for the administration part (workflows, screens, field definitions) could be improved. Sometimes it is difficult to understand "where you are" when administering JIRA.

As a Test Analyst my first requirement is to have a tool where I can create a repository for all my test activities like test cases, test execution, defects and reports. Zephyr is an add-on which provides facility to use JIRA as a test management tool. We can write test cases, add versions, create test cycles and execute cases. To make life easy JIRA comes with a dashboard where I can add different gadgets to generate reports on different criteria.

My organization uses Wiki and JIRA both for requirement gathering, but very few know the capability of JIRA as a test management solution. People in the past used to write and execute test cases in WIKI and also log the defects from there. This not only made it difficult to manage the test cases and defect, but also there are no reports which can be extracted out of it. It becomes very difficult to fetch efficiency in each test cycles. Also, we were not able to track test coverage because we couldn't link requirement with test cases in Wiki. But after JIRA provided us a feature to use it as test management we are managing all these very effectively.

Though JIRA can be used as a Test Management tool, it is not complete by itself. There are still a few niggles in it as compared to other products like HP ALM. We can export the reports in xls or pdf. Also whenever we fail any test steps, the test does not fail by itself, we need to manually select fail from status drop down. JIRA does not provide any lock feature for a test case if any person is working on that case. In fact, both people can assess the same case at the same time.

I've been using JIRA for the past 2 years.

I found JIRA to be a stable product and didn't have any issues with the response time as compared with HP ALM. Only a couple of times during last 2 years it was down for few hours.

I worked on HP QC 9 & 10 before JIRA. There were no issues with these tools to switch to JIRA, but the tool used fora project always depends on management, user benefits and cost involved in it.

User friendly, easy to set up and maintain. Great integration along other Atlassian tools. Application can be enhanced either with free plug-ins or you can create your own.

Seamlessly merged efforts between quality and R&D.

Missing a Requirement Management piece on the suite.

1. Its agile support is fantastic! Whether you are an agile expert, or just starting for both scrum and kanban teams, the whole agile process is supported
2. Requirements log
3. Story board
4. Dashboards are a great feature to stay on top of what is going on in all the projects you are managing
5. It's accessible from practically anywhere, whether you're on a mobile device or desktop across many OSs and browsers

Integrating JIRA with HP Quality Center gave our dev team and management a new window to participate/track the defects Testing Team reports from. This integration is absolutely powerful and made defect sharing with different parties a peace of cake. Now we, the testing team, can report defects on our own "beloved" HP QC, and these defects gets sent automatically or upon request to different JIRA Projects and to different project parties and teams.

I would say test management, as it's a generic issue tracking tool, and not designed specifically for test management. So, the only support for test cases is the ability to mark them as passed or failed as part of the test execution, and that's the whole test, not step by step like Quality Center. It does have many test management add-ons that can be bought, and some of them can perform close functionality to what HP Sprinter does, like Bonfire, but it does not provide video recording. It doesn't provide version control for Test Cases, and integration with Test Automation and Performance Testing tools is cumbersome.

I hate the fact that I have to buy an add-on for each feature I need. Some people might see this as positive thing since you buy only what you need, but again, not all add-ons are provided by Atlassian, and hence support and quality is subject to different providers, which is again is cumbersome, and not many people would go on with.

Reporting also needs improvement, as I need to be able to create my own custom reports and be able to export them, and screen shots doesn't work all the time.

If you are an agile development team, go for it. I would advise that f your dev team have problems accessing HP Quality Center, go for it and integrate Jira with Quality Center.

JIRA features are agile planning and release notes. We heavily use the Service Desk to support our product customers, and we also provide support for our services customers via JIRA tickets with a time tracking plug-in so invoicing, project status, are available to everyone us and our clients, keeping us on the same page.

We are now using this system for all time tracking of internal non-billable projects, support contracts, development tasks and billable work. We can see our resources utilization and track how much time was spent on each client, which is good for invoicing, on Go2Group made products. This helps with our ROI on a product by product basis, and we even track our time off in this system.

It has enabled us to be on the same page with our client’s they can see the tasks and burn downs and exactly where their money is being spent. When we combine this with the Confluence Wiki, we now have a very robust Q&A and documentation page. We use it for sign-offs and online documentation. There is a history of what folks have done, and the information is radiated out in near real time. It is all there.

We can serve multiple clients, our own internal products, projects, and operations from one system cutting the resources needed to run these systems. Compliance is much easier to achieve, documentation, you need to sort out what needs to be displayed and reported in the formats you wish.

All in all, these tools, with little effort or cost, have allowed us to provide, what larger consulting and product firms struggle to provide due to legacy products/system/acquisitions, and compliance.

A more enhanced Service Desk module, with support for more types of alarms and the like.

The product is very easy to download, and install. Once downloaded, you just click next, OK, then viola! You are a newly minted JIRA Administrator, it is too easy. Teams, company data, and processes end up growing from grass roots movement before management realize it.

While Atlassian and TFS seem to be more of the toolsets that companies are adopting, and they are great core ALM stacks to build upon, you are still going to need tools from other vendors for most environments. For instance, you have more strenuous support desk needs, there is ServiceNow. If you make cars, boats, aeroplanes, trains, etc., you will most likely need IBM Rational DOORS. High end testing is still the domain of HP ALM/QC. Aerospace higher-end agile planning, you could look at JIRA Agile or VersionOne, or Rally. Embedded C, etc.

To summarize, MS TFS and/or Atlassian (maker of JIRA) are good core ALM stacks to run your shop on. The remaining issues are generally around how to integrate other systems to TFS or Atlassian, and also, how to migrate to TFS/Atlassian.

We are a heavy user of the Atlassian tools and are a reseller. We do VAR work for other competing ALM solutions as well, notably Microsoft, IBM, HP, Perforce, etc. This is just the toolset we have grown into.

Then they look into the systems and realize what risks there are and are usually slow on the uptake to designate these systems as Class A or B critical systems. They may be surprised at how many individual systems have sprouted across their organizations. You can find yourself in an organization with multiple JIRA instances due to the grass roots nature of adoption, with dozens of workflows and hundreds of custom fields in each instance.

It can be a lot of work to pull these together under compliance and DevOps. Would be much easier to accept these tools as mission critical, or at least realize their importance, and grow them correctly.