Jira Reviews

It is helpful for bug tracking in software development. If developers are doing some work and testers notice some defects, they can flag it in JIRA. For example, I track my day-to-day work in JIRA so that others know what I'm working on. They can look at JIRA and don't need to contact me. From JIRA, they can find out that I am working on this project and spent two days on it, etc. It's used for so many things, like task management, bug tracking, and release management. 

JIRA is not for deployment. For deployment, you are going to use some tools like Jenkins. It's meant for all the features that are going into that deployment. 

Different teams within the company use JIRA. For example, everybody in the engineering section uses it, so altogether, that's around 200 people.

JIRA gives us a lot of visibility. For example, if you're planning to release a given feature, you can track the status of that feature. Is it working correctly, or does it have some bugs? So you have a high level of visibility on the work. 

The JIRA user interface looks great. It's an overall good experience. It's very intuitive in the sense that you understand how it's going to work. It's very self-explanatory, and it's beneficial overall. Each release has different steps and phases, and the whole thing can mostly be captured on JIRA. The workflows are really helpful. 

So at one point in time, they did a huge UI upgrade. At that time, I felt like they had changed something, so it was hard to figure out. Now that we are habituated, it's not an issue now. We had gotten used to the old interface, so things changed, we felt an initial discomfort. That's the only thing. Otherwise, there is nothing I dislike about JIRA.

I've used JIRA since the beginning of my career and nothing else.

I haven't had any issues with JIRA's stability so far.

The scalability of JIRA has always been good. The response time is always fast. I've never had any issues with scalability. I think no matter how much our usage increases, we'll continue to use JIRA.  But, I think our usage is at an optimal level. 

From our end, setup is basically book-keeping. I can't say much about the overall setup because there is an administrator for JIRA who adds users and sets everything up. I haven't been an administrator. I'm just consuming the JIRA. 

Initially, I think administrators are going to set some things like configuring the workflow should and then how you want to say things. But other than that, if you set it up once, it's going to work. You don't have to do much maintenance.

I rate JIRA nine out of 10. I would recommend it.

We use this solution because it comes with some of the products that we are using. It is a part of the package. Our usage is quite basic, and we have not finished exploring and deploying the whole solution.

It is a complete solution. It has more features as compared to other tools, especially the open-source one that we use. It is also easy to administer.

Based on the feedback from my admin, it is sometimes difficult to find some of the features. It is not a big deal, but its configuration interface can be improved to make it easy to find things.

I have been using this solution for three years.

It is very stable.

We have not deployed it on a very large scale. For now, we have ten users, and it is mostly used for our internal things, but from next week, we're opening it for the community. We'll have a broader experience of the product.

We haven't used their technical support so far.

I have not heard of any complaints about the installation. It takes almost half a day to install. It took some time to configure it for different tools that we use, but the installation was straightforward. There is enough documentation for its installation.

We did it on our own. I only have one admin guy for its deployment. 

We are a regional research and education institute. We're using the free license provided for educational institutes.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate Jira an eight out of ten. 

We primarily use the solution for product development efforts and documentation. We use Confluence as well for documentation.

Most of my work is keeping track of what's been going on and identifying what is blocking future work. What I like about this solution is you can create a consolidated customized dashboard out of your files to identify what's been going on and identify who has how much data assigned to them. You can begin to understand where roadblocks are and how to streamline efforts effectively. It's been helpful. 

The challenge which I frequently see from Jira is the label. When you search for a label sometimes, it suddenly disappears. If there's a mismatch due to all-caps or lower case, you won't be able to find it. It won't even come up as a recommendation or suggestion. That's something that can be really frustrating, as people create labels in their own specific ways and then no one else can find anything. While it should be a standard thing across the company to have labels created in certain way, the system should be able to pull up suggestions of labels that are close. 

The product could be more intuitive. 

If something isn't getting resolved, we generally aren't getting any alerts to warn us to this fact. We don't get any visibility on if something's been open for a few months even if it should have been closed after a few days. We need some sort of system that shows us items that are lagging.

I've been using the solution for about six months to a year or so. It hasn't been too long. Our company has been using it since they started doing development work.

In my experience, most of the time it's very stable. Sometimes we have a few bugs here and there in Jira. However, it doesn't affect our work in a very big way. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

I'm not sure about the whole company, however, on my team, we use it extensively. We have around 30 to 35 people using it on this team. Obviously, they are using it on other teams as well, however, I don't know the count of each team.

In terms of scalability, we are able to add new users as needed, and that has never been a problem for us.

I've never had to reach out to technical support. I don't know how responsive or knowledgeable they are.

I didn't previously use another solution, Jira is the first product I've used for this purpose.

I actually was not involved in the initial process of the setup, therefore, I can't comment on the process. I have no idea as to if it was difficult or straightforward.

I'm not aware of any regular maintenance that is needed on the product.

I don't deal with the financial aspect of the product. I cannot comment on if it is overly expensive or not as I don't handle billing or payments.

We're just a customer. We don't have a business relationship with Jira.

I'm not sure of which version of the solution we are using.

I'd recommend others go ahead and try the trial version of the product. If, after that, it seems to fit your needs, a company should go ahead and implement it fully.

Overall, I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

Virtually every day we have our daily scrum. Our team gathers around the board, which has all the columns showing where the tasks are standing: requested, planning, ready-coding, review, etc. Together, we view one task after the other and update the statuses. It's really a focal point of the team to know where the work stands, and what's the progress of the work since the last time we checked.

Within my company, there are roughly 25 employees using this solution. We have a scrum master, who's the most knowledgeable person on the tool. usually, they're the ones organizing the tasks, creating new tasks, and then creating the report at the end of the sprint or the quarter. They're the person who's creating the reports, using the more advanced features. That's the scrum master.

There are the developers, including me as a tech lead. There's the tester. There are managers — once in a while we have to present them with some reports and statistics, so they know how much work is being achieved, but they don't have in-depth knowledge of the tool. It's really an internal tool, so the customer is not involved.

We're not expanding much at the moment. We've been expanding in the past year, but now things have slowed down a little bit due to COVID-19.

With the help of Jira, tasks are less likely to remain stagnant for a long time. We always see them somewhere on the board. Nothing gets forgotten — it forces the team to make a decision on every little task that is planned.

The way we can quickly see in which state a task stands — with everything classified by columns. It's easy to know who is taking care of what. For instance, if I want to know how busy the person in charge of QA is, I can easily see what staff members are working for him via a little face icon or a tower. I can see who is responsible for what tasks. The board gives you a quick summary of the workload of everybody on the team.

When a task is completed, it disappears and I don't know how to find it. If I want to go back in history to review an old task that we completed, I cannot find it. Unless you remember a keyword or a task number, it can be very difficult to find old tasks.

Sometimes, in the display, there is an overload of information that makes it very difficult to read. If there's too much information, it defeats the purpose. You have to reach a balance, and I think at the moment, there can be too much information.

Sometimes the interface is too crowded. It seems like the default option when you open a task is that everything is open and all of the menus are deployed.

There needs to be easier integration with third-parties — personally, this is the biggest issue for me.

I have been using Jira extensively for one year.

Atlassian tools from the Atlassian suite are all linked together. We use GitLab. We wanted to integrate GitLab with Jira because whenever we create a branch in GitLab, for a repository, we create a branch to develop a feature or to fix a bug. Once the work is done, we have to merge that back into the master branch. When we do the merge, we name the merge and we enter a reference to a Jira issue.

It's easy after that. The person who's taking care of and viewing the merge requests can just click somewhere on a piece of information in the merge request, and it brings you to Jira, to the associated tasks. Usually, for each task, we end up creating a branch; it gets reviewed and merged back into the master. Once the review is done, it's ready to be tested.

That's our work procedure. Basically, the two tools — GitLab and Jira — need to be integrated with each other, but at the moment, there is a bug and It doesn't work. IT reported that problem to Jira or GitLab, but we have not heard back. 

There is a problem when it comes to integrating Jira with other tools, or other tools with Jira, there seems to be a weakness there.

Adding more users is not a problem. We haven't tried to add a third-party or to integrate with a third-party, so I can't comment on that. 

We don't tend to use Jira outside of its purpose at the moment. It's hard to answer this because we just add or remove users; we're not trying to upscale it to a higher scope or anything.

I go through IT for technical support. Except for that problem I mentioned, the integration between GitLab and Jira, we tend to find the answers pretty quickly.

Jira offers good technical support.

I didn't help with the initial set up myself. Since we have web access, you don't have to install anything. It was already installed when I joined the company.

Our IT team handles all maintenance-related issues. They don't necessarily know all the menus of Jira, all its capabilities, but they know how to deploy it.

Have a training session before you begin using it. That tool is good for teamwork, but it doesn't replace a face-to-face discussion. Among yourselves and your teams, establish some conventions as to how you will describe your tasks — what criteria will be acceptable? Include a section for requirements, have a section dedicated to discovering your setup because the tool has its limits. It helps you organize your work, but it doesn't replace the self-discipline of the developers to stick to some team conventions — that's also really helpful to get the full benefits of that tool.

One of the main advantages is that everything becomes visible when you use this tool. When your work is done in full daylight, it's difficult at the beginning because you feel like everybody's looking at what you do — it's all visible. They can access the information through JIRA, but at the same time, you're not going to get stuck too long in your corner. The drawback is that you feel more like you are being spied on. It feels like you're working in an aquarium. Everything you do is visible. But at the same time, you're not going to get stuck on your own. Without this tool, it's easy to get stuck on your own.

There's room for improvement. Sometimes the window is too crowded and the integration capabilities need to be improved. Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Jira a rating of eight.

We use it for capacity planning. We need to gauge and assess whatever is coming to our pipeline and then everything comes to the pipeline, appears as a pic, and then based on that, we create the story points and we take it from there. With that, I am able to create a kind of gauge, estimate, and forecast our capacity planning for the next two weeks. We use it to create peer reports.

A more organized hierarchy is important. Reporting and JQL create issues for me. They do not completely cover the reporting part that I need to report in terms of my capacity to plan. In the same token, there is no record at this very moment to provide me with one export with epics story points, tasks, or issues and their sub-tasks at the same time. So I have to do multiple exports to just create the sub-tasks and sub-tasks are not being reported. If I wanted to export this and recreate this in another platform like Azure DevOps, I would have a problem right now.

I have been using Jira for four months. 

The support person I contacted was not skilled enough to provide me the answer so it's up in the air.I'm just doing multiple exports. 

Jira as it is, is a very nice tool. For capacity planning and resourcing, I think it is not built for this and we are trying to make use of it in that area.

I would rate Jira a seven out of ten.

We use this solution for Agile project management and BAU work delivery in sprints / DevOps.

This solution has helped with team collaboration and task delivery.

The most valuable feature is the Burndown Chart to see work that is outstanding.

The reporting needs to be improved.

We are working in the safe channel process in the IT part of the bank. It is a good experience overall, but the look and feel for the user is not good.

It benefits us because we have globally located teams. Our team members work in different geographies, so the product is a better way to manage progress and see the status of different tasks. Otherwise, it is not possible to work in different geographies.

I can drag and drop to the different statuses. I can go into the task and change it, then I can directly drag and drop it from one status to another.

There is a difficulty viewing all the attachments because they are shown in one place. I would like attachments to be shown at the comment level. Right now, if I attach something, it will go into a single attachment pool for the task, not at the comment level. I.e., If I want to attach the new version of a document, it creates confusion because I have to remove the existing attachment.

When writing comments, there are not many options for formatting. We were expecting formatting something at the level of Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Document.

When creating a task, there is no place to add our estimation.

Sometimes, it is slow and hangs. We faced some stability issues where JIRA was down for a day. Also, we have lost some of our comments made in the JIRA because of downtime.

I don't have any issues with scalability.

We haven't used it.

We did not have a previous solution.

I would tell a colleague looking for this type of solution to look at Microsoft TFS and VSTS. 

Most important criteria when selecting vendor:

• A well-known vendor for the software.
• A good reputation.
• Compare what other companies are using.
• The look and feel of the user interface.

JIRA features are agile planning and release notes. We heavily use the Service Desk to support our product customers, and we also provide support for our services customers via JIRA tickets with a time tracking plug-in so invoicing, project status, are available to everyone us and our clients, keeping us on the same page.

We are now using this system for all time tracking of internal non-billable projects, support contracts, development tasks and billable work. We can see our resources utilization and track how much time was spent on each client, which is good for invoicing, on Go2Group made products. This helps with our ROI on a product by product basis, and we even track our time off in this system.

It has enabled us to be on the same page with our client’s they can see the tasks and burn downs and exactly where their money is being spent. When we combine this with the Confluence Wiki, we now have a very robust Q&A and documentation page. We use it for sign-offs and online documentation. There is a history of what folks have done, and the information is radiated out in near real time. It is all there.

We can serve multiple clients, our own internal products, projects, and operations from one system cutting the resources needed to run these systems. Compliance is much easier to achieve, documentation, you need to sort out what needs to be displayed and reported in the formats you wish.

All in all, these tools, with little effort or cost, have allowed us to provide, what larger consulting and product firms struggle to provide due to legacy products/system/acquisitions, and compliance.

A more enhanced Service Desk module, with support for more types of alarms and the like.

The product is very easy to download, and install. Once downloaded, you just click next, OK, then viola! You are a newly minted JIRA Administrator, it is too easy. Teams, company data, and processes end up growing from grass roots movement before management realize it.

While Atlassian and TFS seem to be more of the toolsets that companies are adopting, and they are great core ALM stacks to build upon, you are still going to need tools from other vendors for most environments. For instance, you have more strenuous support desk needs, there is ServiceNow. If you make cars, boats, aeroplanes, trains, etc., you will most likely need IBM Rational DOORS. High end testing is still the domain of HP ALM/QC. Aerospace higher-end agile planning, you could look at JIRA Agile or VersionOne, or Rally. Embedded C, etc.

To summarize, MS TFS and/or Atlassian (maker of JIRA) are good core ALM stacks to run your shop on. The remaining issues are generally around how to integrate other systems to TFS or Atlassian, and also, how to migrate to TFS/Atlassian.

We are a heavy user of the Atlassian tools and are a reseller. We do VAR work for other competing ALM solutions as well, notably Microsoft, IBM, HP, Perforce, etc. This is just the toolset we have grown into.

Then they look into the systems and realize what risks there are and are usually slow on the uptake to designate these systems as Class A or B critical systems. They may be surprised at how many individual systems have sprouted across their organizations. You can find yourself in an organization with multiple JIRA instances due to the grass roots nature of adoption, with dozens of workflows and hundreds of custom fields in each instance.

It can be a lot of work to pull these together under compliance and DevOps. Would be much easier to accept these tools as mission critical, or at least realize their importance, and grow them correctly.