JIRA Software is an application lifecycle management solution for software development teams. It allows users to create, prioritize and track the progress of tasks across multiple team members, and offers a wide range of integrations. It is offered via the cloud and local servers.
$10
per month
Polarion ALM
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Polarion ALM is an application requirement management software platform now owned and supported by Siemens since the 2015 acquisition. It is available on the cloud (Polarion X) and on-premise. Polarion connect teams and projects to improve application development processes with
a single, unified solution for requirements, coding, testing and release.
We prefer Polarion because of its traceability. Working in documents is very important for many customers. We have the possibility to configure almost everything or extend it with our own solutions.
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.
Large-scale software development projects with multiple teams: Polarion ALM's centralized platform can help teams across different locations and time zones collaborate effectively, ensuring everyone is on the same page. Compliance-focused industries: Polarion ALM's end-to-end traceability and audit trail capabilities can help organizations meet regulatory requirements and reduce the risk of errors. Agile software development: Polarion ALM's support for agile methodologies, such as Scrum and Kanban, can help teams manage and track their work efficiently.
The workflows that are customizable in Polarion are amazing. They have specified workflows for companies that deal with different product lines related to regulatory requirements like medical devices. The ability to enhance "out of the box" workflows helps with risk mitigation immensely without having to allocate so many resources to get it going from ground up.
Reporting - bringing together dashboards with key metrics is an absolute must and leveraging output based on needs from executive level presentations to development metrics is a winner for us. And the drill downs are immensely useful for anyone who wants to get the microscopic view of what drives our success on that nth degree.
Over all Risk Mitigation: Risk based ALM is very important to us. The ability to integrate our regulatory SOPs into our own client defined formats and procedures gives us the leverage to tie in all that traceability I discussed earlier into palpable digests of risk which our company leaders use to drive vision.
Requirements management is an absolute nightmare for most people. Polarion helps us drive requirements on different levels like regualtory, business, user interface, etc. This ties in to all the risk mitigation criteria we so much rely on to make us succeed.
Text editing in that program may be more sophisticated, similar to what you'd find in Word.
Views, like Table, Tree, and Matrix, aren't all that easy to figure out.
Finding items that fit specific criteria using filters is cumbersome and should be made simpler. This is particularly true when filtering numerous documents at once.
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.
There is too much at stake to go into a new system. But with everything else being promised as far as newer more innovative products, the justification to not renew is a huge risk so that is not a concern
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.
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.
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.
Polarion ALM has the best usability, extensibility and reactiv product management. The support is also very good compared to other companies. Or in other words it is closer to the customer. Codebeamer is for sure also a good ALM tool with a great feature set, but existing customers are often neglected. We will see, what PTC as the new owner of codebeamer will change at this point.
Ability to see and act upon risk components related to requirements to test tracing that would have been missed or overlooked especially during regulatory submission.
Always ready reporting for executive management based on trending of product releases before they hit the market.
One negative is the resources required to maintain the tool which for most non large organizations would be a huge overhead.
