Overall Satisfaction with Atlassian JIRA
JIRA was our ticketing system and Project Management tracking tool. We used JIRA both for incident management and enhancement/deployment tracking. We also used JIRA to pull statistics to determine how quickly dev teams were turning requests around and how quickly support teams were reacting to cases, updating them, and ultimately resolving them. I mostly used JIRA's reporting features to determine where bottlenecks were in our reporting and development structures.
- JIRA is extremely customizable, especially when compared to Atlassian's other flagship product, Confluence. We were able to tailor a JIRA process flow for every development and support flow that we had, even before JIRA.
- JIRA reports well. While we did find some holes in what we were able to report on, 90% of what we needed was there and readily accessible once a user was familiar with the reporting structure.
- JIRA interacts fairly well with other products. We were able to integrate it into Confluence (as it should be), but we were also able to build plug-ins into Outlook, Excel, and our phone system for more advanced functionality.
- JIRA is far too cumbersome. The learning curve to become proficient was sharp enough to cause several of our less technical people to give up learning how to truly utilize the tool, and keep things very basic. It ended up being handed over to Engineering (me, in particular because of my success with Confluence), and I also found it cumbersome but not really difficult to learn.
- While not an issue for us, I can see potential for a business to need to tailor their process around JIRA and how JIRA perceives typical ticketing/PM process.
- There are quirks with how JIRA chooses to think of business process that make the creation of some work flows more difficult and the path to engineer them less than intuitive.
- Better communication between development and support tiers. - Positive
- ACCOUNTABILITY!!!!!!!!!!!!! - Positive
- Consolidation of spreadsheets, emails, word docs, etc. That we used before JIRA to track incidents and initiatives. - Positive
- Once the business flow is formalized through a tool such as JIRA, corporate politics rears it's head angrier than ever. - Negative, though not a fault of the JIRA solution singularly.
Remedy would be the only product that compares, though Remedy was even more cumbersome, much uglier, much more difficult to pull reports from...basically a poor man's JIRA. JIRA blows the others out of the water due to it's features, visual polish, and relative ease to use once the user is familiar with the product.