Helix ALM (formerly TestTrack) is an application performance testing and application requirements management suite.
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Jira Software
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Jira Software is a project management tool from Atlassian, featuring an interactive timeline for mapping work items, dependencies, and releases, Scrum boards for agile teams, and out-of-the-box reports and dashboards.
Helix ALM is very well suited for maintaining traceability between user needs, requirements and tests for medical device design controls. It allows users to customize the reports to create a traceability matrix or any other reports that are needed. It is also a good program for tracking issues and bugs and for storing/linking verification and validation test protocols and reports.
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.
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.
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.
The support from Perforce has been extensive and allowed us to customize the setup of Helix ALM specific to our needs. They also hosted training sessions for our users and administrators and provided us with troubleshooting help during initial setup.
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.
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.
The other tools that we evaluated did not have all of the capabilities and customization that Helix ALM had to offer and therefore we decided to select Helix ALM.
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.
