The Atlassian Jira Align (formerly AgileCraft) tools help keep our scrum teams moving in the right direction. It gives Sr. Executives visibility into the progress of our digital transformation efforts. It provides information to our program manager to create the necessary artifacts to justify continued funding of our initiatives. It also supports the SAFe framework, along with some others. And the Atlassian Jira Align (formerly AgileCraft) tools provide integration to other tools that we use in our portfolio.
Time tracking - like several time tracking solutions, FP uses a clock that will track in real time so that you do not need to remember how long you worked on a project to input later.
Dashboards - I love FP's dashboards that let me track my personal utilization, the utilization of my team members and all of my open tasks.
Reporting - FP's reports provide insight organization-wide into how we are doing and where we (as an organization) are spending our time. As with any reporting, though, it is important to manage the cleanliness of your data to make the reporting useful.
Effective Sprint planning : Sprint planning can be done using Planning Poker in AgileCraft by clicking Team > Manage > Other > Estimation Games very effectively for distributed teams.
Team Capacity Allocation Report: After tasks are created at team or program level, the report from AgileCraft cab be pulled and can be verified that no team member is under or over allocated. A report can be generated by navigating to Team > Manage > Assign Tasks.
Effective Requirement trace-ability: To maintain requirements trace-ability follow the steps below:
Upload test cases against the story/requirement. once uploaded test cases will be visible under that story
Execute Test cases in AgileCraft and mark them as Pass/Fail based on the actual outcome
Based on test results, The acceptance criterion's can be marked as “Pass” or “Fail” & if marked failed corresponding defect can be logged & can be attached with the story
So against each story we can easily see whether all test cases been executed or not & which acceptance criterion's are failed & how many defects are in open or close state.
Daily Scrum: In AgileCraft, the option to run a daily stand-up is available from Team > Manage > Daily Standups. Selecting the sprint number opens the daily stand-up meeting window in which each team member's tasks are visible and hours can be burned against them. Conduct Scrum meetings in AgileCraft, and burn each associate hour against the tasks created during the meeting. The burn-down chart can be generated & viewed during the stand-up to check whether the team is on track.
Function Point often provided reports that were inaccurate due to bad calculations. The support team would work with us to troubleshoot these issues, but the fact remained that calculations were wrong.
Function Point was purchased by a new parent company that increased prices over their nearest, superior, competitor, pricing themselves out of the market.
Function Point's interface is dated, as is its code base.
New features are being implemented not as software revisions or upgrades, but as new for-pay features.
The initial ticket creation screen lacks some important features, such as assigning "point values" (a measure of effort needed for the ticket).
The browser needs to be manually refreshed to see new tickets, which can make things confusing when several people in a meeting are simultaneously creating tickets.
The interface on some smaller portions of the software are sometimes difficult to understand.
Most of the things are easily manageable except certain things that are hidden and you need to ask teammates who are aware of how they can link attachements in the comment section and so on.
Overall support from Jira team is good. It comes at an additional price but it is very efficient. There are no long wait times, you get a dedicated team to look into your issues. The support is available throughout the year and they keep a record of your issues. Overall we are very satisfied with the support they have provided us over the years, it has been very effective for the price that we pay.
Workamajig was NOT a good fit, after over a year of back-end setup. FunctionFox didn't have the financial integration capabilities we needed, but we used it for years and were happy with the service and support. FunctionPoint brought together the 30,000-foot view of the projects and resources with a simplified process for getting day-to-day jobs into the queue, which was essential for our organization.
Microsoft Azure Devops won't have the major functionality of software management like Jira. The customization provided by Jira is having a cutting edge over any project management tool. Adds-on and Plugins feature in the Jira Tool make it as perfect as desired task management tool for any company. One of the best Agile based Project Management Tools.
It has positively impacted our tech teams, allowing them to better organize the tasks and items they are working on and has greatly improved their ability to communicate & review these tasks with other teams.
I believe it negatively impacted other departments as lengthy training was required by many associates to attempt using the tool, only to find out it didn't meet our needs, therefore much time was wasted.
