There is room for improvement in the high-level project management.

In future releases, I would like to have a planning feature for high-level project management.

For project management, the scheduling of the project tasks should be simplified because it's complex and too rigid using the Atlassian Portfolio . 

The current method for dealing with requirements management involves another solution, which is costing more for the users. Traceability between higher level and lower level requirements in the hierarchy is something else that is not fully addressed. It would be helpful to have requirements management and traceability functionality built into this solution.

The reports are not really customizable, which is something that they should improve on. The reporting capabilities, in general, are in need of improvement.

All Atlassian products are based on JAVA which makes it a bit difficult to trace problems if you don't have much JAVA skilled staff around. You can try to read the error messages and understand what's going on, in some cases you might succeed even without Java skills. In other cases, it makes sense to search the web for solutions. Since Atlassian has a very good Q&A site and online documentation, changes are high that you might find helpful hints online.

Furthermore, Atlassian should provide a product which helps you back up and restore all related data.

My job is to make sure these things meet the needs of the users. What I'd love to be able to do is actually stop hosting these things ourselves and just go across to the Atlassian Cloud version of these products. I've used those in the past and the integration between JIRA and Confluenc, is a much tighter, neater experience. This is particularly important when you get to managing users and so forth. It's a more seamless experience for users between those two products.

But we just can't do that because Atlassian has no practical solution for enterprise identity management. Essentially if you want to use these products you have manage your users and their roles / groups within the Atlassian ecosystem, which is completely impractical for a business of any size.

Since we host our own server instances, we are also responsible for the product upgrades. It's probably the biggest challenge for us. Frankly it's a really daunting exercise - challenging, problematic and very flaky.

Even if you can upgrade the core product, compatibility with the existing plug-ins is questionable.If you do a major version upgrade, more often than not, you'll find that some of the plug-ins you previously had working have stopped working. We have struggled to stay current on the Atlassian products because these upgrades are such a drawn-out exercise.

The connection between JIRA, Bitbucket and Confluence feels like an afterthought. In Confluence, if I'm documenting some meeting, then I can tag the tickets and easily see the status, which is nice, but it's not like a super big deal.

I use all three products, but the interaction between them isn't extremely helpful. I haven't found any useful way of integrating Bitbucket with Confluence.

I struggle to get people to write anything of any significance on Confluence, though, because the editor is so painful to use. We end up writing anything that's a living, important document in Google Docs, and then we link to it from Confluence. It's ridiculous because Google Docs is a terrible tool in a lot of respects. Confluence is just a super-inadequate tool for editing documents.

Confluence is a pretty good tool, but people refuse to edit documents in there, because the editor just doesn't work half the time. That's a real problem, because it's supposed to be the central place in the organization where we share information between all the teams. People don't want to put documents in there, because it takes them forever to edit them.

It seems like that's really the most basic piece of functionality that a tool like Confluence should offer, and it does it extremely badly. It seems like the core part of its offering is that it can create a document and edit it, so people can find it and read it.

JIRA offers a lot of configurability, which for upper-level management is nice because they can enforce whatever policies they want to be enforcing, and get good visibility. Because it's so configurable, as a developer using it, there's just much more complexity than you want on a day-to-day level.

If I could get away with using Trello, for instance, I would, but I do see that it doesn't provide functionality that the business needs. As a developer on a day-to-day level, JIRA's a pain in the neck.

I see now that I can actually jump straight into the ticket in JIRA, and see the description. It might be nice if the definition of done from the ticket in JIRA was more prominently visible in the pull request in Bitbucket. Now that I know the link's there, maybe we'll use it.

JIRA's slow to boot, so we end up wasting a good chuck of time waiting for JIRA to load. It shows me much more configuration information than I really need it to. It shows me many more fields than I need it do, which makes it hard to find what I'm looking for. My team went through something like three different ways of working with JIRA in three months, and had to continually find the correct dashboard. For JIRA to be an enjoyable experience, you need to invest in becoming a JIRA expert. Most people would prefer that they didn't have to think about using this tool, and it just worked. When you're selling it, I'm sure it's great because it has every possible feature. For the one or two JIRA experts in the organization, I'm sure it feels like a great tool. To the end user, it's so over-packed with features, that it's just overwhelming to use.

It would be a big benefit if the super-experts at JIRA in your organization hid all the configurability and all the unneeded features from the rest of the users, so that you could use the tool without thinking about it.