Jira Software vs. Micro Focus Caliber (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

I personally would prefer other products on the market right now such as Microsoft Team Foundation Server and Test Manager. I think having a product like Caliber that can only do requirements without integrating with a another system makes things a little more time consuming.

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

• Borland Caliber tracks functional and non-functional requirements pretty easily. You can easily add a requirement and attach a spreadsheet or a picture if needed.
• Moving the hierarchy of requirements is fairly easy by just dragging and dropping.
• Assigning users to approve requirements is simple by the fields included when adding a requirement and then submitting for review.

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

• I think Borland Caliber visually needs to be updated. It looks very out of date compared to other products on the market. The text box has a notepad feel to it and it's hard to make it visually catching.
• Borland Caliber needs to be easier to integrate with other testing and development products on the market.
• Having fields more related to URS and FRS would be helpful to auto-link to a document. So enter in a URS or FRS document ID at the beginning of a project in Caliber and then auto-assigning requirement IDs to link to pieces of code or test cases and having the user be able to decide a naming convention.
• Borland Caliber needs a specific table for linking to a document ID and then each requirement could auto-generate a sub ID for each requirement to make the process of filling in User Requirements and Functional Requirements more efficient. Then the user should be able to modify the sub ID if the naming convention needed to be different.

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

I think Borland Caliber is better than Atlassian Confluence and has way more options for ease of use and reporting. Team Foundation Server is my personal choice as it comes as a package for developers to link to requirements easily and link to test cases. Borland Caliber is visually the least attractive of the three systems I have used. If you need just a requirement manager for tracking and reporting then Borland Caliber is a great choice.

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

• Having Borland Caliber would be nice if you only need to track requirements and your company does not do any developing or testing.
• It does link very well with HP Quality Center for requirement and test asset tracking and ease of use.
• Borland Caliber is cheaper than a lot of other products on the market that have the same features.

Incentivized