I highly highly recommend it - its an amazing product and the team behind it provides great support and rapid response. They're also highly supportive of charity and open-source organizations - if you ask nicely, they'll give you an enterprise license to their products for free!
What makes JIRA great?
- Completely web based
- Highly customizable, including allowing for custom fields for each task type
- Configuration notifications via email on changes to tasks. We currently use this to notify the assigned user and the reporter of a task when changes are made to their task.
- Stupid simple to use - it takes about 30 seconds to create a task and about a minute to train an end user on how to use it.
- Everything is permission based, so you can allow people to view status of issues but not allow them to change them for example.
- Java based, runs in Tomcat on just about any kind of machine.
- The database is flexible. We use SQL Server, but it will support MySQL, Oracle, Postgres, etc.
- You can use it for everything throughout the development life cycle. We start using JIRA right at the requirements gathering stage to collect user stories and then translate them into functional tasks during development. Then as we transition to QA, we mark each task as resolved and QA tests and closes them. QA can then add bugs as tasks and re-assign them to the developers.
- From a project management perspective, the tool provides a centralized view of the entire team - its very easy to see all the tasks assigned to a single person, group, component, project, etc. and then re-assign with a few clicks.
- Its simple enough that non-technical users can benefit from it. We're currently using it to track marketing tasks, HR requests, IT helpdesk tasks, etc. as well as software changes. It's that flexible.
I've been using JIRA on multiple software projects for a few years now and would highly recommend it as a solution for managing tasks, bugs, features, etc. in a complex environment.
Even if you're a commercial company, the price for JIRA is totally worth it - licenses are $1200-$4,800US depending on the version you need.
7 comments:
You know what's even better than JIRA is Axosoft's OnTime (http://www.axosoft.com). They have all the features of JIRA and then some and provide windows/web/hosted versions. For smaller teams, it's cheaper too and it's free for single-users (both hosted and installed). We evaluated both JIRA and OnTime and hands down, OnTime wins.
Hey Chris, just finished reading your post. Thanks for the killer write-up on JIRA!
Thank you for your great posting about using JIRA! We also use JIRA and Confluence. We've figured out how to store JIRA tasks with the project documentation in Confluence. We would be interested in more information about how you've set up JIRA to "collect user stories and then translate them into functional tasks during development" - do you have a specific issue type called User Story (or similar)? Are the "functional req." created as sub-tasks of the user story?
Thank you for any additional information!
I personally find JIRA a little overwhelming. But maybe that's just me. I now rely on BugWiki, a super-simple bug tracker with no install and virtually no learning to do. Very limited, but very low overhead at the same time. https://www.bugwiki.com
For me, workflow is an importnat aspect of issue tracking throughout the whole software life cycle. We Moved away from jira as we felt it was overkill on the workflow and clunky for our clients. We wanted something a little more agile for both us and our clients.
We've now moved to an issue tracker called fixx which complements our workflow and our staff love it as it works along side basecamp with the same look and feel and simplicity.
The guys behind this provide real good support too. Installation was painless and they answers all the questions i had before i bought it.
We tried other issue trackers too but integration with basecamp and import from a number of other popular issue trackings won it for me.
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software defect tracking tool
I am aware of Jira. But not with the other tool that you have mentioned. For a pretty longer period I was stuck with Jira. But with the introduction of Replicon's task management software (http://www.replicon.com/olp/task-management-software.aspx) by my friend, I overcome Jira with the same. You can try out considering that as well.
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