Atlassian Jira Align (formerly AgileCraft) vs Jira Service Management (Jira Service Desk)

• 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.

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• Highly configurable Notification Scheme, allowing free customization on who receives notifications and when
• Ability to add extra features through the highly diverse Atlassian Marketplace.
• Simple and highly customizable ticket interface. The Software can be almost completely branded in every aspect to represent your organization.
• Integration with Jira Software allows support tickets to be moved into other Log Term projects as necessary.

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• 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.

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• Some of the built-in functions and workflows are surprisingly limited given the fact that you can customize a lot with JQL. These limited areas do not allow you to use JQL. For instance, the built-in notifications are lacking. They have one that is great-- "notify on critical ticket creation"-- EXCEPT that it does not allow you to notify a group or anything, only individual users.
• The ticket interface is a little odd for agents. Changing the status is not a simple drop down from unassigned to open to in progress to pending, etc. There are a couple of tabs ("investigate", "pending", "workflow") where you can change the status in different ways. Maybe I am just not used to this way of doing it, but I feel like it could be simplified.
• It can get complicated deleting/changing some of the out-of-the-box fields and rules, because you never know what will break workflows or other automated/built-in features.

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• 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.

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• We would not be very organized as a software company without using JIRA and it would in turn reflect negatively across the entire studio and the products that we release.
• Almost everyone in our company uses JIRA in one way or another from developers to testers to marketing and every team in between.
• The only time I have witnessed that JIRA has a negative effect on our objectives is if they suffer a major failure on their part and JIRA is not accessable or usable for a length of time. Thankfully in over 3 years of using JIRA this has only occurred a handful of times.

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