Jira

I had the good fortune of working with JIRA during one of my employment. It was a _very_ powerful system, choc-full of customization, and basically: If you can break something down into a flow(chart), you can use JIRA for it.

Jira is a capable solution for managing agile software development projects. Jira has the ability to create sprints, add stories to a product backlog, prioritize stories and see an overall sprint dashboard that makes it easy to move stories to various states. In addition to story and task management Jira has decent facilities for bug tracking as well and works seamlessly with the rest of the product flow.

Jira is as a project management tool contains all the things you need to run agile methodology. It helps you manage every step of the way of your project development. that is a real pleasure to use, provided you know what you're doing. Though you may have to put in more time and effort that a small business does not have to spare, but for larger firms it's an excellent solution.

I have been a user of Jira for 10+ years and still believe they are the best for agile development teams, project management and product delivery. They are easily integrated with our other systems as well including ZenDesk and Salesforce and code management with BitBucket.

Coming from a sales background it took me a little bit of time to learns the vitals of this extensive system but now that I've grown comfortable with the product I love the level of customization to my specific environment. I love the control I have over assigning tasks and helping them move through the board with collaborative effort.

As Digital Marketing Manager of Zestard Technologies, my overall experience with Jira is excellent. It is a simple tool to create and assign tasks, track teams effort and maintain projects status. It enables users to create project roadmaps to map out all projects in progress. The project board includes a drag-and-drop option that allows teams to manage every project detail. Some pros and cons are:

Pros:

• A better vision of the project for the team
• Customizable options, Kanban and Scrum boards, can be modified as per the project
• Easy task allocation and tracking, from both Managers and team members
• Allows the user to create and edit a file and easily access the page
• Integration with other applications used by the project is simple
• Easy filtration options and report generation for project statuses
• Offers extensive add-ons and pre-created templates for those just learning the service

Cons:

• If the team member released from a project, he/she has no option to request through Jira to unsubscribe from getting emails related to projects
• Inbox gets clumsy with all the comments and action performed by the team members
• Too many features of this software sometimes can create a complexion

I haven't used Jira for a couple of years now but found that at the time using it in a distributed team there was nothing that came close to it. Since the large project I was working on ceased and as an Owner of Ace Web Design, I found that I didn't particularly need the complexity that Jira brought to the table, which was absolutely necessary for a large distributed project but not really needed for the smaller projects I work with today.
Pros - Excellent workflow stages, flexibility and ability to have transparency at a level that you choose.
Cons - Long learning curve. Overly sophisticated and not suited for smaller projects.

To be quite honest, my freelance team of GetVoIP and I find JIRA too cumbersome for its own good. There are too many notifications attached to each ticket. Rather than enhancing how well items are tracked, this clutter in the inbox leads to items that fall through the cracks and are lost.

Jira Software makes it really easy for my team members at Maple Holistics to create and collaborate on new software projects. It’s a good way to delegate jobs, plan, and keep track of everyone’s tasks in relation to the main list of things that need to get done. It also gives you real-time data so you can work with confidence that your information is accurate and relevant. And you can personalize the system to work with the needs of your individual team while incorporating tools that your team already uses.

Pros: Mobile Application

Cons: Too buggy, too heavy, too complicated

Overall Experience: IMHO this is not the best solution, I would not recommend, but our boss like it :)

Pros: We can track Repo commit from It, it is also integrated with Chat Software, We can track the development status via charts etc etc

Cons: Sometimes its little Slow

Pros: It contains the industry standard.

Cons: It is difficult to explain to new developers.

Overall Experience: Okay when you know what to do.

Pros: Industry Standard

Cons: License Model