Jira Reviews

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 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.

We used it in my previous organization for project management, product management, and release management. In my current organization, where I started working a week ago, we are using Jira strictly for help-desk tickets. We are using DevOps for our release management. So, we've got DevOps, Jira, and some homegrown stuff, and I'm trying to figure out what's going to work best for this new organization.

I've used Jira and Confluence previously, and this is my first time using the help-desk ticketing system. It is cool and not a whole lot different than SolarWinds or Zendesk, except the appearance of it is more Jira.

We were using Microsoft OneNote for systems engineering and network engineering. It was being used for our documentation, environments, and services, and it was a nightmare. We transitioned everybody and copied everything into Confluence. We were then able to tag specific tickets to the notes, and there were links between what work was recently done and the most updated notes in Confluence.

The roadmap feature and the ability to integrate with Power BI are probably the most valuable features in it. It is a great solution. I absolutely love it. It is a tool that was designed for project management, and it has been awesome to work with it so far. I also love Confluence.

They can maybe dumb down the directions for building the automation a little bit because to be able to build out the automation, I had to play around with it and learn what all the fields meant and what they were referencing. I don't have an IT background originally. My background is in biology, and I got into project management by chance. I am good at it, but I haven't really worked with coding languages. In terms of writing automation, it is easier for devs because they intuitively know what they're being asked, but as a PM who originally didn't have IT experience, it was a little bit daunting at first.

It could also have an extra hierarchy to be able to allow tasks under stories. It could be the way it is set up at our organization, but currently, under stories, you can have sub-tasks, but you can't create a task. Being able to customize your hierarchy a little bit more would be beneficial because sometimes, the devs would say, "Well, here's a story, and now we need sub-tasks," but as we were building out the sub-tasks, sometimes we had to go a step lower to dig in a little bit more, and we couldn't do that.

I have been using this solution for two years.

It has never gone down for me. It was always reliable, even from the mobile app.

It was fine. It seemed to integrate with all of our systems with ease. At my previous organization, there were probably 500 or 600 people using Jira. There were many different roles including product management, project management, VPs of IT and Ops, IT data services, developers, network engineers, systems engineers, and CBAs. It was a full scale of IT professionals.

At my current organization, where I started working a week ago, we are using Jira, but there are only a handful of people who are actually using it. It is strictly for help-desk tickets. I am trying to implement it and roll it out to the organization on a much larger scale, and I'm going to have to talk to them about pricing and other things. In this new organization, there are probably about 500 or 600 employees in total. Assuming I get the buy-in from everyone, which I don't think would be a problem, I would probably need at least a hundred licenses for users and then expand from there as needed.

I haven't interacted with their technical support, but I bet they would have been awesome.

I have used Smartsheet, MS Project, and Trello. Jira is more software-development-specific and a much easier tool to use.

In my previous organization, I believe its initial setup was complex. I was not at the administrative user level. I was given admin privileges for certain projects but not for the whole Jira. This is the first time I actually have admin privileges over all of Jira, and it was set up for me.

It probably took a few days. It would have also involved a lot of conversations and other stuff.

It would have been in-house. In terms of maintenance, it didn't seem to need maintenance from our side.

I would advise going with the entire Atlassian suite. Don't just use one aspect of Jira, unless you have a very specific need for using bits and pieces. Jira is better when Confluence and everything can be integrated, and you have source code management and all of that from the same software or platform.

I would rate Jira a ten out of ten. I love Jira. It has the ability to just do everything, and it is a one-stop shop for all of your IT software development needs.

I use the tool to review code quality and communicate with the QA team. I also use the product to raise tickets with my senior management for issues I cannot resolve.

The user interface is simple. It performs well. It is easy to use. Anyone can use the product.

The stability could be improved.

I have been using the solution for one year and two months.

I haven’t had any issues with the stability of the tool. I rate the stability eight out of ten.

The initial setup is simple. We have completely migrated to the AWS cloud.

I will recommend the tool to others. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

I have worked with Jira for agile scrum projects. Jira is a good tool that helps you track and monitor all your stories, scrum updates, and Definition of Doneness (DoD). We can track everything we need to track and pull the reports from the Jira tool. Based on the team's activity, we can monitor, track, and update the tasks we have assigned through Jira. We also use Jira for sprint planning.

The most valuable feature of Jira is the reporting feature, which allows us to track our team's tasks. You can export and play around with the reports. In the defect tracking tool, you can pull the data and generate reports with a nice graph. It's very user-friendly. The solution's user interface is intuitive and easy to use.

Sometimes, Jira becomes slow when more people use it. Then, we have to close it and log in again. The solution's stability could be improved, and it could be made more robust.

I rate the solution’s stability a seven out of ten.

Around 2,000 users use Jira in our organization.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten for scalability.

The initial setup of the solution is very simple. You can install Jira as a standalone solution. Deploying the solution on the cloud is very, very easy, and then you can access it from anywhere on the cloud.

I have used Micro Focus Quality Center, which is purely a defect management tool. We can also use Jira as a defect management tool. When you compare both tools, Jira is now the best tool for defect management and running scrum projects. You can even expose the Jira APIs to do automation.

If you find a defect, you can automate the process of logging in to Jira and erasing the incident. When you find a defect while running JMeter scripts, you can take the APIs and automate it to save time. The automation process can be done through Jira because it exposes its APIs to third parties to integrate with other tools.

You can expose Jira APIs and integrate the solution with other tools. You can have your own dashboard using the APIs. I would recommend the solution to other users.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

My company uses the product for the user storage it provides. The tool is also useful for requirements management and test management processes. The product is also useful to track the hours people in the company have spent on testing and test logging.

The solution's most valuable features revolve around the dashboard view, which has a burndown chart indicating progress. I also like the tool's ability to provide details phase-wise, allowing users to see how many tickets are in development and how many are in the testing process. It also helps users see how many tickets are ready to move to the production phase. The aforementioned areas of the tool are pretty frequently used.

Some of the customizations are definitely a little challenging. I depend on Zephyr to manage certain reporting aspects and deal with the challenges of customization. More than a thousand records are something that our company cannot retrieve, but with the administrator's permission, the limit can be increased. Some of the functionalities to increase the limit of retrieval, in case there are more than a thousand records, could have been included as a default feature since it would be helpful if I wanted to do some analysis or if I wanted to extract all the details when my limit is only a thousand records and then I have to search for another way to find and extract the details. If the aforementioned details of the issues in the product are addressed, then it would be great.

If there is a provision to increase the number of records retrieved, it would be really helpful. In the tool, only a predefined reporting is there, and it helps with some of the more customized reporting, like Power BI Report Builder, so the area of reporting can be enhanced and it can be really helpful.

I have been using Jira for two years. I am a user of the tool.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten. The product is always up and running in my company, and we have not experienced too much downtime in Jira, making it a very efficient tool.

More than 50 people use the product in my company.

I haven't had the opportunity to interact much with the product's technical support, but based on the inputs from the other members of my team, I can say that my company was able to get support from Jira whenever required. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

The product's initial setup phase was not very complex, as it is manageable.

The solution is deployed on the cloud.

Compared with Jira, I feel Microsoft ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) is coming up pretty fast in the market since the features attached to the paid version work well. Microsoft ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) can easily integrate with other Microsoft products without needing any customization. Microsoft ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) is growing pretty fast in the market.

My company uses the product for planning tasks.

The product has played a major role in helping my company in the area of bug tracking. During the testing phases, be it SIT or UAT testing, if there were any issues, our company used to log the bug using Jira, and then we connect with the respective users, so we have a track of which particular bug and check to see if the bug is related to which user storage.

Jira helped our company's project management, analytics, and reporting parts. If you look at the analytical part, my company used to get the hours we have availed each of the user storage. When it comes to the user storage part, my company would like to see whether the hours we consumed were optimal or if it was over-consumed, which is information that we track with Jira. The tool is useful for tracking progress and seeing where my company stands when it comes to tickets. Each ticket might have a certain due date, which the company gets to see using Jira. Altogether, the tool helps users eventually understand the team's progress, the current sprint details, and how much of the team's capacity has been used. With Jira, my company gets to see the aforementioned details, so we were able to track it with the product's dashboard.

I am not used to using the product's integration capabilities with other solutions.

The product's user interface is good.

I recommend the product to others who plan to use it.

I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

We are using it for software development tracking, bug tracking, feature tracking, and so on. 

We are using the cloud version from Atlassian, and we have its latest version.

The way we can define and customize the search queries for the tickets in Jira is most valuable.

The way to configure it can definitely be improved. It is very difficult and complex to configure. Its configuration should be simplified.

I don't have any requirements for new features. It is a standard system, and we use just a part of the functionality.

I have been using this solution for five to ten years. I use it on a daily basis.

Its stability is good. In the last five years, I haven't seen any outages. 

We are a very small team, and we don't have any requirements for scalability.

I have not contacted their technical support.

The initial setup and the out-of-box features and functions are very straightforward. I would rate it a five out of five in terms of ease. You can just create an account and start to use it. 

It is a cloud solution offered by Atlassian. There is no on-premises setup, and it doesn't require any maintenance from our side.

It is subscription-based, and we probably pay yearly. I would rate it a four out of five in terms of price.

I would rate Jira an eight out of ten.

The design of the interface is clean and not too busy visually.

I'm really new to Jira and I haven't used all of the features. However, it is quite difficult to use and manipulate. It was a little complicated for me and I don't know if it's difficult globally for others, but I had a difficult time understanding it at first. I used it for issues,  epics, stories, tasks, and sub-tasks. For first-time users, Jira could be made better to help them understand.

When you want to create something in Jira, whether it's a story or an epic on a task, you have to create a thing called an issue, and inside the issue, you have to put what type of issue it is. Either it's an epic or a story. The fact that it's called an "issue" was a little confusing for me because I didn't know where to search when I wanted to look for tasks and stories. I didn't know that I needed to search for issues and not only tasks or topics.  

I have been using Jira for approximately one month.

Jira has been a stable solution.

I have found Jira to be scalable.

We have 20 people in my company using Jira.

The setup of Jira was simple.

I did not compare Jira to other solutions.

I have not had a lot of time to explore the solution. My rating might be higher if I had used it more.

I rate Jira a three out of five.