JIRA Software

Puntos a favor

1. It is very flexible and fitted really well with agile development work. whether you are using kanban or standard sprint planning work flow, it supports all of those.
2. It is extremely useful to do project planning and creating stories, they will be saved in backlogs and you can access them with weight, estimate and priority.
3. It is quick to create a bug ticket to track bugs.
4. It is very easy to plan for a new sprint, by adding task, stories from the backlogs, it helps with the total points you want to target for a particular sprint, it automatically sum up the story points and make sure you don't over plan.
5. great report tool to help you analyse the project completion and nice burn down chart as well. To help the team retrospectively go back and review.

Puntos en contra

1. It is a big over complex by providing such flexible functionalities. But it is worth the time and learning curve.
2. As a developer, I don't have to pay the bill. But it is not very cheap if you have a large development team, the bills add up quickly.

Puntos a favor

The organisation of tests and the variety of the issue types for testing (Features ,Test cases, Test sets, Test executions, Test plan, bug...)
The ability to track the executions of tests and bugs
Great adaptability with Gherkin and Cucumber
It goes perfectly with ISTQB standards for testing
Perfect for both Scrum and Kanban users
The great boards and views provided by Jira (followup dashboards, sprint board, ..)
The ability to add Xray or Zephir or whatever test plugin that suits you

Puntos en contra

Jira users must receive a training before starting to use the software since it can be a little complex to use the software for the first time
For testers you cannot execute the same test case more than once in the same test execution
It gets more and more difficult when end to end testing multiple applications at the same time

Puntos a favor

The biggest strength that Jira has to offer is how customisable the app is. We're forever fine tuning how how development flows are setup and I've never run into an issue where what we wanted to achieve could not be possible. The workflow editor is pretty straight forward once you figure out how to map these to specific projects and features.

It also has a mammoth number of apps that can integrate with it, which can greatly help simplify your organisations stack. We use a bunch of apps that connect to Jira such as Slack and Git.

The mobile app is pretty good and more simple to use. There's also a new iOS app that you can run on a mac that seems to be a slightly faster and more user friendly version. However, I haven't quite worked out how to tailor the notifications.

The search is very powerful!

Puntos en contra

It is very slow to load pages and jump between stories. When using this on a daily basis it really gets annoying.

When we need to change a setting it's hard to work out where to go. I have to say I've never seen another app quite like Jira which has so many different places to go to in order to change very similar settings.

If someone accidentally creates a ticket with the wrong type the only way to change it is to Move the ticket. And I can't seem to change the status of the ticket at the same time. So often an Open bug ticket becomes an Open feature ticket, which really should still be in Draft.

Puntos a favor

If you are willing to do the work, the advanced search is useful and the user experience isn't bad except that to eliminate done tickets you have to deselect all then re-select every option except those of a done type.

Puntos en contra

Advanced search is the only useful way to reliably get information out, making getting even the smallest view of your data onerous. The core advantage of the tool - it's lack of structure - make it difficult to complete even the simplest of tasks without a ridiculous amount of effort. It's biggest failing is that everything is too flat by default. For example, I am working on a project now and the team has made duplicate tickets because the original tickets are too hard to find and are just dumped on the screen... we have sometimes used epics/stories/sub-tasks with sprints but these are truly inadequate... in today's time why should someone have to spend 20-30 hours a week grooming the backlog and writing searches when if the tool was any good it should (!!) be able generate these views automatically. We are now investigating other solutions like Wrike (absolutely no affiliation, not even sure we will switch to it) and in 10 minutes of testing we were getting views that we have been struggling to get out of JIRA for over a year. Also, you can't do something obvious like make a reminder in the future for a ticket, so you either get flooded with reminders for just about everything or you have to go outside the product to remind you to do something in JIRA. Seriously!?!

Puntos a favor

Jira is a very good platform for organizing your team and projects using Agile/Scrum or Agile/Kanban. Whichever option you will choose you are covered! With its extensible platform through plugins you will never get tired of Jira. The installation is pretty much straightforward and with latest versions you can also make it HA, for instance on AWS, quite easily.

Puntos en contra

Although the product is very mature, feels also like a big giant monolith although its plugin architecture. Also, plugins are too much expensive for just simple features. There should be much control from the Atlassian Marketplace, which should follow more an App Store logic like Apple's or Google's one.