Jira Reviews

I work for an insurance company that has developers who need to be tracked. We're working on converting the spreadsheet into a Kanban flow environment. I'm the program manager/master. 

The solution is very powerful, has many good features, in particular a good reporting capability. I like many of the features, and I have the benefit of having a very skilled Jira administrator helping me out because I'm a PM. 

The solution is not as intuitive as it should be and you have to play around with the environment quite a bit before you get a handle on how things work. One of the issues is that it's usual for a ticket to have a primary developer on it and other people supporting, but that's not possible in Jira. They have a very thick policy and a ticket can only have one assigning, although it may be possible to do it as a number coding, I'm not sure. I'd like to see the solution include a feature whereby you can link stories visually, to explicitly show the connection between a user story and a task. 

I've been using Jira for several years. 

Scalability of the solution seems fine.

Technical support could be improved. When you submit a ticket, it can take two or three rounds before you get what you're looking for. I send the ticket and receive an irrelevant response, which doesn't help. You can go backwards and forwards with them and never get there which is very frustrating. I'm not sure if the user community is that helpful. I've submitted two questions but haven't yet received a response. 

The initial setup was quite complex. 

The solution is fairly good at doing a lot of things, and is potentially very good, but it takes some getting up to speed on. I've used a product called Kanban Flow, and that's very intuitive, very easy to use. Jira seems to be more complicated and requires having specialists on board so that if you have a problem, you can get help immediately without having to go through the ordeal of submitting a ticket and waiting two or three days to get a response, which may not be helpful at all. 

I rate this solution a five out of 10. 

We are basically using it to support the UAT tasks. We are also using it for IT support task handling and working together as a team in our company. 

At my workplace, we are using its most updated version.

I'm working in the IT department, and the ticketing system is the most important service for us. We are also using some automation add-ons. It a very good product for handling tickets and tasks and managing processes. It is also very useful and easy to use.

It would be very practical if you can more freely reach the information that is already inside the system. Currently, we have to buy add-ons for it. There is a lot of information in the Jira system that you can handle only through add-ons. You cannot reach such information on your own. If you want to use this information, which is already in the system, you have to buy some add-on to use. For example, information about how much time an assignee is spending on a ticket is there in the system, but you cannot access it without an add-on. JQL is a very good way to reach the data inside Jira. If we can reach more objects, even through JQL, it would be great.

There are a few small functions that we are missing in it. For example, you cannot rate a ticket. If you would like to use a rating for a ticket, you cannot give stars or something like that.

I have been using this solution for more than five years.

We rarely come across any issues. Sometimes, it slows down a little bit, and then usually, we just have to rebuild the index. That's all. It needs lots of resources and CPU memory. If the resources are okay, we don't feel any problem with it.

It is probably easier to scale on the cloud. The on-premise is not so scalable, but if you can define the resources, it works well.

In terms of the number of users, we have around 750 users.

We do not directly contact Atlassian. We have a support company that helps us with any situation.

It is simple to initiate or install the product. It is easy and simple, but if you make some designs inside and build some projects with some automatization, it can be more complex.

We first tried to build the system inside the Docker environment, but it was not a success. So, we switched to the normal installation mode. Installing the product and making it work took just a few days. It included building servers and a database.

We do it on our own, but we have some strong support. We have outside support in case of any problem with it.

In terms of maintenance, you have to do the updates. You have to upgrade the system and handle the add-ons versions. If you build the inside environment in the Jira, you always have to fast forward to the project.

We have two teams to handle the maintenance. For standard maintenance, where you are upgrading the versions, we have an IT professional team for it. For the inside environment of the Jira projects and automation functions, we have a service management team.

If you are using just Jira, it is cheap, but if you start to use it and you feel you need some more services or more functions, then you have to buy add-ons, which can make it expensive.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate Jira an eight out of 10. It is definitely not perfect, but it is almost perfect.

When you are engaged in an Agile development environment, most of the handling and tracking of the stories are handled in Jira. It can also be used for handling and tracking requests in a ticketing system.

I am a consultant from the quality and design part of the work that we do, and I help people introduce tools into their system. Currently, I am only working with one customer that is using Jira. In the past, I have had five or six who were actively using it.

This solution covers almost all of the types of uses that we have, from an Agile perspective. All of our requirements are supported by it.

This product provides you a good view of the status of your projects.

When I was managing projects that started from epics and moved to multiple tasks, I found that the integration of epics and user stories could have been a little easier. I've seen people struggling to use that aspect of Jira. I think that there is some ease of use that could be brought in to improve certain things.

I have been working with Jira on and off for the past six to seven years.

This is a stable product.

I have not used Jira for really huge projects. I have had groups of between 30 and 40 people and for that size, there were no issues with scalability.

We have asked a couple of questions from technical support and I don't recall having any issues with that. Everything was as expected.

I have not completed an installation myself, but my understanding is that it is quite straightforward. I am familiar with cloud-based deployment but I believe that it can be deployed in a private environment, as well.

One of my customers told me that they were receiving better pricing for a similar tool from Microsoft. Specifically, the total cost of ownership was cheaper with Microsoft.

This is definitely a tool that I would recommend to people, depending on their needs.

In summary, it is a good product and the only room for improvement that I can see is that it needs better integration.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are using the solution for project and defect management, and task tracking.

There could be some improvements in the project management and portfolio level features. I think they could bring more flavours of Agile to Jira, that would help.

I have been using the solution for approximately eight years.

We have found it to be very stable.

The solution is very scalable and flexible. It's one of the best products that we have been using. We currently have 80 users using the solution.

The configurations for the installation are very well documented on Jira sites. You can just go there and it has everything you need. The installation did not take much time, it was straight forward. 

We had one internal administrator do the implementation, the configurations are straightforward.

I would recommend this product to others. 

I rate Jire a nine out of ten.

We have a service desk for customers. We have the whole flow from customer feedback throughout, committing with a relation in the code in Bitbucket.

We have the tracking and tracing, including all tracking of the issues all the way from the customer throughout the JIRA prioritization in backlogs and sprint planning and connecting those through the actual code commit in BItBucket. It's all done through JIRA to the service desk issue and back again to the customer. The entire ecosystem is quite connected.

The best features depend a bit on the project going on. We have some project managers for the Classic Project setup and all the features that come along with the Classic Projects. 

From my point of view, the NextGen Project in the cloud solution is really easy to start up with and it's quite flexible in how you put up columns and move issues and tickets throughout the status and columns that you put up. 

It's really flexible. From the Atlassian point of view, I can see they are moving towards more Next-Gen Project handling. The features from the Classical Projects are being continuously rolled out towards Next-Gen Projects. Of course, there's still lots of ground to cover.

It's really smart how they connected third-party vendors into their own marketplace. You can create and add apps. Anybody can do it. There's some approval function or a step via the Atlassian team to be able to actually endorse your apps throughout their marketplace. However, it's very smart to have collaboration between the company and third parties. Whatever functionality is lacking, there's most likely an app for it. 

I've seen some updates and subscriptions where you can get newsfeeds if you subscribe. They are focused on making the solution as responsive as possible. For instance, they have enabled some features called Project Archiving. If you're done with some project work, you could choose to archive everything related to it. Therefore, it won't be upfront taking resources from your solution, however, you'd still have access to it in the future.

Pretty much 70% - 80% of the Next-Gen Projects features are still to be developed. It's my understanding that the reason they started doing the Next-Gen and changing up the whole dual-end functionality is probably because of how heavy and big everything was getting. It had gotten pretty complex within the Classical Projects. 

It's quite time-consuming picking up the Classical Projects. They've gotten quite heavy and it's hard to use them in a productive way. There are just so many settings and possibilities. It's very complex and time-consuming, however, on the other hand, it's got everything you need in terms of functionality.

We've been using the solution for a year and a half now. It hasn't been too long so far.

The solution is quite stable. We haven't faced any stability issues.

The solution is quite scalable. They also allow you to archive old projects so that they don't take up space on your product, and that can help you scale. You might need a specific kind of subscription in order to archive, however.

I don't really have much experience with the technical support team at JIRA. I've been reading the community tickets mostly. Most of what I've been curious about, I've been able to find the answer myself via the community or the WIKI. 

You can communicate with other users, which is really smart. It allows you to discuss best practices effectively. At the same time, I would guess that some of the users there would be actual Atlassian employees that are commenting and guiding. Overall, the community space is quite helpful. Therefore, I haven't really had any issues or tickets or any need to connect with a technical team in Atlassian.

One of my colleagues actually had an issue when a new user was invited before he had opened his 365 email. He had not logged in to the email account. Therefore, when the invitation was sent from Atlassian or from JIRA, I can't remember exactly which module, but then there was feedback that this was not an active email account, which made Atlassian revoke the whole user. Then, when he actually logged into 365, he wasn't able to connect to JIRA due to the fact that the email had been marked as expired or not an active email. He sent the request to Atlassian and they opened up a ticket and everything was fine within a couple of hours. It was really quick. That I think is probably the only dialogue we've had with the technical support in Atlassian and it was pretty positive. I'd say overall we're quite satisfied with their level of support.

The initial setup's level of complexity varies. If you use the Next-Gen Project, you can get it up and running in, I would say, five minutes. That part's quite easy.

You can also just subscribe and you can get the free version. I really like that kind of subscription that you can start with quite a few features available. You can get it started for up to five to 10 users without any cost. Then, when you start getting the ball rolling or the projects rolling, you have to actually insert your credit cards to both get features unlocked, and also to add more people to the projects and to the solution. 

If you want to, you can add on quite a lot of features and connect with the apps from the Atlassian marketplace. That's also a really nice possibility. You can just click, add apps and it takes about 30 seconds. Then you have added functionality injected to your solution.

I would guess we are using the latest version of the solution as we're using the cloud solution. I'm guessing that it's continuously updated automatically.

I'd advise others to consider the solution. However, It depends on what they're trying to achieve. There are a lot of easier project management tools like Monday.com, for instance. It's a lot easier to get up and running.

If your vision is to become a larger software development company, monday.com might be something that is usable for project managers. However, it wouldn't be a good tool, at least how I've seen it, to connect everything together as we're able to do in the JIRA cloud with all the connecting apps. I would guess we would be able to integrate Monday to JIRA or something like that.

It's really easy to get JIRA connected to Confluence and Bitbucket and to have the service desk as well. That way, everything is in one place. Again, it depends, on based on where you're heading. If the company is looking for easy project management, there's a lot of tools that would be just as good as the JIRA. If you're looking to distributing the teams and connecting a whole ecosystem, then definitely JIRA is a good pick.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

Our primary use case for this solution is development ticket status tracking. We use it for managing different kinds of projects. This is an online tool, where teams from anywhere in the world can use it.

This product has improved our ROI. Without this tool, our projects cannot be completed fully. Dependency cases among the teams cannot be resolved.

The most valuable feature for us is the capability of assigning a task to a developer and resolving it. This tool can be used anywhere and on any device.

The user interface and views on different devices should be improved. The customization feature can also be improved.

In terms of stability, there are very few failures.

Our impression of the scalability for this solution is that it's good.

We did not use a different solution prior to this one.

The initial setup for this solution is straightforward.

We used a vendor team for implementation.

Good. The return of investment is something that we have found to be very valuable.

We feel that the product is a good value for the cost. 

We did not evaluate other products before choosing this solution.

It is an excellent tool for project management.

Team level agile project management.

Agile teams work with this tool. However, scaled agile support of this tool is limited.

• Dashboard possibility
• JQL query
• Workflow management.

Tree view of linked issues.

Having a Technical Account Manager gives us someone who I can email about any of my questions or concerns about products, roadmaps, configuration and scalability options, etc. If I have an idea for something I want to do he might say "that’s a terrible idea", or "you might want to try it this way instead", because he has a depth of internal knowledge and context which most end users are unable to attain. This internal advocacy, contacts, and ease of communication are each tremendously helpful.

Collaboration on open action items and active ongoing projects. I spoke with my TAM about this issue and he completely agrees. There is no one system on which TAMs and their customers can collaborate on action items, ongoing projects, meeting notes, etc.

Began using Technical Account Management (TAM) in Nov 2014.

Yes. We were having an issue where we have to take one of their products offline to do a backup every night. I was certain there was a better way that it could be done, but on Atlassian Answers, other users were giving vague, hand-wavy responses. Our TAM was able to give us a couple different options, each of which will be able to save a department of 300 roughly 4 hours a night.

No.

We are just in the process of dealing with future scalability issues and having the TAM in place now puts us in a good place to address those concerns.

Very high.

Well above average. Their response time is good, and we are able to escalate what we need to escalate.

Yes, we have used several throughout the growth of our part of our organization. Most recently we moved off of Rational Team Concert from IBM. There is not enough time to tell you why I hate that product! It is one of the worst products I have ever used for ALM. It is not set up to encourage self-directed teams, despite its name. It says it can do whatever it wants, but it is not designed as a product to make people happy, just to make IBM's consulting organizations more money. Atlassian products are the exact opposite. A new team can be brought on and be working efficiently within minutes – with Team Concert could be hours or even days, if ever, before a team can be working well together.

The initial setup was very straightforward. The only complexities had to do with our own infrastructure. With Atlassian, either you can run the programs open to the world or behind the firewall. The default state for our systems is locked down, but Atlassian works best when their tools are able to connect to one another. This isn't a problem with the products, just an issue with our own infrastructure. I run local development versions of the tools on my laptop with no issues.

Completely in-house.

We did not look at any other complete suites of tools. We evaluated Rally Enterprise and VersionOne for project/defect tracking. Both of those options had decent levels of integration with our CI tools. Ultimately the value that the Atlassian suite gave us as a total package of discrete, but connected, components was above and beyond the piecemeal approach we would have had to take otherwise.

As an Enterprise customer, evaluate what you really need. If it's tech support above/beyond what comes with the subscription, go with the Enterprise tech support instead.

TAM is when you really need/want an advocate within Atlassian. For instance, our program and product management groups set up an on-site meeting with our TAM to discuss JIRA Portfolio, and they were able to ask questions of the Portfolio product manager as well as the TAM after a solid demo. Without a TAM in place, this type of thing would have been impossible short of sending everyone to the Atlassian Summit (User Conference) every year. That’s invaluable.

Another recent example is that we had a problem with a plug-in owned by Atlassian, but because we have our TAM in place he was able to get us in touch with the plugin developer directly and we've skipped weeks of struggle.

It's all about advocacy, insight into product roadmaps, best practices, etc.