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Jira makes agile software development management easy
August 17, 2019

Jira makes agile software development management easy

Richard Davies | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with JIRA Software

We use Jira as the product management tool for our agile web team of about 12 people that are doing a major redesign/rebuilding of our city's main website. It's used to plan and track the individual tasks, stories, and bugs assigned to each team member. It also provides helpful reports showing our sprint velocity and other useful metrics.
  • Jira is powerful and flexible. It can be configured and used in a number of ways and for a number of different use cases. But despite that, we've found it easy to use and we were able to use it without much training.
  • For agile-based software development, it makes it easy to manage your backlog, plan sprints, track and manage individual issues, and get reports showing overall team/sprint metrics. All of these features are seamlessly integrated with each other.
  • It integrates well with other developer tools like Github and Slack. For example, this makes it easy to view branches and pull requests related to a specific story or automatically notify your team of important status changes to an issue.
  • Sometimes there are different modes for editing the same piece of data (like an issue's description) depending on how you're viewing that issue. One mode may use a WYSIWYG editor while the other mode uses plain text with Markdown. This is slightly confusing as the user experience isn't consistent.
  • As with most WYSIWYG editors, it can sometimes be difficult to control the formatting the way you want. I've also had issues with it inserting line breaks after hyperlinks sometimes for no apparent reason.
  • As a team switching to an agile-based methodology, it's helped us to follow our desired agile practices and has made it easy manage our processes.
  • It's helped our project to stay on track and has been recognized as a successful pilot with our organization.
  • Other teams within the organization have seen or heard of our success and are now looking to implement some of our same tools and practices, including Jira.
It looks and functions like a modern-day web app with in-place editing, modals, and sliding sidebars, etc. It's generally very easy to use but does have a few minor quirks that may be slightly confusing at times.
I haven't had to interact with their support team, outside of maybe reading some online help or blog articles. So I can't really comment on their support team, but the fact that I haven't needed to use them says quite a lot about the quality and ease of use of this system.
Jira has more features and is more flexible. It has features specifically designed for agile/Scrum-based methodologies which made it very appealing to us.
It's a good project management solution for medium to large teams doing software development or other similar projects. It's worked well for our agile-based development methodology, although I think it can be configured for other methodologies too (although we haven't used it that way). It might be overkill for a small team of 1-4 people and you might find a simpler tool more efficient for your needs.