Jira Reviews

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 use Jira to manage all our software development projects and our engineering projects. Our main use of the solution is for the workflows on our different types of projects. It's mainly used by our engineering groups, they have the proper workflows and all of the stats. As a director, I work more at the business level, tracking tasks similar to the new planner that's in Microsoft which some people are switching to. We also use it in the backend of the projects. For project managers and directors, it's more about a to-do list thing that's shared. I'm a company director and we are customers of Jira. 

The online collaborative nature of the solution has been helpful. Previously, coordination was done in Microsoft Project and Excel spreadsheets. The level of collaboration and the accessibility of the information which Jira offers has greatly improved things and we've also been able to build out and fine tune the workflows and the integration into the different tool sets. We're definitely going to keep using Jira.

I think the customization and tailoring of the workflows have proven to be very useful. And then there's the collaboration of the tool itself which has a lot of nice features. 

One of the issues is tracking the hours that people spend on each task. I know the solution has some built-in features but it doesn't quite meet our needs. We tried a couple of expansions unsuccessfully. Being able to track the effort on each of the tasks is important for us and we'd also like to be able to compare that with what's been budgeted. It would be useful. We've recently moved to Teams and some of the integration with Teams doesn't seem to work, whether it's not supported or not there, the ability to integrate that would be something we'd like to see. 

We've been using this solution for over five years. 

We haven't had any issues with stability. 

We're a fairly small organization. We've scaled up to around 500 users and we haven't had any issues with that. It's mainly used by our engineering group, and our active users use it all the time, on a daily basis. We'll increase as we organically grow. 

I can't recall the initial setup but it took us a while to figure out exactly how to use it. We deployed using our own staff. 

I don't know what the licensing costs are but we find them affordable. It's never been a major issue.

This is a powerful tool and allows a lot of collaboration, it's worth spending some time figuring out how your workflows will be, that's where the real value is.

I rate this solution an eight 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 use Jira every day for tasks like tracking product deployments, mapping it to the tools that we use, and sprint tracking. We also used it for audit purposes, where everybody goes back to that for details about each user story.

Each sprint tracking is done in there, as well as the other product-related activities

All aspects of Jira administration help with respect to QA development and deployment.

This solution allows us to use customized workloads for different projects.

The sprint tracking is really helpful and very convenient.

Scrum boards are very easy to follow and we use them every day.

The roadmap, to understand what our team is going, is quite helpful when it comes to understanding things in a visual format. It provides good visuals such as the Burnup Chart.

Requirement traceability is easier to do with this product.

It integrates well with other tools.

We have been working on integrating Jira with Confluence for the past months but it is not yet working. Having more seamless integration with Confluence would really help us track our product management activity and other product details in one place.

Integration with BitBucket would allow us to have a better deployment process.

I have been using Jira for between four and five years.

This product is very much stable, and we have every tracking option being used.

It scales well, from what we have seen. We have more than 350 users that are in groups, and perhaps another 150 in addition to that. We are onboarding a lot of teams.

When I need support, I contact our in-house technical team. I have not spoken with anybody from outside the organization or anybody from Atlassian.

We were using the on-premises version until a year or two ago when we migrated to the cloud version.

The initial setup was simple and it didn't take much time to complete.

We have an in-house team to deploy and manage our IT solutions. There may have been some outside help initially but everything is now done in-house.

We have an enterprise license that includes cloud service and support.

Overall, this is a very good product and I think that it is the best project management tool. It is used company-wide and I recommend it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

When you are engaged in an Agile development environment, most of the handling and tracking of the stories are handled in Jira. It can also be used for handling and tracking requests in a ticketing system.

I am a consultant from the quality and design part of the work that we do, and I help people introduce tools into their system. Currently, I am only working with one customer that is using Jira. In the past, I have had five or six who were actively using it.

This solution covers almost all of the types of uses that we have, from an Agile perspective. All of our requirements are supported by it.

This product provides you a good view of the status of your projects.

When I was managing projects that started from epics and moved to multiple tasks, I found that the integration of epics and user stories could have been a little easier. I've seen people struggling to use that aspect of Jira. I think that there is some ease of use that could be brought in to improve certain things.

I have been working with Jira on and off for the past six to seven years.

This is a stable product.

I have not used Jira for really huge projects. I have had groups of between 30 and 40 people and for that size, there were no issues with scalability.

We have asked a couple of questions from technical support and I don't recall having any issues with that. Everything was as expected.

I have not completed an installation myself, but my understanding is that it is quite straightforward. I am familiar with cloud-based deployment but I believe that it can be deployed in a private environment, as well.

One of my customers told me that they were receiving better pricing for a similar tool from Microsoft. Specifically, the total cost of ownership was cheaper with Microsoft.

This is definitely a tool that I would recommend to people, depending on their needs.

In summary, it is a good product and the only room for improvement that I can see is that it needs better integration.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I'm working on creating test cases and one test. I also have an overview of the Sprint.

In general, the GUI is nice. 

The part when it comes to the testing area is a bit hard to handle. The screen is too small, you can't really read what you're typing in, and it's only for the testing area. It looks like they have pressed in more than the UI system could handle to display it properly.

I have been working with Jira for about eight months.

Jira seems like a stable product, but sometimes I'm losing data.

As a totally different team does the entire setup, I don't know if it's scalable. But we have about 150 users.

To be quite honest, at the end of the day, a tool is just a tool. For me personally, it's hard to say this tool is much better than the other. From just what I know so far, Micro Focus Octane looks a bit more modern. But I don't know which Jira version we're using at the moment. Octane looks a bit more integrated, it looks a bit newer, but would I buy a tool because of that? Certainly not.

I would recommend Jira for Sprint management. But when it comes to documentation of manual tests, I would say, "Okay, you can buy it if you want to have one package, but you can also have a look at something different."

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Jira a solid eight.

Most of our company is using Jira for IT projects. We had an internal project with which I was involved, and I touched on it a little bit. We have its latest version.

I liked the flexibility of the application. It was pretty user-friendly.

If you're not a technical person, it might not be very user-friendly.

I have been using this solution for the past 12 months.

It was stable. I don't recall any bugs or glitches.

My impression is that it was pretty scalable. We have 10 to 12 people who use it. They are IT managers, directors, and developers.

I did not have to use tech support.

I used to use Microsoft Project in a different organization. In my current organization, I have been working for two years, and Jira is the only tool that they have used as far as I know. They are two different animals.

I wasn't involved in its setup.

I would rate Jira an eight out of ten because of its flexibility. I like the controls on it.