With JIRA, there's no shortage of ways to stay in the loop. Whether you prefer to receive updates via email, chat, or by checking in on your mobile device, JIRA has you covered. At your desk or on the go with the new mobile interface, JIRA helps your team get the job done.
Issues are everywhere: Tasks, ideas, and requests are hiding in documents, people's heads, and deep in your inbox. Use JIRA to capture and organize your team's issues, prioritize and take action on what's important, and stay up to date with what's going on around you. JIRA makes all of this easy, so your team can spend less time managing the work and more time building great software.
Work the way you want: Your process is at the heart of everything you do. Don't shoehorn your team's work into the default workflow defined by your project tracker. JIRA has workflows to match your existing processes, that you can easily adapt as your team evolves. Use the tool that fits your team, don't change your team to fit your tool.
Productive, powerful planning: Teams that need to be effective and efficient choose JIRA to help them capture, assign, and prioritize their work. Ensure that everyone on your team knows exactly what needs to be done when, then watch the job get done flawlessly. And when you add the power of agile to JIRA – with the JIRA Agile add-on – you can even plan agile sprints!
Collaborate easily: On any team, it's important that people can easily share information and reach out for help when they need it. JIRA's simple, intuitive interface allows you to collaborate with teammates and get the job done more efficiently. If you think that's awesome, you'll love it even more when you combine JIRA's @mentions and assignment features with the power of Confluence and HipChat.
Visibility at the speed of light: Watch the issues that are most important to you, monitor activity streams, and share information with powerful dashboards, wallboards, and more. With JIRA, you'll always know what's going on.
Collect, service, and report: With JIRA Service Desk, the JIRA platform becomes a modern, flexible service desk experience that streamlines customer requests and boosts your IT team's efficiency.
Agile project management: These days, just keeping track of your work isn't enough – you've got to be agile. JIRA Agile adds agile project management to the power of JIRA.
Pros
I have been working on an Agile Project and I would say this is the best tool for the below reasons,
* Better visualization of the project roadmap for the team.
*Customizable options, Kanban and Scrum boards that can be modified as per the project and fields to be displayed, columns on board for the flow of tickets, etc..
* Easy task allocation and tracking, from both Manger's and team members view.
* Allows the user to create/edit respective items, for example making file and screenshot attachments just a click away.
* Integration with other apps used by the project is simple. Namely apps like TestRail & Confluence.
* Best part is the backlog, which helps to create/track ticket then and there when required and work on it in future.
* Viewing logs is easy as every action is tracked.
* Easy filtering options and report generation for project statuses.
* Filter out tickets release-wise, helpful for regression.
Cons
For the simplicity of the application, I could hardly think of any major negative points.
I faced this situation so just sharing it. If the team member is released from a project he/she has no option to request via.JIRA to dissociate from the Project Board/unsubscribe from getting emails related to the ex-project. Inbox gets loaded with all the comments and action performed by the ex-team members.
My experience with Jira has been fantastic. Overall, once a team gets used to the 'ticketing' structure, there are a lot of organizational efficiencies that can be gained. The standardization of ticketing can help teams navigate through areas of need and allocate resources from other projects if ahead of schedule. Jira works phenomenally as a tool to help manage projects both large and small. I have helped test and implement projects that have utilized Jira as the primary project management tool and believe that it is a state-of-the-art solution. Overall, I cannot recommend this service enough!
Pros
I use Jira for Project Management in my occupation. As a worker in a large enterprise, Jira does a phenomenal job of creating a fantastic user experience for both desktop and mobile. I think mobile project management is especially intuitive with this service. Where Jira stands apart from other standard project management tools is in its ability to track issues throughout an entire development lifecycle. Tickets are an essential component to keeping work organized and teams moving forward. The ability to collaborate via comments is unparalleled. Jira also offers extensive add-ons and pre-created templates for those just learning the service. When tracking projects, I never felt overly-encumbered by high learning curves or a clunky interface. Jira allowed me to work with many of the tools I am comfortable with and expand my potential.
Cons
From my experience, the largest pain-point / decision point between my team is on the issue of creating 'tickets'. While Jira is a very detail oriented application, this detail can sometimes become quite cumbersome. For example, the process of creating and resolving tickets can sometimes feel even longer than completing the task itself. Furthermore, it is difficult, if not impossible to close a ticket if you are not the creator. Therefore, project managers need to carry significant oversight as task statuses change. Therefore, tickets are very controversial but also an essential component to completing work successfully on this platform.
It took time to get buy-in from the entire IT department to fully utilize JIRA. However, now that the whole department is all-in, JIRA has truly made our work effort much easier. We now have internal business partners who utilize JIRA to review work status, set priorities, and create new tickets when issues/upgrades present themselves. With an organization our size, I can't imagine not utilizing something like JIRA...not sure how we did it all in the past.
Pros
The best part about JIRA is the ability to keep track of all work being done via tickets. I love that JIRA works for all kinds of styles of work. We work within an Agile environment, with some teams using Scrum and other teams using Kanban. No matter how the team is structured, they utilize JIRA tickets. This is great because there is a single repository for all work being done and we can easily search for tickets across all the different teams. The use of Epics vs. Stories is very easy too. We can keep track of what tickets belong to which effort with ease and show the progress of work through the tickets. We can also easily maintain a backlog of tickets. If two separate people submit a similar ticket (or at least two tickets that reference the same work effort), we can combine those tickets easily so that we aren't feeling overwhelmed with more tickets than actual work.
Cons
The biggest debate among our team members is when it is necessary to create a ticket. JIRA has created a culture of needing to log every little thing, even if it takes just a moment to complete the work. Sometimes, it takes longer to create the ticket than to complete the task at hand. That tells me there is too much reliance on JIRA to report work completed. It causes some in management to show that their department is succeeding simply by the number of tickets completed. But the tickets don't tell the whole story, especially because there isn't a time component to those tickets being completed.
A very strong tool for development projects, which covers so much more than just project management. Thanks to Jira, you can track issues over the whole development life cycle. Entire project layout is possible with infinite iterations, including planning and backlogs. The variety of collaboration tools involved (like comments) is unmatched by all other tools I’ve used. The project progress is easily tracked, plus you can track then across releases. Jira offers full reports on both progress and performance.
Pros
One of the best features I’ve found in Jira is the Workflow editor – I’ve never seen anything like it despite my extensive experience. Some people would say it’s not even that important, however, for growing businesses it’s something you can’t do without. Lots of task tracking is needed all at once, as you can never predict what necessities will arise in a growing company. Jira provides great help with all these issues. Sprints can be structured across multiple tandem-working teams, taking into account their wishes and preferences – either for traditional setups or for newer ones.
Cons
Honestly, one thing that was really off-putting for me was the impressively complex layout. The project list is simply huge, and you have to take some time to grasp the navigation and search features. Perhaps, in the next update the developer needs to add the possibility to tag or somehow categorize or classify projects more clearly to make them easily searchable. Otherwise, it takes a bit too much time. The dashboard is simple, but I don’t much like the visualization for reports. You also can’t assign tickets to several people at the same time. Only the person who created the ticket has the authorization to close it, which is quite bothersome. You can’t create columns or tables, and notes exist only for text input. I would also like to see a feature where you can generate turnaround time for ticket closure in an automatic way using reports. Plus if you have a bad Internet connection, there are issues with loading contents (sometimes the loading even stops altogether).
In a few words JIRA is a task tracking software that makes life easier when working on a project.
Once the initial setup is in place (easy to do for common scenarios ) all is left for an administrator is to manage the list of projects and user accounts.
Note that parts of the process (e.g.: customizing workflows) need to be done up-front, since this will become more complex once one or more projects are configured and in-use
As for usability, it is one of the best tracking systems I've ever used: as a developer/QA you can easily update the status of your work in a user-friendly way. As a manager, you can always get the overview you need by just opening a screen or a report (most of what you need is in place by default)
What's best about it is that as long as it is installed on-premises, it can be used as a central point of information for everyone involved with a project. The fact that it can be integrated with other common software industry tools adds further benefit from this.
In the end, I should probably add that I've been using all kinds of bug tracking systems for about 15 years (starting with ancient tools like redmine going through PivotalTracker or VersionOne or JIRA) and almost all of them were either missing features that I deemed important or "spartan" usage/layouts that constraint the usage.
JIRA just provides everything that's needed in completing a project out-of-the-box (whether it's Agile, Waterfall or Kanban or whatnot)
Pros
- Overviews & quick access to information
- Possibility to integrate with most commonly used systems (it integrates with pretty much all mainstream tools, nut just the ones from Atlassian) - you can integrate it even with continuous integration tools or test management tools (e.g. TestRails)
- Security control (everything is fine grained, tools to configure fine-grain access are already integrated
- Comes out of the box with the most common work scenarios (client onside/offsite, development only/development + product management, etc)
- Reporting (easy to extract the things that matter (whether this is worked hours or development velocity)
- Version management (easy to manage what features are grouped in a release, or what fixtures were done for which version)
- Workflows can be customized to match just about any real-life usage scenario
- Allows for both on-premises (self-hosted) installation and cloud usage.
- Configurable dashboards
Cons
- Pricing - it is prohibitively expensive for small companies, although they are making steps to minimize this with the new pricing models (e.g.: a few years ago they started allowing up to 5 accounts per project and unlimited projects, for a fixed yearly fee).
JIRA Software offers flexible pricing.
Small teams: $10/month for up to 10 users
Growing teams: $7 per user/month for 11-100 users
JIRA is a cross platform issue and bug tracking software with advanced project management capabilities and features. JIRA is suitable for any company size and is extremely valuable to all collaborating teams, stakeholders and project managers. JIRA helps your team share information and engage others seamlessly, display issues on agile boards with custom agile workflows, enforce kanban work in progress limits and check their efficiency planning and assign members with certain tasks, work together with colleagues using joint-editing tools and monitor the team’s progress and updates of each task.
Moreover, JIRA boasts a feature-rich service desk implementation that allows each department to collect customer requests instantly, and arrange them in priority queues that improve the productivity of the team and happiness of customers. Additionally, JIRA offers advanced source code integration along with a huge set of add-ons that can be conveniently found in Atlassian’s Marketplace.
JIRA brings a team’s resources and knowledge assets under the same collaborating platform. This makes the team more efficient and minimizes the employees’ efforts to complete simple every day tasks. Complex activities that require the participation of personnel from different departments is easier when everyone uses JIRA.
The agile project management features in JIRA offer a first-class opportunity for supervisors and managers to locate roadblocks that undermine the overall productivity of the team and take focused action and identify areas for improvement.
JIRA’s value and usability are greatly enhanced through its mobile platforms. Whether you are using Android or iOS JIRA remains accessible in a whole set of ways while you’re on the go.
Using the JIRA app, you can access issues and bugs that are reported, and display them using custom filters. All reports are accompanied by comments and attachments like screenshots to help users fully understand the issue. A bug or issue can be assigned to a developer right from the mobile device.
JIRA Service Desk offers a clean and intuitive on-line customer portal for the clients that need help. They can just find what they need through easy to understand interface that will guide them to online help or to the most appropriate person to resolve their request.
After the requests reach the service department, engineers take over assignments and start working on the tasks.
A queue system automatically categorizes and prioritizes requests according to custom settings. A number of queues are available out of the box, but more can be added by users at any time. Service license agreements (SLAs) and the automatically generated metrics will provide you with detailed real-time reports, helping you assess progress and efficiency of your team.
JIRA Agile is aimed to help software development teams collaborate better. Using agile planning processes, teams can deliver functioning software earlier and stay flexible when requirements change. JIRA supports agile through various practices such as kanban and scrum. Visibility is the one thing that collaborating teams usually miss from their workflow, and that is exactly what JIRA Agile comes to fulfill.
You may plan in detail and do estimations with unparalleled accuracy. All bugs, tasks, and actions can be drag-n-dropped for users to perform easy prioritization or change sprints. At the end of the sprint, JIRA creates extensive reports with graphs and rich information which highlight the work done and the unfinished tasks that should be moved to the backlog or the next sprint.
Teams can use JIRA to manage the reporting, fixing and reviewing of software bugs in an efficient and integrated way. Developers can take assignments from shared dashboards and agile boards inside of JIRA. From there, Stash git repositories and Bamboo can be used to connect commits and test results back to the issue. All this can be done without the need of ever leaving JIRA.
If you need more Git or Mercurial repositories, you can utilize the integration with Atlassian’s Bitbucket that will allow you to spend more time coding instead of dealing with issue and merging handling. The popular GitHub is also supported by JIRA and the connection can be done with the use of just the DVCS connector.
Users of JIRA will find that Atlassian’s Marketplace is the place to be when looking for extended functionality, or just for opportunities that you may never have thought of. It includes a vast collection of over 400 add-ons. There are admin tools, chart drawing tools, dashboard gadgets, themes, and styles etc. Over 61% of them are free of charge.
Besides the add-ons, here you will also find the very valuable workflow templates. You may search among a vast collection to find something suited to your needs, or create your own tailored workflow and upload it to the Marketplace for everyone’s benefit.
JIRA integrates well with a large number of related software to further expand the usability and utilization of the software in any usage scenario. Besides integrating with other Atlassian software tools like Confluence and Stash, developers have managed to achieve good integration with other software tools.
Some of the most notable examples include the popular revision control tool Github, the widely used Gliffy diagram editor, the Affinity Live and SalesForce CRMs, and the AtTask and Clarizen development tools.
JIRA offers three solutions. The basic package can accommodate 10 users and costs $10 monthly. The second package includes JIRA agile which will help developers and costs $20 per month, and the third package which costs the same is intended for Service Desks so it has the respective add-on enabled. Teams may count more than 10000 members if the software is hosted in the company’s servers and this will cost 24000$, 28000$ and 42000$ for the three packages, or up to 2000 members if it is hosted in the Atlassian Cloud with the price in this case ranging from 1000$ to 1500$.
Although JIRA is commercial software, it can be used for free and without limitation from organizations that are non-profit, non-government, non-academic, non-commercial, non-political and secular. Open Source projects also meet the criteria to get a free user license for JIRA.
Below are some frequently asked questions for JIRA Software.
JIRA Software offers the following pricing plans:
Starting from: US$10,00/month
Pricing model: Subscription
Free Trial: Available
JIRA Software offers flexible pricing.
Small teams: $10/month for up to 10 users
Growing teams: $7 per user/month for 11-100 users
JIRA Software offers the following features:
JIRA Software has the following typical customers:
Large Enterprises, Mid Size Business, Non Profit, Public Administrations, Small Business
JIRA Software supports the following languages:
Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish
JIRA Software has the following pricing plans:
Subscription
JIRA Software supports the following devices:
Android, iPhone, iPad
JIRA Software integrates with the following applications:
AppFusions, Get Satisfaction, Innotas, LeanKit, SpiraTeam, Testuff, Usersnap, Workfront, Zendesk, time cockpit
JIRA Software offers the following support options:
FAQs, Forum, Knowledge Base, Online Support, Phone Support, Video Tutorials
Overall, experience with JIRA is just awesome.
Simple tool to maintain the team's effort and Project's status on a single page, Project boards.
Would blindly recommend JIRA for simple and complex Agile projects.
Happy Project Tracking :)