Jira Reviews

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.

Easy to configure, very fast to configure, extremely powerful workflows and schemes, integrates with other Atlassian tools as well as 3rd party tools.

Collaboration and software development lifecycle were the 2 keys that JIRA served great for. We have multiple organizations in the company already using JIRA for tracking projects.

Better JIRA Agile integration and more functionality related to JIRA Agile plugin

JIRA: 10 years

We didn't encounter any deployment issues

We didn't encounter any stability issues

We didn't encounter any scalability issues

9/10

8/10

Remedy, Bugzilla, Clearcase, TestTrack and Rally have all been replaced with JIRA with my leadership

Straightforward

In-House

60%

10 years ago 2K initially and 1K for additional plugins. recently 10K for the Atlassian Suite and additional plugins.

HP QTP, Serena Business Manager, Rally

It rocks simply.

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.

It's scalable.

It's easy to deploy.

The cost of the solution seems to be reasonable. 

Once the solution is deployed, it's not easy to configure. If you have a lot of capability, it's very dynamic from the back end. Therefore, when setting up the workflows, it can be a little bit complex. We did a lot of functions on managing the development and that's why maybe it's a little bit complex. Basically, in order to design a workflow in Jira, it's not a straightforward task.

From a feature perspective, not much is missing. However, they need to put some investment into the user experience. It needs to be easier to use, more friendly, especially on the configuration part. It's a hassle. You need to deal with a high learning curve in order to understand how it's configured and how it can work.

We've used the solution for more than eight years now.

The solution is scalable. 

We have more than 50 people using Jira at this time. 

We do plan to increase usage. We are growing. Since we are growing, we are increasing Jira as each member on the technology team needs an account for development, business analysis, or testing.

While the initial setup is pretty simple and straightforward, handling the configurations and the workflows can be complex. 

I didn't attend this in the development phase. In testing, I did the same effort and it took me a month to set up while I was deploying a test stream. I worked on the testing workflow as well, the defect workflow. That said, I don't know how long it takes for them to configure Jira.

We handled the setup in-house.

The licensing is per unit. My understanding is that it is pretty affordable. However, I don't directly deal with licensing.

We are just a customer and an end-user.

From a testing point of view, I would rate it at a six out of ten. I use it as a defect management tool, and it, for me, it's not easy to use.

Some of the use cases are for tracking issues and bugs.

I am responsible for an administering job for Atlassian Jira at my company. I'm working for some of the major IT companies in Kazakhstan.

The solution is deployed on-premises.

The solution is valuable because it's pretty flexible. It allows you to do a lot of stuff, and the functionality is pretty rich. It integrates well with other products, like GitLab, that we are currently intensely using at the company.

The solution could be more user-friendly.

I have been working with Jira within the past year.

The solution is pretty stable.

The solution is scalable. There are a few dozen users using this solution. We might increase the usage in the future.

I previously worked with ClickUp and would suggest using it. It's a competitor to Atlassian Jira.

When it comes to functionality and usability, I think ClickUp is better, but compared to Jira, ClickUp's drawback is their integrations with other products. The product is not old enough to be mature.

Jira is more flexible and more integrative with other products, and ClickUp is more user-friendly. The functionality is pretty rich.

I would rate this solution 9 out of 10. 

The only thing that I'd like to advise is to just monitor the market and keep an eye on comparison between the Jira and ClickUp.

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

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

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

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

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

We haven't had any issues with stability. 

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

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

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

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

I rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

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

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

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

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

The sprint tracking is really helpful and very convenient.

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

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

Requirement traceability is easier to do with this product.

It integrates well with other tools.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.