Jira Reviews

We use Jira for project management.

Our team really needed something to help us track the progress that is made against our system-level requirements, and this solution helps us in that regard.

The most valuable feature is Jira Align, which is a plugin that helps you to understand the progress that is made against each epic. I have had limited exposure to it but by using Align, we can also see the progress concerning Initiatives, including progress made against the requirements.

In general, Jira Align is very useful for management. It allows them to see the big picture and what is really happening from a team-execution point of view. Being able to see progress against their Initiatives is a nice feature.

The UI is good, and it helps us to see what needs to be done to complete our sprints.

Nowadays, many organizations are moving toward the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) framework, and this is something that Jira should be able to accommodate. Jira should understand that at the leadership level in an organization, such as the C-level or even below that, they don't like to have an epic creator. Rather, they are interested in observing all of the corporate objectives that are being turned out by the team.

OKR is a very important feature for them to add, and it's a big investment. There are separate tools that are trying to support and enable people to use this framework. If Jira could do that, it would be great because we don't want to integrate multiple tools. For example, we don't want to use one for OKR and another one for Agile backlog items. If we can have support for everything using one tool, it would be helpful. That said, it would require a big investment to implement.

The biggest drawback that Jira has is that they don't have a separate chart to show metrics for lead time, cycle time, and throughput. We use the control chart as a workaround but it's not giving us the correct metrics. The metrics are skewed because the chart shows us some items that are still in an open state. This is something that needs to be fixed. By comparison, Rally Software has a feature that enables people to understand the lead time, cycle time, and throughput as separate metrics in different charts. Having Jira implement that capability would be helpful.

We are unable to enter an explicit agreement below the kanban board, which is something that we would like to be able to do.

I have more than five years of experience with Jira.

Stability-wise, Jira is good.

Jira has no problem with scalability. It's far better if you compare it to Rally.

I also use Rally Software. Some times are more on Rally, whereas other things are more on Jira.

Rally software has some better charting features, whereas Jira is more scalable.

Between these two products, it's very difficult to say which I would recommend. Rally has some good features that are not available in Jira. For example, in Jira, we can't put an explicit agreement below the kanban board. This is something that we can do in Rally. Rally Software, on the other hand, does not have the feature that allows us to understand the progress made at the feature level or the initiative level. This is something that Jira gives us with the Align plugin.

I would lean toward Jira as the market leader. If they improved some features, such as the metrics available on the charts and support for OKR, I would prefer and recommend it over Rally and other products.

The pricing for Jira is reasonable, although I think they can bring it down because the plugins cost extra. Jira Align, for example, is available at an additional charge.

Jira should understand that there are now competitors in the market, and they should lower their prices to expand the user base. As sales volumes increase, the price should naturally be brought down. In this case, people are more likely to retain their licenses instead of switching to a more cost-effective solution.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I am an Agile coach and consultant, and my clients use Jira to manage Agile teams, including tracking and gathering reports on performance at the team level as well as the team-of-teams level.

Since I work with different companies in my consulting work, there are different versions and implementations of Jira that I deal with. Most of the time I work with Jira on-premises, although I have worked a few times on the cloud edition.

In the near future, I most likely be using Jira Portfolio instead of the regular Jira because that will be my new responsibility.

I enjoy working with (and can recommend) Jira for a number of reasons. The best features are that it is friendly and provides good visibility. It's to the point and very effective.

When I start work with a company, one of the promises I give them is that they will get visibility, and very quickly at that. We are able to easily create boards and have the teams start work with story points. Then, we will make use of the Structure feature, which is another good feature that we get benefit from. 

In terms of the general Jira software, one element that is missing is budget management. Perhaps such functionality exists in add-ons, however. Once, several years ago, I tried to use one such add-on (the name of which I can't recall) but I dropped it because it was not effective enough. If we had this feature, I think we could provide the whole picture to top management.

I have been using Jira for about five years. 

It is stable. 

It's not scalable enough, in my opinion. To explain, I have a specific level of understanding of Jira so I am able to make specific customization to support activities at scale, but I don't feel like Jira is easily scalable out of the box. It's not always natural to scale up Jira without customization.

The technical support that I receive is not necessarily talking with any Jira support team, but rather it involves using the community's help from the internet.

On one hand, this avenue of assistance is quite good because I can often find answers there, but sometimes it's not enough. In these cases, Jira will ask to open a ticket and to vote on it so it gets priority. But it's frustrating because we might still not get answers, or we don't find anyone able to handle our issue for months or for years.

Overall, and for most problems, I think I have enough documentation so I can figure out what to do and how to do it. When compared with other tools, I think that Jira's documentation is clear.

I don't deal with licensing in my current consultant position.

For application lifecycle management, I can definitely recommend Jira and I would rate it an eight out of ten.

I am using Jira for some programming-driven planning and PI planning system, but I have just started using it for that. I am primarily using it for some projects.

I'm serving as an enterprise agile coach, so I work with a team to help them use Jira. I'm not really sure what the exact data subjects are, but I mostly look at what the team is doing and if they have updated, then they let me know. I'm not using Jira for my own instances, but for my team's. I'm helping the scrum masters and the product owners.

The solution is deployed on cloud.

In terms of scrum teams, I find that usually, the product backlog depends on charts and especially reports like Sprint Reports. I find the reports to be very useful. With regard to SAFe Agile, I was looking at having a proper program board. So far, I have tried using the portfolio feature. Something that I have been looking to understand or learn more about is how to integrate Scaled Agile and their work types into the Jira.

I'm still exploring the solution. I think the knowledge is a challenge because most people are used to Jira for teams, but not Scaled Agile. I think that is an issue with awareness. We are looking for some YouTube videos and help pages on finding that. Maybe there are features, but sometimes we aren't aware of them. We are still in the exploration stage.

I would love to see transparency in terms of how the program is displayed when you are working in multiple teams, especially how the dependencies could be tracked. The most important thing at the moment is that it is easy to do.

Something I would like to see improved is the traceability feature. When you have a user story, if you can see all the test cases, it would be an improvement if you could see any design documents or any change management. If you can see the traceability nicely, that is also something that we are looking for. Today we can link and do things like that, but sometimes the solution has a bit of a challenge with attaching test cases, so I think we have to use some plugin. Traceability with the test cases could be improved.

I have worked with this solution for five years.

The solution is stable.

I'm not able to comment on the scalability because I work with different types of teams. Some teams are really big, and they haven't said that they've faced any challenges. I haven't specifically asked, so I'm not very able to comment on that because I don't know for sure.

I'm working with a couple of teams made up of 20-30 users or 100-150 users, and maybe more for certain accounts.

I haven't had a lot of experience with technical support, but for the questions that I have raised, I received a pretty quick response, so I'm happy with that.

Setup wasn't that big of a challenge.

Implementation was done by Jira administrators, which was good.

The license is yearly. It is a large, long-running program.

Some of my teams have been using Version 1 and Rally. Because of that, I have been exposed to those tools for some extent.

My experience is much more with Jira. That's why I tend to go for Jira, but we haven't used many other solutions. Based on teams and what the people are saying, they find Jira to be more user-friendly. For Scaled Agile, I have also heard that they have found certain features in Rally more useful. But I don't know, I haven't used Rally to that extent.

I would rate this solution 7 out of 10.

We use it for project and sprint planning and day-to-day bugs. We also use it for documentation, engineering, and enhancements tickets and for creating the feeds, which are like new features.

We are most probably using its most recent version.

It has been very helpful for feature enhancements, release planning, and sprint planning. We have been using it for creating bugs, enhancements, and all the tasks for a sprint. It helps us in looking at the quality aspects of the product along with the volume, burndown rate, and a lot of other things.

As an engineer, I like that it provides you blocks to put in comments, code, etc. It helps in giving better information. 

It is very configurable, and we can do whatever we want. Jira dashboards are also good, and we use them extensively. We also use the tracking mechanism extensively. 

Another thing that I like a lot about Jira is that in the dashboard, you can plug the modules that you want. You can enable certain sections. For example, you can show trend history, open Jira tickets, etc. Some of the managers have created a dashboard for each engineer. So, it allows you to do all sorts of things.

There should be a way to look for specific comments. When we have thousands of comments on a Jira ticket, there is no way to look at the comments of a specific type. In the comments, if there is a way to put a tag, it would be helpful. For example, when there are a lot of lengthy discussions happening on a particular ticket, there could be a conclusion tag or something like that to indicate a conclusion. It would help in sorting the comments based on a certain category, such as conclusion. I should be able to tag a comment with something like ##dev_conclusion##, and someone looking at the comments should be able to expand all the comments and search based on this tag. Some of our tickets can go up to 100 or 200 comments, and it currently takes a lot of effort for someone to go through them. It would be good if there was a way to preview the comments.

We want Jira to be the single tool that people use. We lose a lot of information when working at the ticket level in Jira. We don't want to have discussions in Confluence and design docs somewhere else. Currently, we make some decisions outside, and we make some decisions in Jira, and there is no combined way. There should be a way to integrate documentation into this, and I should be able to directly update the documents. They can also incorporate a review mechanism for documentation. I should be able to assign a sub-comment to someone to say, "I'll respond to it," or I should be able to tag someone to say, "Can you please look at it?" We should be able to use a workflow. There should be some built-in intelligence where when there is a design document in a Jira ticket, the signoff should be done by certain people. Currently, the documentation is completely separate. If there is a way to get the documentation into this whole workflow, it would be useful.

I have been using this solution for seven or eight years.

Its stability is really good. There is no doubt about it. Sometimes, we have performance issues. That's mainly because a lot of people have standup meetings between 8 am to 9 am, and everybody is using Jira at that time. The number of connections is at a peak in the morning hours. If I was a Jira development engineer, I would be thinking about a mechanism to ease that. Other than that, it is pretty stable and reliable.

We didn't have any issues with scalability. We create hundreds of tickets every day. We have between 1,000 to 2,000 users across all departments. It is being used extensively, and its usage might increase.

I didn't have any contact with their technical support. We have a Jira maintenance team. We have a Slack channel, and if there is an issue, we send it there, and the team looks at it.

I'm not a part of the team that takes care of its deployment. We are a big organization, and I am an end-user of it.

I would advise having proper planning because you don't want to clutter your Jira. Without proper planning, you would go on creating a lot of labels and other things, which would be of no use. You need to do release planning and then accommodate things into Jira. 

A lot of companies have a separate release planning team, and then there is a separate Jira infrastructure team. All these teams should think and work together. Otherwise, everybody would be creating their own tags, which won't make sense. I might create a tag for daily bugs, and someone might create another tag for the same thing, which would result in cluttering.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. Jira is an amazing tool. There is no doubt about it. We have no thoughts of using any other tool.

We basically use the solution for trying to develop a product end-to-end. It's assisting us in having hardware and software come together.

The solution provides users with clarity in terms of the scope of work in a given timeframe.

Managing the backlog and being able to move work around and drag it around in order to replan it to certain sprints is the solution's most valuable aspect.

There are many areas where improvements can be focused.

There's a really steep learning curve for configuration. I'd like them to simplify all of their configurability yet not remove the configuration options.

I've been using the solution for two years.

We haven't had any noticeable stability issues. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. it's reliable. 

There are some issues with scaling. It's difficult to consistently configure multiple teams within a single product.

We have about 150 and they're robotics engineers, software engineers, firmware engineers, PMs, and product people. Anyone that would be on a product development team uses it.

We will maintain usage and intend to continue using it for this deployment. I cannot speak to if there are plans for expansion.

We've never reached out to technical support. I can't speak to how helpful they are. 

I'm also familiar with Azure DevOps, which is easier to set up. However, this company has always used Jira.

The initial setup has a moderate amount of difficulty. It's more complex than, for example, Azure DevOps. I'd rate the process at a three out of five.

The deployment took about three months. 

I'm not sure how many staff are needed for deployment or maintenance tasks. 

We handled the implementation process in-house with our own team. We didn't have any consultants or integrators to assist us in the process. 

It's hard to put a number to the ROI we're seeing. It's more qualitative around the structure it provides than any kind of cost savings. 

The cost is about $10 per user, per month. 

There is a perception with Jira that they try to nickel and dime you quite a bit.

For example, they'll often say "Oh, you want this little feature? We'll charge you $3 per month per user." Whoever's signed up to your account they will charge you, even though you might only need five people to sue it from a 150 person team. That's excessive.

Compare that to Azure DevOps where withAzure DevOps, you just pay $20, and then you deploy that extension to your instance or tenant. With Jira, they charge you a dollar or $2 per active account in your tendency even if not everyone in my tenancy needs to have that extra feature set.

Since we use the cloud, we are using whichever version is currently deployed there. It's updated automatically.

I would recommend Azure DevOps over Jira.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

I use it to manage my scrum projects and some of the Kanban projects.

In terms of version, they have been updating it every three weeks. It is a kind of a sprint that they do, just like Google Chrome. So, there is no going back and forth. We use a cloud-based application. So, it is always the updated one.

The type of cloud depends on the client. I've been through all kinds of situations: completely public, semi-public, and private. If it is a public cloud, then it is directly from Atlassian. They are providing it. So, there is no middleware.

It definitely streamlined the process of managing the projects. Earlier, we had a system scattered all over the place. We had information in Excel, Microsoft Project, and some of the other applications that we have, but now, we have everything in Jira itself. So, we create user stories and groom the product backlog. We have kept everything in Jira. It is our single source for project information that anyone can go to. So, we could see a lot of transparency with Jira.

Overall, it is very intuitive. It is so lightweight and easy to use. It is easy to manage our product backlog and user stories, and it produces great reports.

It is good for single projects, but if you have to manage the portfolio level of the projects, they have a few add-ons that we need to buy and integrate. They can improve this part to manage it in a better way.

It is not capturing the number of hours for which each person has worked on certain things. We use many add-ons to let resources enter the time in the user story itself. We use an add-on called Tempo, but it is kind of a lousy add-on. It is not straightforward. Rather than helping us, it creates a lot of confusion. So, instead of looking out for the additional add-on, I would prefer to have the timesheet entered as a part of Jira itself. They are anyways capturing every information they could for each user story, and then we are able to break down all the task lists. For each task, we're also assigning a resource. So, while we're doing it, why can't they allow the users to enter the time that can be created as a report? Right now, we need to acquire the add-on, and the add-on is not great. It is not helping. The add-on is also not free.

There could also be some additional reports.

I have been using Jira for seven to eight years.

Stability-wise, it is very good. It is very lightweight. I have used other enterprise-level products to manage the same kind of scrum and Kanban projects and other projects. Other products have many enterprise-level features, but they're very slow and kind of hard to manage.

It is a cloud-based one, so I don't see much difficulty in scaling it. If you want to go from 100 users to 200 users, you will be able to do it without much hassle.

I've been doing a lot of consulting. So, I've seen from five users to the entire organization with more than 500 people using it.

I did contact them through email and discussion forums. I had a limited opportunity to work with them. So, I don't know much about their support.

Jira is a kind of the last one I settled on. Before that, I have used products such as Rally and VersionOne. These two are enterprise-level scrum and Kanban tools that are similar to Jira. 

I have also used Asana and Trello. Trello is lightweight, but I wouldn't call it equivalent to Jira. Jira has many features that not many solutions have. 

Most of the time, we are working with the cloud-based one. So, we don't have to set up everything. It is all there. You just buy a monthly subscription package. The workflow configuration, however, would be a bit difficult while you're trying to set it up. In addition, if you have to go down to the permission level, it is a bit different.

Workflow-wise, you need to plan well because once you configure it, you cannot often change a workflow. For each project, the workflow might be different. You might have a development team, a QA team, a configuration team, and a deployment team. When you start a task, you just need to make sure you are covering everyone. In terms of the workflow, you should know what would happen if someone is not there, and what are you going to do. So, you need to make sure that you are covering those things. Other than that, you need to know how much you are going to take care of the hierarchical level permissions. These are two primary things, and then, later on, you can relabel quite a lot of things in terms of how you're using the backlog product and user stories.

I would rate Jira an eight out of 10.

It's pretty much for engineering development, Scaled Agile purposes for engineering development, for managing basically the epics and the stories and the capabilities and everything that we have to deliver in sprints. We're not using it as a ticketing tool or anything like that, for operations. We're using it purely for managing the development stuff in a Scaled Agile manner.

The solution is easy to use. It's pretty dynamic. It allows us to basically handle everything that we need in terms of a backlog, and we're trying to do it in an organized manner, so we know who works on what and how to size the story points so we can ensure that our epics burn down from sprint to sprint.

In terms of the general way that the tool functions, it seems like it's a pretty good fit-for-purpose for what we're trying to do. We've never thought about replacing it with another technology. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. 

The stability is pretty good.

There are a few things about it that I think need to be improved in terms of the ability to build reports. We would like to be able to use the data from Jira to help drive Gantt chart roadmap-type views of not only what we're building, but rather where we're going.

What we've elected to do in a couple of cases is just pull the data out of Jira and then pull it into Power BI so that we can try to get some of the more sophisticated information that we want out of it. We actually experimented with building portfolio views so we can see stuff in real-time. In some ways, it's okay. In some ways, it's just a little lethargic for our purposes.

We'd like to be able to manage things in real-time and by looking at stuff. We're doing PI planning, Program Increment planning, and that kind of stuff, and it's not always a good facilitator for that. We tend to pull it out and put it into other tools to manage that, and then we get it back into Jira as that's our system of record for where all the stories are kept. That's probably the biggest headache with it.

For some of the portfolio stuff that we did, the queries were so complicated that it was just taking forever. It was like watching paint dry for the results to come back. We would be in a meeting and then we'd hit a refresh and you're waiting for what seems like an eternity.

The solution could use API integration to take feeds from other tools so that we can read them better. We got one camp using an ITBM tool from ServiceNow. We have Jira running in this other area, and having an API between the two so we could actually collaborate between the two tools. However, API integrations with other tools would be helpful so we could either take data out of it or put data in it, thereby making it more of a data-driven platform that integrates nicer with other platforms. That, I think, would be something I would like to see.

I've been using the solution for four years or so. 

I haven't heard people really complain that it's unstable. We haven't had very many performance issues with it. I don't know if it was a network problem or what it might have been, however, I haven't really heard people talk about performance problems other than when we were trying to use it for portfolio views and that got kind of weird as queries were just complicated. Beyond that, the stability has been fine.

The issues that we have with scalability aren't necessarily with the tool as much as it's how we're using it. We're a big company so there are a lot of people using Jira, however, we don't really see how the projects correlate across different activities within the company. When we're trying to get two integrated roadmaps and trying to get to a point where we're collaborating, doing inter-sourcing of a solution, and we're all in Jira, there are times where we're in it and yet we can't collaborate and work together, and so we start replicating things across the two projects.

I don't know how much of that is the issue with using it how we are versus the product itself though. 

We have 8,000 to 10,000 people using the solution currently. That's across many departments. We are a company of around 150,000 people. There may be people using it that I am not even aware of. I only have visibility of what I'm doing and what I'm exposed to in terms of integration with offerings and that kind of stuff. I know when we were managing licenses, we used to have a DevCloud team. For their scope, it was in the 8,000 to 10,000 user range. 

The solution is being pretty extensively used. Likely usage will grow as the company grows and takes on new business. I don't know if it's going to organically grow exponentially as it's already being used where it needs to be used and currently we're only using it for development activities across the different offerings and platforms. It's not used as a day-to-day run-and-maintain ticketing system to manage customers or issues or anything like that. I'm sure there'll be some incremental growth as we take on new business and grow as an organization.

We use Jira. We use Confluence as an extension of that, and then we also use ServiceNow, the ITBM capabilities of ServiceNow as well.

We had a DevOps team that ran our cloud environment, and they basically spun up a project for us, and it was pretty straightforward. It's not like we were installing it in the cloud. People just said, "Here you go, and you can just start using it." After that, we just created a project for what we were doing, and then we were on our way. I wasn't really involved with any part that was problematic or anything.

In terms of maintenance, pretty much everybody is maintaining their own instance. We've got somebody that manages what's in the cloud for the company, however, it's pretty much hands-off in terms of day-to-day support issues. We had a few people that were supporting it when there were problems, however, it's just a handful from what I understand.

We're just customers and end-users.

We are likely using the latest version of the solution. I don't know what the latest version of Jira is, however, I'm pretty confident we are.

The advice I would give is it's not a solution for a novice person that doesn't know Scaled Agile. Users will get out of it what they put into it, and if you don't know what you're doing you could set yourself up for a nightmare when you're using the tool. My advice is that the better you structure yourself and understand Scaled Agile and how you want to set up the project the more successful you'll be at using it for your organization's purposes. If you're going in there as a novice that doesn't understand anything about Scaled Agile you could create a mess for yourself and then it won't give you the value you are seeking.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

We had a regulatory requirement through our legislature to collect motor or voter information for residents of California. So, if you basically wanted to sign up to vote, you could do so at a department of motor vehicles. The Jira instance was used for what we call the new motor voter, which is the online premise to register to vote when you conducted a DMV transaction, such as vehicle registration, driver's license, renewal, etc.

We had its latest version. It is online. In the cloud, we set up an account for the department, and then add users as needed. It is a government cloud.

It documented our business requirements.

It was easy to use. The consultants that we had on board were familiar with it. So, obviously, having a community that had used it before or was familiar with it was a positive thing.

If I'm comparing it to ALM Octane, the documentation is not as robust as ALM Octane's documentation. So, they can improve on the documentation side.

Another enhancement could be in the area of interfacing with other products or connectivity. It could have better integration with other tools.

I have been using it since 2017. It has been about five years.

Its stability is good. There are no issues with the performance.

Its scalability is fine. At the peak, we had about 15 users, and towards the end, we had five users.

Our usage was not extensive. We used it only for one project, which was the motor voter project. We don't have any plans to increase the usage. We have stopped paying the subscription fee from the last month because we migrated everything over to ALM Octane for our business requirements.

We didn't need to call them at all.

We were using IBM DOORS Next Generation for business requirements. It was on-premises, and we weren't able to make it available through a URL to the external consultant or workforce. That's why we basically went with Jira. IBM DOORS Next Generation wasn't flexible enough to accommodate all of our remote workforce.

It was straightforward and easy. You basically create an account for your department, and then you onboard your users. There is a subscription fee per user for each month through Confluence. 

It took us a week to get it up and running. It involved reading, studying it, figuring it out, and then doing it. It was pretty simple to set up data and add users. So, we onboarded it within a week.

The challenge for us while setting it up was that we had to put it on a credit card, which is not a good thing for the government. Typically, the government likes to pay through a purchase order or procurement process, but because it was a monthly subscription fee, it had to be on a credit card. We had to use an executive card in order for us to pay the bill every month, which was really kind of a pain because our accounting office always had to make sure and check the number of users. They would ask if I had 15 users this month. I am the administrator of the application, so, of course, I know how many users are there. I can see how many users are there and how many are using it and remove them if they don't. I think the state just needs to modify its procurement process because I think ours is pretty old school. I don't think that Atlassian needs to adapt to ours, but that was the only challenge we had in setting it up and configuring.

We had an in-house as well as a procured consultant, but he was through the state, not directly with Jira or Confluence.

The ballpark figure is about $100 a month.

It is easy to use and easy to onboard. It has got a good foundation of offerings for the business requirements if you're working on an agile project or user stories.

I would rate Jira a seven out of 10.