Jira Reviews

Customization of workflow is a key valuable feature. JIRA comes with a few default workflows, however you can create highly customized workflows depending on your needs.

Tracking more items in JIRA allows for more transparency of projects; centralized access to latest issues, risks, tasks, etc.

Improvements for Cloud version. One such item is available of nested user groups, which is available on server version. Managing a large number of users on Cloud version is extremely challenging due to lack of this capability. I wrote my own command line admin tool in order to manage users more easily.

I have used it for two years and was the main admin also.

We used the Cloud version, due to external access needs. Cloud version deployment is just configuration.

With more users and more projects, administration becomes more difficult. Administration is very manual. Thus, I had to write my own command line tool to automate some of my administration.

Customer service is good. Response to support requests were fairly quick.

Technical support is good.

Initial setup is straightforward. A large user base and/or large number of projects requires more planning and strategy, so that you can re-use common workflows, rather than create new configurations for every project (think of abstraction is object-oriented programming).

Pricing is based on the number of users. Cloud is cheaper, but choose in-house (server) version if you can, as it has more features and is more secure; overall very affordable.

We looked at RedMine (open source), but features were limited, and it is not very user friendly. Other options such as BaseCamp and Asana were not really comparable products, in my mind, even though they come up on many comparison websites.

JIRA is tool. As with any tool, it needs to be in the hands of the right person to be used effectively. The administrator and/or trainer in your company should be very competent with JIRA, as they will be leading the effort. JIRA is powerful, but what truly makes it a powerful tool is integration with other Atlassian packages and third-party software. JIRA should almost always be used in conjunction with Confluence. There are many integrations available such as GitHub and many other applications.

Multiple features make this product a delight to use. Using this for backlog prioritization is the key to either kanban or scrum processes. JIRA does a great job of articulating the story and adding elements to the story to help in the prioritization. If you are overseeing multiple projects, it allows you to easily follow the teams progress.

Another feature is the ability to incorporate add-ons. It’s great to have for those one-off processes you need. For example, the integration with Confluence.

Working in a dev shop that is 100% scrum, this tool is invaluable in its insights to how the process is working. Are the stories written well? Is the team executing on the highest priorities? How is the team executing sprint by sprint? All these can be found easily within JIRA, either with their out-of-the-box reporting, or the ease with which search queries can be downloaded to CSV to manipulate in a data visualization tool.

The reporting out of the box is minimal; I would like to see a report-building capability out of the box. Teams have access to more than a dozen out-of-the-box reports with real-time, actionable insights into how their teams are performing sprint over sprint. Examples include Burndown, Sprint, Cumulative Flow, Epic , release, Velocity. However most will find these reports too simple and want some sophistication. Luckily Jira gives the ability to export results where you can work offline with them in a tool like Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel or other preferred data parsing tool. For additional spend you can purchase their reporting plugin.

I have used this application for approximately five years over several different roles: product management, development manager and delivery manager.

We deployed on premise. The amount of time to deploy was simple for a trained technician. Would highly recommend if installing on premise to shy away from any customizations in workflows; will make upgrades a pain in the future. If you considering using this, I would recommend the cloud option first.

No issues with stability.

Like any application installed on premise, you must be monitoring server and application logs to ensure the right level of performance. Scaling up is easy.

Most of their customer service comes from the community. Robust community of evangelists who respond rather quickly. As the application is highly stable, contacting customer service has been few and far between. Responses came thru within expected timeframes and were helpful, even if pointing to already published articles.

I would rate their technical support high.

I've also used Microsoft TFS (Team Foundation Server) for another development team that was .NET based. Used both Jira and TFS at the same time, though for different project teams.

Atlassian built their reputation on building applications that were easy to install and using a community model to improve. The setup of JIRA was straightforward, just as the documentation indicated. Us technology people have a hard time reading thru user guides, but these were easy and quick.

It was implemented by one of our developers.

Development teams, especially scrum teams, need some type of tool. For geographically dispersed teams, the ROI has a quick payback period, less than three months. Geography could be the dev team in one city and the product team in another.

Look to their cloud offering first; get using it quickly. Be wary of some of the add-ons, as there are cost components to them; if you need them, add them in.

As indicated above, we used Microsoft TFS. We tried to have a JavaScript team use TFS, but it didn't really fit into all the other ALM tools a JavaScript developer uses, so we quickly scrapped TFS and moved back to JIRA. The same was true for a .NET team; tried to have them use JIRA, but it was difficult to break the Microsoft eco-system. Not impossible in that case, just a culture shift you want to address carefully.

Review all your use cases for the tools to see if Atlassian matches up nicely to those you need; makes integration easier when all are from one provider. Be sure you understand what you are licensed for and what costs extra. For example, do you need portfolio management? Because, if you do, it's an extra cost.

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.