Item: Atlassian Jira
Rating: 10
Author: Bhargav Nanekalva

Overall Satisfaction with JIRA Software

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

JIRA makes internal project communications, issue and task tracking, assignment and management out of email and Excel in some cases (I've seen few enterprises do it) a breeze. Our team now communicates about an issue via comments, upload files and this keeps discussions better organized. Searching issues in JIRA is very simple and if you are a nerd or a project manager and would like to perform a complex search there is JQL which stands for JIRA Query Language that makes it very powerful to find issues from any timeline.

Pros and Cons

Pros

JIRA Query Language - simple and extremely powerful search for issues.
User and group management - To manage multiple teams and users is very simple as well.
Webhooks and ready to use third party integrations like Slack keeps everyone informed about project updates.
JIRA project work dashboards are very useful and we use it to display on a kiosk where entire team can keep track of issues.
JIRA gives multiple ready to use project types and customisable issue workflow.
Promotes Agile methodology

Cons

UI performance can be improved. It still feels slow even after 5 years of using it.
They could've offered Confluence along with JIRA since it's not reasonable to pay for project documentation separately. We simply use Google docs for that purpose and it's free!
There is a steep learning curve for tech and non-tech users initially.
It's mobile support is still very limited!

Return on Investment

We definitely saved a lot of time that could've been wasted trying to manage project issues and tasks compared to manually, or by email or by using some document.
Learning curve and lack of knowledge in using some of the features set us back a little in taking full advantage of the software.

Alternatives Considered

Trello and Basecamp

I have used Trello and Basecamp in the past for managing few small projects and JIRA is the only one that felt right for a project of any size and for a company of any number of users. The other two will fail as the project gets larger.

Other Software Used

Trello, Basecamp, Redis

Likelihood to Recommend

We are creating efficiencies that allow us to deliver more software products to more customers in less time, growing our business while maintaining excellence in our product. JIRA helps us track through a project's active life, and also run reports and searches that allow us to aggregate data to help us continually improve our processes.

Comments

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