What is our primary use case?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
We started using the solution three years ago. I've used the solution since 2016 personally.
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
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.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I don't have any details in relation to costs or licensing arrangements.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Hybrid Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.