Jira Software vs. Micro Focus Agile Manager (Discontinued)

The Jira software works well for managing scrum boards and allocating resources to a task. When your Epics and Issues are set up properly, it can give you a good idea of where your team stands and the trajectory of your project. It is not the ideal solution if you need to provide documentation and support to people outside of your product teams or organization. It would benefit from having a public documentation or repository feature.

Incentivized

One scenario I believe HP Agile Manager is well suited is for a team of 5 or more developers who are releasing new features or addressing defects. Another scenario where it is beneficial is for teams of QA Automation engineers, where again, the objectives are clear. A scenario where I believe it would be less appropriate is for operations-type teams where objectives are not always clear cut, and the roles must be more reactive.

Incentivized

• Running sprints and tracking progress of roadmap, epics, story, task and subtask
• The user interface is great. It allows tables inside details, have common shortcuts and clean design.
• Can create custom dashboards and can view data in multiple ways
• Advanced access rights based on role

Incentivized

• Agile manager is particularly good for planning out sprints in an Agile methodology
• The Task Board in AGM gives clear swim-lanes to indicate progress/status, or to gauge that of another team member.
• The Dash Board gives visibility to team members capacity and the overall team burn down.

Incentivized

• Management of the software is very difficult at times, although has improved.
• Ability to manage resources is really non-existent, there are some plugins but they are ALL buggy (I've tested them all).
• Better integration with Trello, would love to see this happen. Right now it's very clumsy.

Incentivized

• Removing stories from a Sprint results in them being difficult to find later.
• Editing story details is slightly cumbersome.
• It's somewhat unclear how capacity fills up for stories split from prior sprints.

Incentivized

This is because Jira Software generates a huge profit for an affordable price. Having a tool that makes team management transparent and effective is very valuable.

In addition, the renewal of Jira Software and all Atlassian tools is predictable and clear, as the prices are published on the Atlassian website and there is no pyramid of intermediaries.

Incentivized

JIRA Software is a pretty complex tool. We have a project manager for JIRA who onboarded us, created our board, and taught us the basics. I think it would have been pretty overwhelming to learn without her. JIRA offers so much functionality that I'm not aware of -- I constantly need to Google or ask others about existing features. Also, although they are all under the Atlassian umbrella, I find it difficult to switch between JIRA Software and Confluence.

Incentivized

Our JIRA support is handled internally by members of our Product Support team. It is not supported by a 3rd party. Our internal support will always sent out notifications for downtime which is usually done on the weekend unless it is required to fix a bug/issue that is affecting the entire company. Downtime is typically 3-4 hours and then once the maintenance is complete, another broadcast email is sent out informing the user community that the system is now available for use.

One of their strong points i stheir documentation. Almost all of the basic set up needed within JIRA is available online through atlassian and its easy to find and very precise. The more critical issues need to be addressed as well and hence the rating of 8 instead of a 9.

Incentivized

Take your time implementing Jira. Make sure you understand how you want to handle your projects and workflows. Investing more time in the implementation can pay off in a long run. It basically took us 5 days to define and implement correctly, but that meant smooth sailing later on.

Incentivized

Jira Software has more integrations and has more features than many of its competitors. While some of its competitors do have better UI/UX than Jira Software, they have improved this greatly over time. Atlassian also acquired Trello years ago, so that adds better user interfaces to the system. They do also offer a pretty in-depth library of how to customize the platform that others don't.

Incentivized

HP Agile Manager is beefy enough to work for bigger teams. In this way it matches closely to what is offered with Rally. One area it comes up short when compared to Rally is the apparent lack of a test management capability, where requirements can be entered then mapped to test cases. Agile Manager has some of the agile feel offered by Trello and Waffle but the added functionality that makes it more valuable for bigger teams.

Incentivized

• Jira has positively made our company's daily activities much better organized
• With Jira we can track progress and follow up on tasks
• Jira has great reporting tools which aggregate various data and give us a good overview of our teams capacity

Incentivized

• It has allowed us to plan our Sprint work more effectively
• It has made it more clear how to accurately estimate certain problems
• It has given clarity over time as to the skill and work speed of team members

Incentivized