Complete, Concise and Full Fledged!
Overall Satisfaction with JIRA Service Desk
In the past company I was working for [and a few others as well] we had used Jira as our main tool for issuing new features, as well as bug tracking. We kept a Kanban board and a well aligned agile philosophy throughout the company so our tasks were in a very transparent manner being tracked and taken care of. Jira possesses a big set of very curated [and necessary] tools to aid our whole task management process.
Before Jira we had tested a couple of other tools that were supposed to take care of the same nature of tasks, they were all MIT opensource solutions, all too often falling short of a 'full fledged' task and team organization tool. Jira does that job greatly and in a very elegant manner. It took us only a couple of hours to separate our teams and provide our board of directors some very good reports all displayed in a straight-forward dashboard whereby they could easily evaluate our progress and figure out whether the company goals were being met or not.
Every department - although not every one used Scrum - used Jira for their own tasks and had their own way of keeping track of their tasks by using Jira in a very successful way.
- Issue tracking in a simple and direct manner. Anyone across the company can easily report a new bug and it gets directly delivered to the responsible team without any hassle.
- Multi-flavored: one can chose whether he/she is going to use Kanban, scrumboard, a simple ToDos board or whatever may best fit the team's organization.
- Dashboards: lots of good dashboards, both for directors and staff. One can have a simple way to access one's progress with an easy to customize dashboard page.
- Social-network like features whereby a feature or a bug can be further discussed by everyone involved in the given process and contribute with that in a more collaborative way.
- Not too easy to install. One can get easily distracted with its installation 'wizard' and end up configuring an embedded database instead of a proprietary one, as well as not setting another thing accordingly.
- It should accept Oauth for authentication. Sometimes we would like a customer to be part of the bug issuing process, without having to configure a user just for him/her. Perhaps if OAuth was accepted, then we could - in a user controlled/moderated setup - have our tasks being commented by users. They can give us a lot of good insights.
- Issue Work-Flow: sometimes an issue has a more generic nature. So, instead of having just written-to-stone classifications for the issues, one should also be able to rank it by tag, or something of the sort. Also, for deciding to have a certain bug closed, terminated, solved, it can sometimes get a little too gray to see whether a bug should be closed because it was solved or not. Perhaps a little more work on it could be of great benefit for anyone.
- Jira does have some steep learning curve and requires a little bit of time so the team or the company when it's the case, to adapt to its way of doing things. During that adaptation period, things seem a bit too bureaucratic with Jira, so one might find a bit of resistance of the involved peers for quite a few days, whence, bringing the overall productiveness down.
- Once the team is used to Jira, things get faster and amazingly easy to track. Managers stop coming directly to the staff just to ask how the progress of some issue is going and start referring and using more and more Jira, thus becoming an indispensable tool at the company.
- Jira is a reliable and also an enjoyable tool to use, as well as very accessible one. We've noticed that the team started to access it from their homes in order to give some touch ups on some tasks' descriptions, to set an issue to a completed status, and other general usage, thus increasing the staff's eagerness to be part of the process they were involved.
Jira is the full-fledged task, bug and issue management tool. One can have his way with other tools, but there is going to have to be a whole lot of compromising. With Jira, one does not need to compromise, for as soon as its learning curve is achieved, one can have all he wants and in a very simple and curated way. Jira is complete, fun and reliable to use.
I've used Bitbucket, which is of course a mini-free-jira tool, so it's good for small and personal projects, at best.
Trello is too only scrum focused. I can't really see much further than just using it for scrum.
Slack is a good way of keeping the team involved, but it does not offer a way of attaching the strings from one end to another.