Jira Reviews

I'm overseeing the developments done in Jira. 

The thing that I do like about Jira is that it is relatively easy to understand. In some respects, you don't have to read a lot of ticket information, and you can start pulling down. Everybody is using it, and it works for a lot of people who are just doing enterprise development, cloud-based development, and things like that. It is built for the general audience. 

It is a good defect tracking tool. It has a lot of capabilities and functionalities. There are a lot of graphs and a lot of tracking. It can be sprint-driven if you want. There is a lot of data that you can pull out for estimations. It has got a lot of out-of-the-box functionalities that are kind of like the Jazz platform for out-of-the-box scrum and other such things. 

It also works well with all the integrated tools that you buy.

One thing that I don't like about Jira is that when you do an export, it only allows a thousand issues. So the export feature needs to be better. 

Another thing that I don't like about it is related to epics. There are times when you simultaneously want to have a story tied to two epics, one driving the content change and one driving the format of that evolution. It is not truly a parent-child relationship. It is a single-parent relationship to the stories. It would be nice if you had the capability to tie in multiple epics to a particular story. It is a rare case, but we have that. 

Setting up and executing a triage board should be simpler in the sense of how you do the admin. I come from a regulated space, and there should be easier control of who approves and reviews a system board to oversee all the defects. It should have easier out-of-the-box solutions to allow us to set up a triage board at the system level, the software board level that reports to the system board, or the test level that reports to the software board at the system level. There should be out-of-the-box solutions to migrate that and say that who are the three people on the triage board and if they have these admin privileges. Software review board and test review board would be another thing.

We have also had a problem with the integration with Bitbucket Pull Request data. It is an add-on to the tool, but it is not fully integrated. It is not easy from my perspective. Jira, Bitbucket, and Xray should be smoothly integrated. Xray is pretty good, but Bitbucket is standalone. So, when you pull out the data from a comma-separated value and want to move it into a new database, you have to reenter the data. You somehow lose that Pull Request capability. Pull Request through Bitbucket and the review of the code should be easier to manage. You could use a software package called Crucible to go ahead and mark how you did the review, who reviewed it, and who is the independent reviewer or subject matter expert, but that also should be easier to set up. If they want Jira to be the one-stop shop of the view of all of your deliverables, not just from a defect tracking perspective, but also from a requirement perspective, a code perspective, and a testing perspective, it needs to pull out more data and work better as an integration tool. 

I'm using Jira for the requirement repository. When I do requirements, it would be nice if I had the capability to say that for your requirement, I'm going to give you traceability to support a traceability report from Xray. I'm also going to give a requirement ID number in the ticket. You could use Jama and things like that, but it would be nice if Jira supported that.

We had on-prem and cloud deployments. We had to go to on-prem because of the security measures that were deployed. On-cloud didn't have the same capability. If you have one database on the cloud and the other one is on-prem, they don't talk to each other. It would be nice if you pulled it in and you could switch and say that I want to go on-prem because I got greater security risk.

When we go into the regulated space, I require a lot more integration and capability for tools. It is very hard to get tools to perform at that level because they're built for the general audience. In the regulated space, whether you're in medical devices, avionics, or any other regulated environment, tools have to be validated. I've worked with some companies in the past that had the capability to facilitate that validation. With one of the solutions, you could go ahead and buy a validated suite or a requirement package that will validate the tool for your use, but it is such a small market for Jira around the world that nobody really cares about that.

On their website, they show a bunch of tools that work with Jira, but it would be nice if they gave you examples and said that if you're a regulated medical device or regulated, here's a solution that could work for you. Here is Jira. Here is Crucible, and here is Xray, and here is what it'll do for you. They could also ask how do you do the requirement management? Do you use Jama that ties to Jira? It would be awesome if they had some use cases that showed people how to use Jira as the building block and how to add something on the front end for requirement management, and something on the backend for testing, such as Crucible for the peer reviews and Xray for the test management. People would see it and say that I want to do that.

It would also be nice if it could provide some lock-out capabilities based on your development and environment preferences. For example, you can specify that no one can close a defect until it has been tested, or until a particular task is complete, you can't go to the next phase. It would be cool if you could have something like this set up versus someone configuring it in the background.

They have got 10,000 licenses of Jira, and they have teams around the world deploying it across multiple geographies. All of that works fine.

I haven't used them because this company has its own tech support. So, I've been reaching out to them.

Most people who turn to Jira say that the return on investment is much better. 

Jira and its solution off the shelf are cheap. It is cheap for startups.

It depends on what you want to use Jira for, and what's the problem you're trying to solve. If you're going to do defect tracking and management of an artifact and you have got requirements, code, and tests, and they all got to summarize, you have to then go ahead and take Jira. You can then buy Crucible for the peer reviews and Xray for the test management and get them to work seamlessly with each other. 

I would rate Jira an eight out of ten. It is fairly cheap. For a nine or ten, it would be like DOORS and Jazz platform, but the problem with that is that it would become really expensive.

The solution is primarily used in a scrum setting for creating all the features, topics, epics, stories, backlogs, and helps manage the scrum.

It's a very powerful product. It works well with Confluence. It interacts with it well.

There are very advanced features in Jira compared to, for example, ServiceNow.

You can record your unit testing, regression testing, UATs, et cetera. With a wider universe of applications, it's very flexible. 

I'm not totally a business analyst, however, a business analyst, can really, really use it very deeply due to the fact that you can register the results and create your test cases, run them, and document the results. All the testing is very advanced in Jira and it's very nice.

While it's very powerful, it's very complex sometimes. You can do many fancy things and have connections between features. With so many options, it's easy to get lost and it's not as easy to be on top of all the features and changes. In that sense, ServiceNow is easier to keep up with. Its configuration is more complex than ServiceNow.

The interdependencies between objects sometimes are not easy to trace back and to have a clear view of. That's why starting with small configurations is very important; we don't create very complex structures between objects in Jira. That said, sometimes when updating a history that was linked to an epic we would not understand why the epic didn't change when we changed the history. The relation sometimes can become complex. This is not a problem of Jira per se, it's a problem of how you configure Jira.

I worked with the solution for a while, however, I stopped using it. My last project was about 12 months ago.

The solution is stable. I cannot recall any issue with bugs or glitches. Jira never went down. It was reliable.

It is a scalable product. It can be applied with much more deepness, especially for developers.

Normally if I had some questions and issues on how to do what on Jira, I'd look for local support. We didn't have any Jira consultants or anything like that.

We also use ServiceNow. We use both products in the same way.

The configuration process is pretty complex. It's a pretty advanced product. You'll want to understand how to use it and what you want it to do before jumping in.

I would advise potential new users to start with simple cases in terms of configuration and to build on top of that in order to add complexity by identifying the need and not working from scratch.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. You need to get used to using it. It's a solution that can et very complex. 

We are primarily a software development company. We work on some very specialized software for the government. So, we use Jira as our primary bug/issue tracker. We are also looking to put some add-ins in it to help with configuration management.

We also use it for configuration management and task assignment, but that's all within the bug tracker itself. What's good for us is that we are not doing all of that in three different applications. That's very useful. I'm sure larger businesses can find other uses and plugins for it, but right at the moment, Jira is fulfilling our needs.

We think Jira is great, it's been a real help as an issue tracker for us. We have had no problems with it. It just works; it's always worked. We never lose any data. So, we're happy to try to keep it going in the future.

We are a small business and we're up to our ankles in getting code out the door on a regular basis. We do not have a lot of time for investigating new things, but Jira has saved us a great deal of time. It has a nice user interface and we can do a lot of things with it.

They are not supporting in-house servers anymore and I think I've got until January to port this to something else. The issue is not that it is difficult to move Jira to another server, but we have a relatively large database on an SQL Server that Jira either uses or created and we do not want to lose that data. 

We are not a very large company so that is a problem. A lot of our business is on Azure and I would prefer to have an Azure solution for our software management. At the moment, I'm trying to figure out how to move Jira over to Azure on our servers. As a small company, we just don't have a lot of time to solve those kinds of problems. So we may end up moving to something else if it turns out to be more difficult than we can handle. 

Everybody has to make business decisions and obviously, right now, we're not in that sweet spot for them. But, moving onto the cloud has its advantages too. 

We are using Jira regularly now and have been for about a year. 

My impressions of Jira's stability are good. We are running the Jira application on a Windows Server 2019. We also have a large SQL database server running on Windows that Jira accesses. So, there's a Jira database running on the SQL Server and the Jira app and it's never gone down.

Jira is a scalable solution. We have not run into any issues with it. 

We have used a number of things from spreadsheets to in-house-built issue trackers. But Jira worked right out of the box.

For a small business, this quality of a product for the price is really nice. I think we're paying $78 a month or something like that right now.

I would definitely recommend it. Now I'm a 10-person development company with about 30 staff members. If you don't have a lot of IT support and you're doing everything yourself, Jira is a great product for you. It's not hard to install and it just works.

We are using primarily using Jira for the project and issue tracking mostly.

One of the most valuable features is querying because the jQuery function is very good. Additionally, we can create good designs very easily.

There are too many restrictions in Jira. In DevOps, you can access the dashboards easily, but in Jira, you should have more administration rights. In our organization, there are some restrictions on creating dashboards and other features. Everything should be accessible with all access rights for everyone.

Jira should allow you to create and develop pipelines easily. In India, we have to purchase them separately or integrate other data tools. All these tools should be in Jira.

I have used Jira for approximately 12 years.

Jira is stable.

In my experience Jira is scalable.

The technical support has been satisfactory but could be better.

I have used DevOps and the main difference between DevOps and Jira is the test cases. You can have test cases in DevOps, but not in Jira. This is what I have observed in my recent comparison. Jira has jQuery and it is far better than what they have in DevOps. There are some filtration and grouping settings in DevOps which I do not like.

The initial setup is easy.

Jira is expensive and a lot of people are choosing DevOps because they are cheaper, open-source, easy to use, and have basic licenses. Jira should decrease its price to be more competitive.

I rate Jira an eight out of ten.

I primarily use the solution for use cases and make sure that our tasks and priorities are getting done.

I like that we can actually categorize the stuff from high priority to a lower priority. You can make categories and you can focus on the right items that need to be worked on. 

The initial setup isn't too complicated. 

The solution is stable. 

The scalability is good. 

It is not intuitive. It was hard for me to understand how to use it right away. It would be ideal if they could make the solution more user-friendly so that it is easier to pick up.

I haven't been using the solution for that long just yet. it's been about six months or so.

There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. it's reliable and the performance is good. 

The solution can scale well. it's pretty straightforward if you need to do so.

We have product owners, project managers, and scrum masters on the solution. I would say that we have a thousand people using it, however, I'm not saying that for sure, as the bank has 46,000 employees and I'm just a part of a small team. I'm estimating that I would expect over a thousand people to use it.

I have never used technical support. I've been able to manage everything and figure stuff out with the stuff I have here. Everything is available to me.

I did use a different solution, however, I switched when I switched roles at the company.

For the most part, the solution was set up for us. My understanding is that it was pretty simple I assisted a bit, and I found that the navigation piece was not enjoyable to implement. 

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

I'm a customer and an end-user.

I'd advise users considering the solution to make sure that they have a little time to review it and understand the tool and make sure they actually find that it is a good solution to meet their needs and that it's what they're looking for. From Agile delivery teams that are here to deliver their MVPs and stuff like that, I think it's great to keep track of all their backlogs and stuff like that. It is also great for someone from a use case perspective as they break it down well.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. Of course, I'm still learning it. That said, it's great for keeping track of all the items and the stuff that needs to be done and for the use cases that have been closed, to make sure that we get the proper sign-off and understand the line of business. 

I work with a credit rating company in the US. As a scrum master and project manager, I have to make sure that all the impediments are removed for the team. I work with product owners to make sure that all initiatives requested by our stakeholders, who are mainly compliance and regulations people, are moving in a timely manner.

I use Jira to make sure that we are capturing all the work that is requested, and it is progressing in a timely manner. I am in charge of a squad called Core Operations Reporting. A squad is usually focused on one or two initiatives. The goal of our squad is to automate regulatory reports as much as possible. I talk to our stakeholders to ensure that any errors in credit ratings are dealt with in a timely manner. A lot of these requests are ad hoc, and we prioritize them in sprints in Jira. 

It was very easy to learn Jira. I can't explain how easy it was. The hardest part of my job is understanding the business and communicating with difficult stakeholders and difficult people on the squad who are resistant to change and agile methodology. The fact that Jira was so simple to understand was a huge boon in my book because I didn't have to waste time trying to learn the tool to get work done and move the squad along. It was very easy to understand.

As a scrum master, I run daily stand-ups, and they are run directly from Jira. During these stand-ups, to make sure that there are no impediments, I run through all of the open issues and action items that the team members have. The feature that I really love in Jira is called Issue Navigator. It allows me to customize how I want to show the user stories within Jira to my squad. 

I can use Jira Query Language (JQL) to write queries to see the stories that are there for the current sprint. I can also sort them by assignment. I am able to call each assignee and have them walk through the status of what they did yesterday, what do they plan to do for the next 24 hours, and if there are any blockers or impediments.

I also use Jira is for burndown charts. A burndown chart provides a visual depiction of how quickly the squad is closing out user stories. It gives us an indication of how efficiently the squad is performing. I also use the Active Sprints function and a feature called Planning Poker. Planning Poker is an add-on, and it allows me to work with my squad members to estimate the complexity of user stories. It allows me to estimate user stories in an unbiased way with my squad members. It is important that people are not piggybacking on other people's estimates, so when a business requests a functionality, I use Planning Poker to have people send me their estimates in an unbiased way. They cannot see what other people have estimated. This way, they have their own unbiased view on specific user-requested functionality and its worth. After that, we end up talking out like, "Why did you think it was a three? Why did the other person think it was a five?" So, it allows an unbiased way of estimating user stories.

One major issue that I, and even our business stakeholders, have noticed is related to Epic Link. In Issue Navigator view, Jira allows you to enter JQL, which is basically like SQL. You just enter a query, and it displays the stories that satisfy the query. There is a field called Epic Link, which is basically a high-level designation for a bunch of user stories with a common goal. Epic Link is typically of different colors. When Epic Link's background color is a dark color, it effectively becomes unreadable. I am looking at my screen right now, and there is an Epic Link called Click View User Request. The background is purple, and the text is black. It is almost impossible to read it unless you click on it or give it an extra minute of viewing. That's basically what needs improvement. I wish there was a way for us to change the text color of Epic Link in the Issue Navigator view.

I've been required to report on metrics, and I don't know if it is possible with Jira, but there needs to be an easier way to capture a few metrics. For a two-week sprint, we are required to report on a number of metrics such as committed, completed, added, and rolled over. There is a way to see the stories that have been added after the sprint has begun, but there is no easy way to aggregate this, which is a waste of time. I wish there was an easy way for Jira to explain to me what has been added after the sprint has been done. Currently, it is a bit difficult for me to tell.

In addition, when rolling over stories from one sprint to another, it is kind of difficult for me to find out how many story points were actually rolled over without going into Jira and doing an analysis. I wish Jira would somehow aggregate that information for me so I can easily report about it. There should be an automatic aggregation of how many story points were added after the sprint began and how many story points were rolled over to the subsequent sprint.

I also wish Jira had an indicator to tell you that you are approaching the limit for the story points that can be delivered during a sprint. Typically, there is an established capacity for each sprint. I take an average of all of the delivered story points from the past six sprints, and I use that number to estimate how many story points can the squad deliver. I wish there was an indicator in Jira that tells you that you are approaching the number of story points that can be delivered during the sprint. I don't think there is an indicator like that, but such an indicator will be very helpful because then I will be easily able to see that we are approaching the limit. I can then talk to the squad members and say, "Okay, we need to remove some story points from the sprint because we're reaching capacity."

My experience with Jira is pretty extensive. I pretty much use Jira every single day and multiple times a day. When I'm not using Jira, I'm using Confluence. I also use SharePoint.

It is 100% stable. Stability is also dependent on a lot of factors. Jira has been down once or twice, and people go crazy. In almost two and a half years that I've worked here, Jira was down only a handful of times, and I don't think that was Atlassian's fault. Atlassian is the company that is responsible for these tools. 

I am not really aware of things in terms of expansion. However, there are some add-ons or extensions for expanding the functionality of Jira. The Planning Poker tool seems to be an add-on. Similarly, there is also another extension or plugin called Structure that was previously going to be leveraged. We haven't moved forward with that because we're using more of a manual solution in the metrics reporting. There is another add-on called Dataplane Reports. So, scalability is definitely there, and there are definitely opportunities to scale horizontally and expand the functionally of Jira through plugins and add-ons. 

In our organization, we only have 5,000 employees, and probably 70% of the company is using Jira. which includes the business as well. The business is also learning how to use it, and they understand that it is a very powerful tool. I would say about 3,500 out of 5,000 people are using Jira.

I didn't have to contact Atlassian. We have an internal Jira support team that answers all our questions. I don't think they have contacted Jira support in a while.

Its initial setup was not done by me.

Its initial setup was done by Jira administrators.

I am not sure about the pricing, but I know its licensing is on a yearly basis.

The main advice would be to just use it as much as possible and try to learn the basics of JQL, which is Jira's proprietary language that allows you to tell Jira exactly what you want to see. It is pretty self-explanatory and not hard to use. There are so many different fields in Jira such as issue type, key, sprint, summary, Epic Link, reporter, assigning, status, story points, and components. You can add the required columns to the Issue Navigator view, and it will spit back exactly what you wanted to see.

You should also learn what kind of value it can add to the organization before just jumping in. Try to talk to senior management and figure it out. You should learn how to read the burndown charts to basically understand how efficiently the team is working. Every organization has an IT organization, and I am sure the majority of them are using Jira.

I would rate Jira an eight out of ten. No tool is perfect, and there is obviously room for improvement.

We use it to trace our business needs development.

We have some nice dashboards out there where we can track needs for clients or track internal projects.

This is our way of communicating with different teams. We are a global company. I am based in San Diego, for example. A lot of the BAs are based in Paris. The development team is based in Minsk. We absolutely need to be in constant communication and on the same page.

With the time differences that we all have, it is very hard to kind of get on a call and centralize the information in person or during meetings. This solution makes it possible. 

One of the most valuable aspects of the solution is the fact that everything is traced on one ticket on Jira. We know exactly what has been done and what is left and we share the same feasibility we are assigned. We don't have to wait for team updates or emails or calls or even reminders. We just need to look at the same ticket and we know in real-time exactly what is happening. Without Jira, I don't see how we would be able to manage and trace in a very consistent, effective way.  At least, not across all of our development initiatives.

I have never been trained on Jira, to be honest. However, it's easy to navigate. Even for somebody who is never on it, it's very simple to pick up and understand. The only caveat is that when you get a bit more in detail, or you have some business requirements, you don't have documentation that you can just go and consult to enrich your portal or access.

One aspect of Jira that is very nice is that we are able to integrate other tools that our company is using. For example, we do use Salesforce for our support team and that's linked to Jira. Slack, as well, is also integrated into the system. It makes everything so much easier.

Jira has recently updated their UI, but more can be done to make it even better.

One thing that is missing is notifications that we can send out in an automated fashion so that we don't have to log into Jira every single time. We do have dashboards on our navigation pages, but we need to log in to see the current status. I can't just click reports every once in a while to trace or track projects, I have to log in to see. I'd prefer it if the data automatically came to me instead of having to go seek it out. 

It's possible the dashboards and the reports are something that can be properly configured on our end. However, I'm not the Jira administrator in our company. I probably just don't know how to do it. Jira may actually be able to trigger these kinds of reports. However, if they don't have this functionality, it should definitely be added.

 I have been using the solution for four years now.

We've never experienced any downtime with the app. I can't recall any bugs or glitches. There haven't been any crashes of any sort. It's very reliable.

I would say the solution is pretty scalable. Every single project team in our company uses it. Our staff, our BA, our developers. We do also have DevOps teams using it. Everyone uses it for different purposes. Our company, over the past ten years, grew exponentially. We've tripled our size and we never had any downtime with Jira. 

We have business owners, developers, quality testers, business analysts etc. on Jira. We have internal consultants from professional services teams, who trace the needs as well so that they can transmit information to their clients. All the top management personnel go to Jira to consult the dashboards as well. If they wish to trace the progress that their teams are making, they can do so. The solution is basically used in every aspect of the company, and as the company grows, so does the usage.

I've never had to reach out to technical support, so I can't speak to how they are.

When I joined the company, we already had Jira. 

I wouldn't consider it complex at all.

I wasn't here at the initial setup of Jira, however, in our company, we have a Jira administrator. Whenever we have a project to review and need to know how it's laid out and how we can place them better, etc, it goes through this person. She analyzes the needs and does it for us. 

 She knows the tool pretty extensively, but we don't rely on external consultants to do it. We have somebody from our company who does it for us and acts as our own Jira professional. They would be the one that basically helps you with the setup for your project needs.

I don't handle the finance side of our relationship with Jira.

As far as I know, no other solutions have been considered as we've been pretty satisfied with this tool. 

I'd advise other companies to go for it and try using it. Jira is one of the biggest players in the market. It's a scalable solution and very user-friendly. The onboarding is quite simple. I have never been trained and I've been using it for the four past years. Whenever there is a new release on Jira, we get a guide, which is helpful, and instructions as we use the latest version that comes in the form of pop-ups on your screen. If you want, you can just disregard it, but once you discover them, you can just hover over with your mouse and you can see the new features. If an organization is looking for something that will be easy for its workforce to adapt to, Jira would be a smart choice.

With the communication and the bridges that we've established with other tools, it's helping other teams get the information they need without having to get the Jira license or get them to go onto Jira. They just need to find their tool and they get the update from Jira in real-time.

We use it for Kanban boards, bug reports, and some workflows.

It has enabled us to keep track of features or projects. Previously, we used to manually keep track in Office. We now have a centralized repository for all the information.

I like that you can comment almost anywhere, and you can leave a trail. That's the most useful thing.

I don't know if it's the way it's deployed in the organization, but the interface we are provided is not as customizable as other tools. The multi-language report is not enabled in our installation. I don't really know if it's something related to the tool or our installation.

It is pretty good. I haven't had any problem with it.

We haven't had any problems with scalability. It doesn't feel slow. It hasn't been down. It's working pretty well.

Its users are in the hundreds, but I don't know specifically. It is available to everyone in the company, and it could potentially be used by anyone. We all are allowed to use it and implement it as we see fit.

I have local technical support. That's our first line of support, and they contact Jira technical support if needed. 

I'm just a user. I don't know.

General advice would be to find out about customization features and multi-language support features.

I'm not a heavy user of this solution. From what I've used, I would rate it an eight out of 10.