Jira Reviews

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.

Defect Management, Issue Management, and the GreenHopper plugin with Agile.

They should provide CLI or some other deployment mechanism that improves productivity by avoiding duplicate efforts.

6 years as a user, and 1 month evaluation period

During an upgrade we found an issue.

Yes, this is not stable as compared to other tools I managed.

Yes, scalability is an issue. Performance decreases.

7/10

7/10

Straightforward

Ourselves

I would rate it a 5 on scale of 10, but again it depends how large is the team, company size, overall features needed and the instance you want to manage.

When we used it, it was a low-cost solution but now the costs have increased. The team has to look into long term costs.

Yes, other defect management tools available on the market when I first evaluated JIRA 6 years ago.

UI of this tool is good.

Small teams and small projects may consider this as good option.

The features mentioned below were quite useful for me -

• Project tracking

• Planning

• Defect management

• Code integration

• Service Desk

• Email notifications

• Reporting

In my organization, we have so many diverse projects, that the flexibility to integrating JIRA with other tools has been a helpful feature. It has streamlined and channelled our project and test management activities. This has helped all my organization's departments as we now have a data-bank that means anyone can access the required information with a few mouse clicks; be it someone from sales, QA, developer, or management.

The only problem area for me is applying filters, and for new users it is very complicated work. I hope they can come up with a better filtering functionality, as this is one of the most basic, important and most widely used features by all categories of users.

I have been using different versions of JIRA for the last three to four years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

It's very good.

It's very good.

We previously used Quality Center, but JIRA offers better value for money.

The initial setup was straightforward if you know the basics of installation.

Through a vendor team and they were real experts in JIRA.

I can not give you details but the ROI is excellent.

JIRA's pricing and licensing is the best in the market with the features a user gets.

• Quality Center
• Mantis

This tool has some good bug tracking, issue tracking and project management features. One of the best feature is its integration with other tools which I love, but at the same time, it has some limitations as well.

This is a great product, but I always say before jumping into using it, go through the user guide. Also, if possible, look for some tutorial videos to get the full use of its functionalities.

Usability for our users and flexibility for our admins.

JIRA and Confluence have taken off here like wildfire. Our users enterprise-wide have made excellent use of these tools.

Performance and Scalability in a large enterprise could be improved.

4-5 years.

Not with deployment, but growing pains as fast as we have grown in the last few years with JIRA. We now have 7 different instances of JIRA.

Yes – we wished we would have stayed on the simple path of using the product with fewer add-ons and customization. Most of the complexity is add-ons and customizations that we have chosen to do and likely we have taken some of those too far.

Yes...We would really like to see JIRA scale into 10-100 millions issue range.

Took some getting used to but great!

Took some getting used to but great!

We switched because we wanted to remove over 3000 Lotus Notes applications. 30-40% of those applications were replaced with JIRA or Confluence.

Atlassian products seem to be very simple and straightforward if you use it simply and stick with what comes with the product. The complexity and complication comes when you introduce add-ons and customizations. The other observation is that Atlassian products seem to be less ‘conditioned’ for larger enterprises.

The ROI on Atlassian products has been tremendous. It’s been well worth the investment!

We chose JIRA/Confluence as they were solutions we can get up and running quickest, and also cheap.

Keep it simple. . . minimize the add-ons and customizations!

The features of the Technical Account Management (TAM) which have been most valuable for us are understanding the limitations of tools, suggested sizing and approach for operation teams, and suggested approaches for onboarding and educations.

The TAM provided good insight as to how we can more effectively perform troubleshooting, and scale down operational costs.

Co-location. Working out times with someone on the West Coast is painful. Also more ROI material. Big blue can spin out ridiculous documents that executives love as to why spending millions of dollars on IBM will somehow make us richer.

The TAM was able to assist us with issues we had involving deployment.

It was a struggle with TAM vs. Premier but eventually we were able to address some stability issues. We had an app crashing every other day for several weeks before it got the attention we thought this contract would bring.

In terms of the TAM and scalability the only issue was just an upsell to datacenter really. But the TAM is helping look at forecasting triggers etc to understand the need for more instances. It is really difficult to get any sizing recommendations for horsepower though. The feedback is “well every customer is unique, so it’s difficult to say” and push to Premier Support for that.

A few mismatched tools. The Atlassian ecosystem has tools that do one function very well, but pull together nicely as a platform. Would like more consistent navigation and provisioning integration though like what is seen in On demand/cloud offering.

We had setup well before the TAM agreement. Pretty straightforward other then lack of sizing recommendations across the board.

Yes, TeamCollab, Home grown tools, Redmine, Jenkins, XLDeploy, Jazz/BuildForge and RTC. RTC and XLDeploy/Jenkins combo is still widely used and seen as an internal competitor.

I would recommend buying premier support for half the price and training your folks internally. It’s really not at all what we felt was advertised.

JIRA: Product is well liked but we have had performance issues. Premier Support: Knowledge is very good and they are willing to bring in other people when they need to. The Premier Support team was very thorough and very responsive.

I think that if you look at how we troubleshoot, Premier Support has allowed us to not waste our time with dead ends, to have better focus, and get to root case much faster. Even though we still have monitoring in place, for root cause analysis we rely heavily on Premier Support and don’t waste as much time.

For our Premier Support, We would like to have on the call interaction all the time. The session we’ve had recently has been valuable, but we would like to see more live sessions/interactions.

Purchased Sept. 27th 2014.

Our Premier Support engineer was extremely helpful with deployment. I was pleasantly surprised, the engineer gave us guidance, looked for any potential issues, and was above and beyond in terms of service. They did a really fantastic job.

From the beginning that has been the main thing we have been working on and thru Premier Support, they have done a good job working on our side, and escalating to a larger team when needed.

The Premier Support team was very thorough and very responsive.

The Premier Support team was very thorough and very responsive.

We previously used the standard Atlassian support and then jumped from standard to premier. In terms of tracking, we had other defect tracking, but now JIRA has been a replacement – it is the tool of the future.

The initial setup was straightforward.

Yes, we have other vendors and tools – evaluation is ongoing.

I would tell people to understand your growth and usage up front – really comes down to understanding that and keeping it under control. We grew too fast and weren’t prepared for the issues that came with that; you want to make sure you have a good performance testing environment in place, datacenter etc. so you’re not scrambling afterwards.

Having a Technical Account Manager gives us someone who I can email about any of my questions or concerns about products, roadmaps, configuration and scalability options, etc. If I have an idea for something I want to do he might say "that’s a terrible idea", or "you might want to try it this way instead", because he has a depth of internal knowledge and context which most end users are unable to attain. This internal advocacy, contacts, and ease of communication are each tremendously helpful.

Collaboration on open action items and active ongoing projects. I spoke with my TAM about this issue and he completely agrees. There is no one system on which TAMs and their customers can collaborate on action items, ongoing projects, meeting notes, etc.

Began using Technical Account Management (TAM) in Nov 2014.

Yes. We were having an issue where we have to take one of their products offline to do a backup every night. I was certain there was a better way that it could be done, but on Atlassian Answers, other users were giving vague, hand-wavy responses. Our TAM was able to give us a couple different options, each of which will be able to save a department of 300 roughly 4 hours a night.

No.

We are just in the process of dealing with future scalability issues and having the TAM in place now puts us in a good place to address those concerns.

Very high.

Well above average. Their response time is good, and we are able to escalate what we need to escalate.

Yes, we have used several throughout the growth of our part of our organization. Most recently we moved off of Rational Team Concert from IBM. There is not enough time to tell you why I hate that product! It is one of the worst products I have ever used for ALM. It is not set up to encourage self-directed teams, despite its name. It says it can do whatever it wants, but it is not designed as a product to make people happy, just to make IBM's consulting organizations more money. Atlassian products are the exact opposite. A new team can be brought on and be working efficiently within minutes – with Team Concert could be hours or even days, if ever, before a team can be working well together.

The initial setup was very straightforward. The only complexities had to do with our own infrastructure. With Atlassian, either you can run the programs open to the world or behind the firewall. The default state for our systems is locked down, but Atlassian works best when their tools are able to connect to one another. This isn't a problem with the products, just an issue with our own infrastructure. I run local development versions of the tools on my laptop with no issues.

Completely in-house.

We did not look at any other complete suites of tools. We evaluated Rally Enterprise and VersionOne for project/defect tracking. Both of those options had decent levels of integration with our CI tools. Ultimately the value that the Atlassian suite gave us as a total package of discrete, but connected, components was above and beyond the piecemeal approach we would have had to take otherwise.

As an Enterprise customer, evaluate what you really need. If it's tech support above/beyond what comes with the subscription, go with the Enterprise tech support instead.

TAM is when you really need/want an advocate within Atlassian. For instance, our program and product management groups set up an on-site meeting with our TAM to discuss JIRA Portfolio, and they were able to ask questions of the Portfolio product manager as well as the TAM after a solid demo. Without a TAM in place, this type of thing would have been impossible short of sending everyone to the Atlassian Summit (User Conference) every year. That’s invaluable.

Another recent example is that we had a problem with a plug-in owned by Atlassian, but because we have our TAM in place he was able to get us in touch with the plugin developer directly and we've skipped weeks of struggle.

It's all about advocacy, insight into product roadmaps, best practices, etc.

For the most part the system is simple to use and simple to administer.

When I began I was part of a very small development team that did not have any formal bug tracking in place. Jira has gone from being a simple bug tracker to a full development planning suite, in addition to tracking our support and production tasks.

There are so, SO many areas that I couldn’t even begin to count. A cursory glance at fixes and improvements requested by users would speak volumes. The most basic of requests have been allowed to languish for years, many over a decade. (really) The most basic improvement would be to offer WYSIWYG text editing. There are open source packages that could easily be integrated, but Atlassian wants people to buy Confluence. Bulk editing multi-value fields should not be limited to overwriting what is already there. There should be an append mode offered.

We’ve had Jira in place for 6 ½ years.

I have not had any issues.

None to date.

None to date, though we did need to move to a new server to meet our growing needs.

Atlassian’s customer service used to be wonderful. There was phone support that was always accessible. Support is absolutely terrible now. All support is performed via email and the response time is long. Often multiple messages need to be exchanged before a point is made and understood.

Not the worst but definitely no longer the best.

No solution was in place prior to Jira.

Our initial setup was fairly straightforward, though all we run on the server is the bare minimum needed to get Jira up and running.

IT put the server together for me and I took care of the rest.

In the beginning it was fantastic. The annual license renewal was definitely worth it for phone support and significant improvements in Jira. Nowadays the “improvements” are lackluster at best, and phone support is gone. The annual renewal would be worth it to stay current with the latest releases, but Atlassian’s plugin support is lacking; lack of plugin support has stopped us from upgrading, and continues to.

I don’t recall the original start up cost. The initial license fee was considerably lower than it is today, and had no limits on the number of users. Today, apart from the general costs of maintaining the server, we have the annual license renewal fee.

I looked at Trac, Bugzilla, Test Track.

Before making a decision have a look at the requested features and bug fixes – see what has not been addressed and what the plans are to address the features of greatest interest to you.