JIRA Software Project Managment Tool
Jira is a software application used for issue tracking and project management. The tool, developed by the Australian software company Atlassian, has become widely used by agile development teams to track bugs, stories, epics, and other tasks.
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Jira Software use cases
Jira Software is a customizable workflow engine. It allows users to track issues, bugs, tasks, and other work items through a predefined workflow that users can modify to fit their requirements. It has several use cases:
Bug tracking
Teams primarily use Jira for tracking bugs on software and apps as they develop the products. It enables teams to find, record, and track bugs. It also provides a system to assign them to the right person or team at the right time.
Product and project management
As a product and project management software, it allows users to assign the needed tasks to complete the product or project. It also has tools such as views and reports that provide the information about due dates and statuses. The team is able to collaborate with each other, provide feedback, as well as manage approvals for requests or changes.
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Kanban software development
Jira includes flexible Kanban boards to give users full visibility into what the team has completed, what they are currently working on, and what else they need to do. Using the Kanban system to develop software allows the team to properly prioritize their work, visualize the workflow, and minimize work-in-progress.
Scrum software development
Agile teams use it to develop software using the Scrum method. They are able to stay focused on their iterations at a fast pace. Customizable scrum boards enable them to deliver incremental value in an organized way.
Project tracking and management
Jira is a preferred project tracking and management system by software developers and IT teams. It supports both traditional and agile project management. It centralizes the solution and provides a highly customizable interface. Its workflows allow users to control the status of the project and how it transitions to other statuses, providing excellent tracking information.
Jira Disadvantages and Cons
Many agile teams enjoy Jira benefits in how the software support the way they work. But some users continue to look for alternatives due to the experience they have with the software.
Not the best mobile app
Jira users are more than satisfied with its web version, but not so much with its mobile app. They complain of going through tedious navigation to do various tasks. In contrast, they can all do these actions smoothly in the web version.
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Complex integration and migration
Users who have to integrate or migrate from other application lifecycle management (ALM) systems have a hard time with Jira. Migrating a project, for example, from Microsoft Team Foundation Server into Jira involves manually migrating each artifact into Jira, which is very time consuming.
Reports are not reusable
Users are not able to download Jira graphical reports as images. Using other methods alter the resolution of the images, resulting in poor images.
Limited file size upload
Users complain that the default file size limit of 10MB is too small. Uploading a photo, video, or document more than 10MB creates problems. The maximum attachment size per file can be set higher, but this requires Administrator privileges as well as consideration of maximum storage available to a user’s plan.
Confusing UI
Some people find the user interface a bit cluttered, and filtering tools are not the easiest to use. Also, some find the configurations confusing, where users have to browse a lot of options to find exactly what they need to set.
For those who want to search for other options, check out our Top 3 Software Alternatives to Jira Software.
Jira Advantages and Pros
Jira remains to be a viable solution among development teams. Businesses of various sizes across industries are able to further their cause, methodologies, and disciplines with the help of the software.
Supports roadmap requirements
Jira has tools that enable users to sketch out the big picture, communicate plans, and connect the bigger project roadmap goals to the team’s everyday tasks. Teams can roll up their work to bigger goals, track the big picture, get ahead of dependencies, and plan with the team capacity in mind.
Great for agile
The software provides a single view for all user stories and can generate the needed reports for various sprints, such a burndown charts, sprint velocity, and others. Also, users can organize tickets into sprints and releases while they monitor workload and task assignments of the team.
Available integration
The issue and project tracking software integrates with many popular third party software. For example, integration with Hipchat and Slack makes it easy to communicate issues and respond to notifications. More than 3,000 apps are available at the Atlassian Marketplace to extend the features of the software.
Highly customizable
Jira allows users to create any type of issue. They can customize workflows to fit any requirement of a particular company. Users can create and customize various elements, such as tables, forms, timelines, reports, and fields.
For different types of users
Jira users include developers, project managers, engineers, managers, and other non-tech business professionals. Customers across industries apply the solution to achieve a variety of goals such as traveling to space, and building futuristic innovations.
Try Jira Software for your project tracking?
The market for bug tracking software continues to grow as more organizations adopt project management, agile methods, and issue tracking as an essential business strategy. Jira Software is one of the best issue and project tracking software available today, with great support for agile. It offers thousands of plugins to extend its features, as well as an on-premise option. However, it is not the only option to track bugs, issues, and tasks. Users need to weigh Jira’s strengths and weaknesses and how all these fit their business needs as they manage their projects.
