JIRA Software

Puntos a favor

I have been working in information technology field for more than twelve years. For a long period, I was a big fan of Bugzilla. However in my previous company, when we have migrated to Atlassian Jira, it was a very difference experience.

When the entire organization moved more in to agile, the product also changed priorities around understanding customers' problems. The migration was tough as we were not in a position to ignore the requirements from our users. The import functionality helped us a lot and thanks to our engineering team to put huge effort in doing research on Jira.

I love the way information is organized across, projects, boards with decent agile reporting capabilities.

Being in product management, I have enjoyed the flow of user stories, backlog review, estimation, roadmap and Atlassian Jira's functionality to customize workflow.

The transparency which Jira brings to the product management team is a big plus. What we are working on, what is going to come next and when, what is in the pipeline are a big relief to any customer facing product development organization.

Another beauty is the categorization of user stories and epics, which helps the product owners to start filtration of issues at the entry level itself.

The knowledge handover from product team to other teams collaborating for product success ( Eg:- CS, Marketing) became seamless with Jira.

The dashboards are great for monitoring purpose.

Finding Jira, an effective and comprehensive solution to ensure that every action in a user story is accounted and traceable across the product life cycle without loosing the goal of delivering iterative and incremental value to customers, as fast as possible.

Puntos en contra

I like learning new things. Jira require good learning and is not a very light tool. The user interface act a bit confusing sometime. Setup, project/workflow creation, user management etc. are tough tasks and require brains from Dev ops with good knowledge of agile practices.

Puntos a favor

Couple of features below that I really admired the most-Mobile version of Jira board, colorful status tracking with accurate percentage, effective customized workflow modal, quick peek view of tasks in dashboard, search option for any filter, quick catch for getting user by using '@', easy query handling and filters, easier mode of cloning tasks, linking items and referencing, multiple built in report types like bar chart, pie charts, etc., Kanban & Agile flexi boards, vast of plugin support like git-hub, git bucket, zendesk, etc., From the admin point - easy configuration of development tools dotnet, configuring mailing options, deep level view of audit logs, watch list for issues.Couple of features below that I really admired the most-Mobile version of Jira board, colorful status tracking with accurate percentage, effective customized workflow modal, quick peek view of tasks in dashboard, search option for any filter, quick catch for getting user by using '@', easy query handling and filters, easier mode of cloning tasks, linking items and referencing, multiple built in report types like bar chart, pie charts, etc., Kanban & Agile flexi boards, vast of plugin support like git-hub, git bucket, zendesk, etc., From the admin point - easy configuration of development tools dotnet, configuring mailing options, deep level view of audit logs, watch list for issues.

Puntos en contra

Sometimes I feel, the JIRA GUI is clumsy to have many things in dashboard, other than that I do not see any specific negative factors to hate JIRA, and it depends on how we use the features for projects.

Puntos a favor

The organisation of tests and the variety of the issue types for testing (Features ,Test cases, Test sets, Test executions, Test plan, bug...)
The ability to track the executions of tests and bugs
Great adaptability with Gherkin and Cucumber
It goes perfectly with ISTQB standards for testing
Perfect for both Scrum and Kanban users
The great boards and views provided by Jira (followup dashboards, sprint board, ..)
The ability to add Xray or Zephir or whatever test plugin that suits you

Puntos en contra

Jira users must receive a training before starting to use the software since it can be a little complex to use the software for the first time
For testers you cannot execute the same test case more than once in the same test execution
It gets more and more difficult when end to end testing multiple applications at the same time

Puntos a favor

*Functionality

The best feature of Jira is a huge number of integrations, massive amount of possibilities, statistics and tricks that you can you inside the platform.
There is an integrated tracking, kanbans, lists, sorting direct contact with chat (stride) and feature to work with git right from every task or issue.

* New UI

Recently Jira got an update, a new chat (Stride, instead of Hipchat) and a new UI for the tasks. I can see that company goes in the right direction to adopt all of it's powers.

*Customization

Jira, being confusing at first hides a lot of it's features inside most of which you can change and adjust to your business needs. It is a great solution for a big corporation with dozens of departments, hundreds of employees and thousands of issues and tasks daily. However, in all other cases Jira can be a nightmare at this point.

Puntos en contra

*Slow

Out off all CRM platforms and tools to handle tasks and issues Jira is the slowest by far. Is it initial problem or has it appeared after adopting so many technologies under one roof - I can't be sure. But one thing is clear - Jira is awfully slow.

*To many features

Yes, it is a disadvantage when it comes to Jira. When a new customer comes to Jira I believe, he is most definitely confused. Especially, if he/she tried ANYTHING else before. Of course, I see that company does a lot to make it easier and more comfortable, but as it is now, Jira is a terrible solution for fast adoption, scary for a small or middle sized team and most definitely not a great choice for personal use.

Jira is Huge. If you are huge - great features, customizing, different apps and plugins will help you solve a lot with Jira. If you are just starting or don't have that many tasks and issues and people in your company - you should probable check other options.

Puntos a favor

This tool lets you create projects, and subdivide them into smaller projects. This allows for separation of development tasks from product and project management. It has messaging/comments in each ticket that is created, where people can be tagged and notified when their input is required. This makes for collaborative solutions. Informational data objects such as documents, images, zip files, videos can be attached to each ticket to add to the task description. JIRA also has Bitbucket integration, so any software development such as code branches or pull requests are automatically attached to the corresponding ticket if the ticket number is mentioned in the commit message. Pull requests are also automatically linked to the ticket so it is very easy to find corresponding code for a task/ticket.

Puntos en contra

JIRA does it's job. The cloud version of the tool can be slow sometimes. The tool does not put dates on every change or addition to a ticket. For example, if you keep making changes to an issue description over time, it does not tag each change with a timestamp or which user made the change . This makes it difficult to track when an addition to the issue description was made, or who made it. Also, in some cases of very large features, the description box can get very convoluted and hard to read. Same goes for message/comment sections where too many people are commenting and asking questions, it gets very difficult to sift through all the noise.