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A skeptical JIRA user won over
Updated December 18, 2014

A skeptical JIRA user won over

Adam James | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

4.2

Overall Satisfaction with Atlassian JIRA

JIRA was our ticketing system and Project Management tracking tool. We used JIRA both for incident management and enhancement/deployment tracking. We also used JIRA to pull statistics to determine how quickly dev teams were turning requests around and how quickly support teams were reacting to cases, updating them, and ultimately resolving them. I mostly used JIRA's reporting features to determine where bottlenecks were in our reporting and development structures.
  • JIRA is extremely customizable, especially when compared to Atlassian's other flagship product, Confluence. We were able to tailor a JIRA process flow for every development and support flow that we had, even before JIRA.
  • JIRA reports well. While we did find some holes in what we were able to report on, 90% of what we needed was there and readily accessible once a user was familiar with the reporting structure.
  • JIRA interacts fairly well with other products. We were able to integrate it into Confluence (as it should be), but we were also able to build plug-ins into Outlook, Excel, and our phone system for more advanced functionality.
  • JIRA is far too cumbersome. The learning curve to become proficient was sharp enough to cause several of our less technical people to give up learning how to truly utilize the tool, and keep things very basic. It ended up being handed over to Engineering (me, in particular because of my success with Confluence), and I also found it cumbersome but not really difficult to learn.
  • While not an issue for us, I can see potential for a business to need to tailor their process around JIRA and how JIRA perceives typical ticketing/PM process.
  • There are quirks with how JIRA chooses to think of business process that make the creation of some work flows more difficult and the path to engineer them less than intuitive.
  • Better communication between development and support tiers. - Positive
  • ACCOUNTABILITY!!!!!!!!!!!!! - Positive
  • Consolidation of spreadsheets, emails, word docs, etc. That we used before JIRA to track incidents and initiatives. - Positive
  • Once the business flow is formalized through a tool such as JIRA, corporate politics rears it's head angrier than ever. - Negative, though not a fault of the JIRA solution singularly.
Remedy would be the only product that compares, though Remedy was even more cumbersome, much uglier, much more difficult to pull reports from...basically a poor man's JIRA. JIRA blows the others out of the water due to it's features, visual polish, and relative ease to use once the user is familiar with the product.
It is the only tool that I've used in 10 years of IT that I would think of as a complete support/development ticketing and tracking solution. I have already recommended the JIRA/Confluence combo to another colleague at a large multinational company, and they are trying to implement it now, but with many of the same headaches that my firm had with less technical people. It's not difficult to work with syntax/coding wise, but the logic behind it is the same logic a developer would use (very granular, event driven).

Questions:
1. Are you looking for a ticketing or development solution or both?
2. Who will be creating the business flow and reports? Are they technical or soft skill driven? Who will be maintaining it once implemented?
3. Are you also looking for a corporate Wiki solution? Do you wish for JIRA to interact with it?
4. Are you looking for a "set it and forget it" solution or are you OK with this product being maintained and consistently tweaked?

Using Atlassian JIRA

I do not make decisions at my new company, so it's out of my hands. I will say that we're in dire need of a new Project Tracking suite, but I'm not sure how interested they'd be in building something from the ground up. But, if discussions turn to blowing up our current solution and going in another direction, I will be recommending JIRA, and offering to take lead in it's implementation.

Jira Reliability