Atlassian Jira vs. OpenText ALM Octane

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

If someone is already using ALM Octane, then it is worth the pain to go through the upgrade process to get the current versions. If you need it to tie into Jira, it can do that. Just be prepared for a rough road. If you have some other product that you use for DevOps, PM, and QA, you will probably be better off sticking with what you have. DaVita also uses TFS, but not in a full implementation (i.e. not with a build server for code deployment), so for them, ALM makes a lot of sense. If you are using TFS with a build server, there are other methodologies that won't end up making you want to pull your hair out trying to make it integrate with what you are using.

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

• Bug-logging and keeping track of the bug status.
• Integration with DevOps to do continuous testing.
• Keeping coordination between development and testing teams.

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

• The integration to Synchronizer is very difficult to implement.
• The integration to Jira was very hard to get working.

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.

Customer support is very good takes minimal time to resolve the issue and always takes feedback seriously to improve the application.

Incentivized

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

Micro Focus ALM Octane use at DaVita goes back beyond my starting with them three years ago. They have used it as part of DevOps as well as for performance measurement of software releases in combo with HP Performance Center (a great combination). Jira is well suited to managing bug reports and development processes with Agile and Scrum, but ALM Octane goes above and beyond that.

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's had a very positive impact.
• Very good customer support as well when required.

Incentivized