The winning combination for your software development team: JIRA + Agile
August 12, 2019

The winning combination for your software development team: JIRA + Agile

Cristian Bodnarasec | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with JIRA Software

We use JIRA as a project management and a bug tracking tool for most of the company projects. Whether it is software development, ASIC design or IP development, JIRA fits all flavors. For software development, we use it mainly for its agile scrum and Kanban development support. We realized that switching to Agile with JIRA was a winning combination to increase productivity, together with having more homogeneous teams and same mindset across team members.

Pros

  • Easy to use bug tracking features.
  • It has a great support for Agile SCRUM and Kanban software development methodologies.
  • Promotes collaboration within the team and across teams.
  • It is extremely configurable and allows a system admin to address complex project management requirements.

Cons

  • There is a steep learning curve for JIRA administrators before the full potential of the tool can be harnessed.
  • The licensing system is per number of users. If you buy a small license and the tool is widely adopted, you may have an issue in getting your budget approved in a low cost environment, because the price for higher tiers goes up quickly.
  • Support can use some improvement. It happened few times that for critical issues we had to spend a lot of time exchanging emails and explaining to different people where the problem was.
  • It really improved our productivity and therefore decreased the time to market of our deliveries by 40%.
  • It improved the collaborative work inside the team.
  • Helped building the scrum mindset in the team.
  • It helped replacing the various bug tracking tools used across the company to just one.
JIRA user interface is easy to use and provides a nice user experience. Its integration with the other Atlassian tools like Confluence, Bamboo and Bitbucket makes it the one place to go for your project management/bug tracking needs.
For JIRA administrators like myself, it takes a while until they learn everything especially when they need to address complex requirements for different departments.
Atlassian's support is lake any other support of a big company, slow and demanding. Initial consultant assigned to look at your issue doesn't have too much knowledge and he/she may waste your time until it is escalated and people with more knowledge about the system will take a look at the problem and provide a fix/workaround.
There are two advantages that Bugzilla has over JIRA:
1. Being open source (read free)
2. Having a feature that few of my users desperately need: clone a issue to multiple projects at once

Other than these two things, JIRA is better than Bugzilla in all aspects. It is the best choice for any company that looks at increasing the productivity, collaboration between team members and different teams, and subsequently reducing the time to market for projects or new features.
JIRA is best suited for a bug tracking tool. It has everything you need and more. If you find something you need and isn't there, either you go the the marketplace and install a plugin or even develop the customization yourself. APIs are available and the ability to develop plugins and custom scripting to insert in the workflows.
You could use it for project management as well, for task assignment, resources management, deliveries etc. However, you may find other tools that excel at this compared to JIRA.

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