JIRA - not only a bug tracker
December 02, 2015
JIRA - not only a bug tracker
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Atlassian JIRA
Atlassian JIRA is widely used in our organization by almost all departments including Sales, Business Analysis, Product Development, Solution Delivery, Quality Assurance and Customer Support. We have several independent instances of JIRA which are used for different purposes with transparent integration between instances and to and from instances of Atlassian Confluence which is also a highly recommended product.
JIRA is not only a bug tracker in our corporate network but also a task management system for solution delivery, as well as external ticket tracking, task tracking and our requests management system which we use to communicate with customers.
JIRA is not only a bug tracker in our corporate network but also a task management system for solution delivery, as well as external ticket tracking, task tracking and our requests management system which we use to communicate with customers.
- JIRA is a highly customizable tool, almost anything can be adjusted to satisfy various requirements for metrics and charts expected by stakeholders.
- Wide selection of pre-installed tools for reporting allows users to have very useful dashboards for clear data representation (sometimes it's even better that pure Excel with its Pivot Charts).
- Configurable workflow allows us to have separate life cycles for each project, where "Almost Waterflow" is next to Scrum and DevOps.
- While configurable, JIRA requires a certain amount of effort to extend its data schema with new attributes, especially if those attributes need to be calculable or carry some logic behind them - like if you need to calculate the amount of re-opens per ticket throughout the project, it's far from an easy task to do.
- Having quite so many chart options, JIRA still lacks some important ways of data visualization. And there usually comes the almighty "Export to Excel" and Pivots.
- Sometimes it's hard to represent all data points of the lifecycle in the same instance of JIRA, especially when it needs to be done "yesterday" or "abruptly". So we have to use Labels, Components, Fix Versions etc., as anything but what it says just to put everything into the required model of implementation.
- Much better employee efficiency
From my previous experience JIRA is very close to Team Foundation Server in terms of issue and task tracking and I still like Team Foundation Server better. But we're not working with the Microsoft platform in our organization so JIRA is by far the best for our purposes. We are still using another proprietary issue tracking system for some legacy projects but trying to move as much as we can to JIRA.