JIRA Software

Atlassian Jira is go to tracker for software development companies that reached certain scale. Looks like Atlassian is updating all their products so you can expect it to get more modern experience.

Pros

Incredibly configurable, a lot of people already familiar with it

I've been using Jira for bug tracking and project management for over a year. Based on other solutions out in the market this is definitely the best offered at the moment, however there is still room for improvement.

Pros

The two main pros are:
- Customizable: can create / remove any fields
- Integration: can integrate with most popular systems such as Salesforce, Trello, Github, etc.

Cons

Sometimes can get quite cumbersome, if you're not used to the tool, or are tech savvy it may be hard to use filters and reporting.

Advice to Others

Overall, the pros outweigh the cons, just take into consideration a learning curve when first implementing.

JIRA have come a long way in the last handful of years by increasing their product offering with Agile Project & Kanban management features. It's an easy to use incident and bug management tool that my business use extensively. I'm a strong advocate of JIRA. We use Mantis currently for project bug tracking & management but I find mantis less friendly and views are not as good as JIRA. JIRA's reports is a winner also.

Pros

More than just a bug and incident management tool which provides more benefits in one place.

Cons

The only con is the older version currently in use by my business is outdated.

Advice to Others

I have recommended to my businesses management to upgrade to the new Agile capable version of JIRA and suggested that once it's fully adopted to consider moving project defect management away from Mantis.

Pros

We are using it for daily basis in our organization!
User friendly
More efficient
Must needed for Scrum and task assignment

Cons

Retrospective and reports are not that much good as compare to other features.
I would suggest if we can overcome on this it will be powerful tool :)

Able to micro-manage my dev team within a sprint time frame.
The team is communicating well within the organization and we can access the Jira board anywhere anytime.

Pros

simple and clear
works on all smart devices

Cons

Cheap if you have a team of 10 but once you go over 10+ the price will kick in.

Advice to Others

Try it out and set up on your server.

Excellent for managing tickets, backlog, sprints, version releases. Easy to use with permission controls for all users. Allows delegating of tasks and responsibilities.

Pros

Straightforward, built for software development.

Cons

New UI is quite the change, not as intuitive as the old one.

Advice to Others

JIRA is the best for managing product development and issues.

Pros

As a business user, it is easy for me to keep track of the tickets I issued, as well as keeping up to date with the status or progress.

Cons

I don't have anything to complain about, except perhaps the pricing is a little bit steep I heard from my colleagues.

Pros

Jira is made for managing develeper teams, IT companies. In our startup, we use it differently in the IT department and in our marketing department to manage, monitor and control each team mate work load.

Cons

As far as I know, you need an IT person to set it up. So it is really useful if that person administering and setting up Jira 1) knows what you want from it (ideally the decision maker in the company understands how Jira works) and 2) knows how to make it happen in Jira.
That's the most difficult part, setting Jira up.

Needs development and thorough training to be used properly. Once it is set up and being used, it is magic for managing all your tasks.
It has a full list of features and add-ons, but it can be confusing because it can be made to seem all things to all men.

Pros

Web-based, Kanban Board

Cons

Requires a developer to set up properly

Advice to Others

Make sure you liaise with a consultant and get proper training on how to use this product. Properly implemented, it will revolutionise your bus9iness!

Pros

Almost limitless customization options, I've seen different project managers organise a team's workflow in numerous totally different ways.

Really good integrations with other Atlassian software products.

Supplements a physical board very well, including the option to print cards at an ideal size for real-world usage.

Cons

Limitless customization is a double-edged sword. As a user, not administrator of JIRA I am often stuck when attempting to do anything but the simplest task. Depending on the competence of the Project Manager with JIRA, this can be a big or very small issue.

It would be good if JIRA could integrate more smoothly with non Atlassian software. While I understand the business reasons for making things difficult with say, GitHub and Slack integrations, it doesn't improve my feelings towards the product as a user.

As a long term JIRA user, I have been able to use many of the different features to the benefit of our team. I have changed roles now and no longer directly manage a team but am seriously considering how I can use it for my own purposes.

Pros

Speed, reliability and customisation ability

Cons

Very few cons. I was very happy with the product and used it for 10 plus years through to 2017

Advice to Others

Technical ability of all stakeholders to ensure adequate engagement.

JIRA helps me organize tasks and priorities, and it has really adopted to the agile methodologies. I can look at the backlogs of my projects and other projects and get a sense of what needs to happen next.

Pros

easy to learn, great search capabilities

Cons

access control can be a bit crazy

Pros

I like that JIRA is very easy to use, even for a non technical person like me. I have also had older colleagues who struggle to use MS office some time that have no issue or problem using JIRA.

Cons

I cannot think of anything bad to say, maybe because I haven't used JIRA so intensively. But one thing I have heard of from my colleagues is that the pricing can be quite high for small and medium companies as it's based on individual accounts and they may not be able to afford.

A great app in the cloud that I use daily for project management and business analysis. It's great for getting and keeping teams with complex work on track and customer focussed

Pros

really useful for large and sall teams alike

Cons

not easy to add in documents and assets to the top of the project, difficult to filter info, really difficult to set up pages just the way you want them

Advice to Others

setup a small and short life cycle project with one or two members

Easy to manage the work and communication with an offshore development team. Also easy to integrate with other platforms such as Slack and Moqups.

Pros

Once you get the hang of Jira then you realise that it's actually pretty easy to use. It really helps me to effectively manage the work of an offshore team, and work rarely gets missed or overlooked. Online support time if you have a problem is quick and the answers are often pretty good.

Cons

It's hard to get started and requires a few weeks of regular use before you start to feel confident that you're using it properly. It also doesn't look very nice from a visual UI point of view and I find the reports hard to digest. You definitely need someone else in the team to show you how to use Jira in order to get the most out of it.

It allows our team to track bugs and enhancements.

Pros

Supports most development models (Sprint, Kanban, Waterfall). Each release seems to be better than the last.

Cons

Some things that you'd think would be simple can be difficult to figure out. This is normal for software that's had to merge new features while maintaining backward compatability..

Pros

I especially appreciate how flexible Jira has been for the multiple teams/pods of developers in our larger unit. Jira is THE place where the POs are creating user stories every day, our developers working on them and logging their efforts/questions/etc, and our scrum master uses both during stand-ups and for tracking each team's velocity.

Cons

The flexibility at times has been challenging as the configuration can be difficult to get just right, and often applies to all boards created in Jira. Sometimes we've wanted to do something specific for one team and/or to make a change during a Release, but we've needed to wait until the current Release ends before making changes.

Pros

Wonderful way for Biz & Dev sides of a business to collaborate. Our Company had some transparency issues (like most relatively successful startups), JIRA eliminates these by allowing me, a PM, to go in and see every single Dev sprint that we have.

Would definitely recommend, and I see how companies, especially with 200+ employees, can use JIRA to make business (internal business) more efficient.

It took a while to figure out how to use JIRA but once I got into it and saw how it could be customized and how it facilitated collaboration, I became a big fan.

Pros

It's great for collaboration and seeing how progress is going on a project, as well as reporting on issues that a team is working on. It's great for maintaining the history of work on a project/software project.

Advice to Others

Put some time into learning how to use the product. If you are a manager of a team work with your team to figure out how to best use it and train some power users.

Pros

Easy to use
Simple
Straightforward
The software is easy to implement since the offer on prem and cloud versions.

Cons

Too Simple
Some people on our business side find it difficult to navigate and get their tickets lost.