Jira Reviews

The configurable workflows and boards make it easy for us to execute and oversee our own unique process. The portfolio feature allows you to conceptualize your roadmap and experiment with various scenarios before committing to execute. Once you learn how to configure the system, it is extremely powerful.

JIRA has created visibility for our IT organization that did not previously exist.

There are some minor quirks, such as zero-point stories not appearing in the portfolio scope. We often poke stories at zero points because we have a very small group that needs outside help from time-to-time. We need to track these stories without impacting team velocity, so we poke them at zero.

These stories will not appear in the scope/schedule in the portfolio because the system interprets zero points as zero scope, even though the issues are open, assigned to the release and assigned to a Sprint. It would be nice to be able to see them in the schedule.

We have been using this product for three years.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

I would give technical support a rating of 5/10. I have only asked two questions in the support forums. One was answered very quickly and the other was never answered.

I previously used CA Agile (a.k.a. ‘Rally’). My company decided to switch to JIRA because we were already using it for bug tracking. Once the Agile/Portfolio features were released, we decided to use JIRA for all IT project planning and tracking.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. One thing I personally don’t like is how the system, by default, assumes that all projects will have a different workflow and screen configuration. This adds complexity in my opinion. It should assume that there is a default workflow and configuration across projects and then allow you to copy and customize the defaults.

It is very cheap if you forego the local instance and stick to the cloud.

We evaluated Microsoft TFS and Targetprocess. Neither had a Portfolio planning feature, which is why we decided to stick with JIRA.

Establish a basic project management methodology and workflow first, with clear roles and responsibilities, and then use this product to execute. It is only as effective as you are disciplined in your sprint planning and execution.

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.

We are using Jira for the internal project and issue management or tracking.

The most valuable feature of Jira is the integration with all the different Atlassian tools. They all integrate very easily.

Atlassian has multiple tools and it becomes difficult for a customer to process everything differently. Atlassian should combine them and form a single solution for DevOps by including the Jira Confluence, Bitbucket, Bamboo, and others. This would be much easier for customers by purchasing a package, rather than purchasing bits and pieces. With Azure DevOps and other companies, it becomes easier to go with one company having multiple areas that they can cater to, but in Atlassian, the problem is that you have to select different solutions to have a full package. For example, to have document management customers have to purchase Confluence and for Git repository management they have to purchase Bitbucket, et cetera. There is always another add-on that you need to attach to have a complete solution in Jira.

I have been using Jira for more than five years.

I have found Jira to be stable.

Jira is a scalable solution.

I did not have any issue with the use of technical support from Jira.

The initial setup was easy.

I would advise others that Jira is a good solution and I would recommend it.

I rate Jira a nine out of ten.

For the past two years I have been administrating Jira for our enterprise organization, in which there are about 300 end users. Apart from an administrator, I'm also a hands-on Jira user now.

Our main uses for Jira include asset management, project management, Scrum project tracking, Kanban projects tracking, and cost tracking, as well as productivity measurement.

I feel the strongest feature of Jira is its workflow engine. It empowers us to automate our workflows within our organization. It's the one characteristic of Jira which I think can help any organization, be it in any domain. Also, its Scrum tracking capabilities are a great help, and these come out-of-the-box with Jira.

In the way it is deployed, I think Jira is too dependent on the third-party applications that are available in its marketplace. If we could get some of the basic functionalities which are offered by these third-party applications, that would be ideal because each time we need a new functionality, we have to purchase a new plugin as an add-on.

Then, on top of that, we have to keep paying the maintenance charge for those third-party applications along with Jira's maintenance cost. The functionalities of some of these plugins are pretty basic, which a user would expect out-of-the-box, instead of having to pay repeatedly for it.

Also, on the security front, if Jira could have a default, inbuilt encryption mechanism for all the data it stores, it would help organizations which handle sensitive data like healthcare or financial sectors.

I've been using Jira since 2020.

It's pretty stable and I haven't had major issues with it.

The current deployment is not that scalable. But when we go for an alternative deployment model such as the data center model, it's scalable.

We were on the server model for Jira, which is being discontinued in 2024. The data center model is pretty scalable. I think that shouldn't have any issues, but it is limited. I think the data center is limited to only two instances of Jira running in parallel. That should be sufficient, and I think with data center being the only on-premises deployment model, I think it's all right to have that.

Overall, I'd rate the support an eight out of ten. I don't see any glaring shortcomings but I do see certain things which could be addressed better in their support rather than just providing documentation and saying, "Please follow this documentation."

If they could provide on-call support for some of the issues and give us a path to follow, that would be sufficient. They don't need to sit down and resolve the issue for us. But if they could point us in the right direction, I would be satisfied with that.

That said, we do get that kind of support, sometimes. There is personalized support and we have a dedicated Jira expert who helps us with our tickets. But if we are stuck, and we are not able to find a solution for our problem, then we should have a second level of support, which could be an on-call support. That would help us better.

Positive

It was straightforward to set up Jira, even though it was on-prem. But to set up the supporting modules for Jira, like the web component (e.g. Apache) or the database component, requires a little bit more effort. The Jira application does provide support on that front, but the support is pretty limited, because they do not vouch for the other modules that aren't built in to Jira.

Apache is a web server that interacts with Jira and I think they should better support the deployment of Jira with web servers at any enterprise or cloud-level. That should be provided as part of the deployment journey itself. As it is currently, their support that helps us integrate Jira with Apache comes off a little short.

We have our own compliance team who applies security patches and those patches are available from Jira directly. The maintenance is pretty easy and we pay a maintenance fee for Jira software. If there is any issue with downtime or service is completely stopped and we are not able to handle it, Atlassian provides us their support. Maintenance is not much of an issue with Jira.

The license model which we were on was a perpetual license model, which is the server edition of Jira, but that is being discontinued by Atlassian, which I can understand from their standpoint (in order to better compete). The server model means that we buy the license and we do not pay anything for the licensing part year-on-year. It means it's a lifetime license, but we do pay 50% of the license fee for the maintenance with the server. That is the recurring cost for us.

When we go into the data center model, which is the only on-premises model that we have, and the cloud offering from Jira, Jira Cloud, then you can see that both of them are subscription-based models. Data center is a yearly license, and as for the cloud, you can either pay monthly or yearly, depending on your requirements.

But this kind of licensing structure is actually a little heavy on the organization when it comes to the budget, I would say. The licensing which we had was a perpetual license with a year-on-year maintenance charge which we had to pay, which was half of the licensing fee.

I would rate Jira an eight out of ten.

We're using JIRA in combination with Xray as a test management tool.

The Xray module gives us test management capabilities, right. Where we can store tests and test executions and so on. That's basically where we moved our test out and we left Quality Center behind. 

With Jira, basically, you have a story. You try to estimate the story and then you have to try to have coverage for each story with test cases. We sometimes use it for our automation perspective. We're using the JIRA Xray API to write bad test results into the tool, through an API call rather than going through the UI. Our continuous testing pipeline in GitLab will automatically update the test results through the Xray API. That's it.

The thing that was helpful, in my opinion, was the reporting. I was able to do real-time reports myself without having to wait for data import. 

The product has lots of dashboards that could be created also in Confluence using Jira features. I really like that. I am able to make it transparent to everyone where we're standing in regards to, for example, test automation or test coverage. We could easily integrate Confluence with Jira, produce some handmade dashboards, or use the dashboarding inside Jira itself with the various reporting options there. 

It's totally sufficient to cover our use cases right now. I have no gap at the moment.

There is always a bit of a performance problem. It's a bit slow to load the whole data. When I load those dashboards onto Confluence, it always takes quite a bit of time to get all the data in Confluence. It's a lot of queries.

The only thing that was bothering me was the performance issues where it was very slow. 

We started using the solution three years ago. I've used the solution since 2016 personally. 

Stability has improved over time. It was crashing quite a bit and the minute it crashes, the organization kind of stands still. It's a huge dependence we have on it. However, it was 99% available in the end. Only some kind of maintenance announcements might affect it. Other than that, it was quite stable.

Likely every single user has Jira as we are fully delivering software with that. It's between three and 5,000 users. It's company-wide and there could be thousands of users. All the development work is documented there. It's used for our agile teams. You have teams that are using agile scrum.

It's very flexible and it supports both ways of working. It's very helpful also with child transformation. The whole organization moves into agile and everybody is relying on those dashboards and daily standups and it has heavy adoption. Everybody's using it.

The solution is easy to scale and that's a bit of a problem. It's highly customizable and you can also destroy Jira by over-customizing things. If you, for example, want to raise a bug and you have 50 mandatory fields, you kind of lose patience with it.

That's not really a Jira problem. That's the customization from inside the bank where there are lots of different requirements being put into the tool and it can destroy the user experience in the end if they over-design it. If it takes you ten minutes to raise a bug due to the mandatory fields. That's really annoying and that's a big problem.

Internally, I've used technical support. I have not had contact with Jira externally.

We have a separate team in the company who is dealing with all the support tickets.

There are three levels of support tickets and they probably have connections directly to Jira people or Xray people.

We're looking into transitioning into possible options in GitLab only. GitLab test management would be a topic. However, there we are not clear about the features yet.

We came from Quality Center, the fat client version, and we moved to JIRA Xray three years ago. Now we're making a decision as to whether we want to move away from JIRA Xray to something else. That's the open question right now.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup of the whole thing. I was just a consumer. We were just migrating our data over from QC into Jira Xray and that migration process was okay. 

We lost some data, however, in general, the assets were transferred over and we could continue there and leave the whole old world behind and start working on the new world. 

From a migration perspective, it was almost seamless. Afterward, you just had to learn a little bit. That said, it's quite straightforward. The JQL query language was something new at the beginning yet easy to pick up without big pieces of training. You can train yourself pretty well with the documentation that's available on the internet. I was able to teach myself almost everything without having to go into any training. 

I can't speak to the maintenance requirements involved. That's handled by another team entirely.

I don't have any details in relation to costs or licensing arrangements. 

We have an on-prem installation of Jira. I cannot tell you the version of it. I don't actually care, as long as I can store my stories. They're moving into a soft solution, potentially next year, with it.

I am very happy with the tool. I would recommend others to use Jira anytime, as it's super flexible and there's a lot of things that are not being leveraged at all. There's so much power in the product - we don't even know half of it, I would say, in the organization. 

I'd advise new users to not over-customize it. If you just get it out of the box, you already have a really good evolution and you tend to break it by over-customizing it.

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

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.

I have used Jira for defect management and issue management. This includes defect categorization, defect analysis, and defect summary, as well as exporting the defects. I have primarily used it from a user side perspective in both ITSM and agile delivery contexts.

Jira provides substantial analytical aspects, especially in defect categorization and routing. These features contribute to significant effort savings, roughly between ten to 15 person-days. Additionally, it aids in program management and overall effort management.

Jira provides substantial analytical aspects, especially in defect categorization and routing. These features contribute to significant effort savings, roughly between ten to fifteen person-days. Additionally, it aids in program management and overall effort management.

From an automation perspective, there are more aspects that could be needed, especially regarding natural language reporting in the generative AI context. I did an integration with UiPath on Jira, focusing on defect routing, however, the API documentation was not adequate.

I have used Jira for almost eight to ten years.

Jira is definitely recommended. I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

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.