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Get agile with JIRA Software
August 12, 2019

Get agile with JIRA Software

Elissa Bernstein | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with JIRA Software

Multiple teams within our organization use JIRA Software, including Product Content Strategy, Product Design, Product Education, Product Research, Front End, and Dashboard. Each team uses JIRA a bit differently, and each team's "project" is therefore set up a bit differently, but all of us follow a kanban agile structure. JIRA helps us stay on top of our tasks, view progress, and ensure all necessary work gets done on time.
  • JIRA offers a lot of integrations that really improve our work. For example, the Salesforce integration makes it really easy to link Salesforce product roadmap cards (relevant to the entire product team) to an individual JIRA issue (one specific task-relevant to that team).
  • JIRA offers very good search and filter functionality. The quick filters make it very easy to immediately see only my own issues. You can create custom views, which are especially helpful for my team during our daily standup, allowing us to only see relevant issues.
  • JIRA issues come with lots of customizable fields. Due dates, assignees, labels, priority level, epic link, etc. -- makes it very easy to organize and find specific issues.
  • Our team happens to have many steps within the workflow, and therefore we have more columns than other teams. JIRA Software always displays all columns in one static view. Because we have so many columns, each column becomes very skinny and the issues can be difficult to parse. We can't reduce our number of columns, so I wish we had the option to side-scroll instead of fitting all columns into the current browser size.
  • We would love the ability to create CLEAR multiple statuses within a column. You can create multiple statuses for a column, but they all appear together and are difficult to distinguish. It isn't possible to move an issue from one status to a different status within the same column. You have to drag the issue into a different column, then drag it back into your chosen status, or change the status using the issue dropdown option.
  • A minor nitpick, but I wish I could create an issue and immediately put it into our "To Do" column. Instead, it automatically goes into our backlog. Then I have to go to a different page to move the issue from backlog to To Do.
  • JIRA Software streamlines communication between different teams -- I can look at other teams' JIRA projects to see the status of individual issues without having to directly ask any colleagues.
  • JIRA exponentially improves our team's productivity. We have a daily standup where we go over our JIRA project, and this allows us to focus on slow-moving tickets and identify blockers. It really helps to see the issue "physically" moving down the line, closer and closer to finish.
  • JIRA improves our team's visibility. Often it feels like our work goes under the radar, but with JIRA, other teams can track our progress and view our contributions to new features.
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.
I have not had a chance to contact JIRA's customer support. It does offer extensive documentation, although it often feels too technical for me. There is also a JIRA training app that lets you take little lessons and quizzes on different areas (e.g., JIRA basics, agile). I did find it a helpful way to teach myself.
Trello is friendlier and simpler to use than JIRA, but the tradeoff is that JIRA offers way more granular functionality. For our highly technical team, JIRA ended up being a better fit. I've also used Asana at a previous company and really liked it. I found it more user-friendly and fun than JIRA, but that was a much smaller team with fewer technical needs.
Despite my frustrations with our team's specific setups, I have to say that JIRA is truly a wonderful project management tool for large teams and companies. If your team is very small, simpler software would probably meet your needs. But JIRA offers so many features, giving you granular control over every element of your board, and integrating seamlessly with Confluence and Salesforce. JIRA has become the hub of our product team.