5 reasons why we chose Atlassian JIRA for our agile project tracking

JIRA for project management – 5 reasons why we chose it

Every IT company on this planet goes through this decisive moment – the moment when you have to choose the right project management software. It’s funny how this little decision is fundamental for the whole business; you choose one little program that will be the backbone of your workflow for years. Yes, you heard right – for years. Do you have any idea how hard it is to change people’s habits, especially in the workplace?

 

Let’s face it – sooner or later you will have to make that same decision. I can’t stress enough how important this decision will be. There are tons of project management solutions on the market, but we decided to go with JIRA for project management. Why is that? Here are our top five picks!

 

#1 It’s mature and proven

JIRA is an issue tracker developed by Atlassian in 2002. Atlassian’s customer list is extremely impressive and it includes over 40,000 companies of all shapes and sizes. JIRA Agile debuted six years ago and since then has developed as a major offering for agile-driven teams. There are lots of people familiar with the tool, and the community is large and active.

 

#2 It’s extremely customizable

Since it’s used in different industries for different purposes (issue tracking, project management, support), JIRA has evolved into a feature-rich, highly customizable solution. Issue types, fields, states and workflows have sensible defaults that can be changed to suit your needs. JIRA Agile, popular JIRA addon, provides Scrum and Kanban support for jira for project management out of the box. We use the hybrid approach, known as Scrumban, which combines both approaches, as neither solution fits our needs. Nevertheless, we were able to customize JIRA to suit our needs by creating custom issue schemes and workflows. It works like a charm, is really powerful and it just helps us a lot in our everyday development struggles.

 

#3 Powerful JIRA for project management product family

An issue tracker is simply not enough to meet modern software development management requirements. We were also looking for a wiki (Confluence), CI (Bamboo) and DVCS (Stash) management tools. Having a whole ecosystem of integrated tools brings long term benefits. The ability to create and track issues from Confluence pages, view Git commits and build status related to a particular JIRA issue works out of the box.

#4 Extensibility, including time tracking JIRA tool

JIRA is an enterprise solution and as such comes with powerful integration possibilities. We use Slack on a daily basis, so the obvious move was to have JIRA updates pushed to our Slack channel, and now we enjoy real time notifications on JIRA issue events.

Atlassian runs a marketplace as well, where you can find free and paid plugins providing extensions to JIRA and other Atlassian products. JIRA alone has almost a thousand plugins available. For us, the most useful plugin turned out to be Tempo Timesheet – a powerful time tracker. The time tracking JIRA tool is very much worthwhile.

If you are in need of something really specific, you can always develop your own plugin (Java) or, for simpler jira for project management tasks, use the excellent ScriptRunner plugin (Groovy).

 

#5 It’s cheap for small teams

Atlassian products are available in SaaS and on-premise models, which gives you the ability to choose the one that suits you best.

JIRA and JIRA Agile cost only $10 per month (cloud version) or a $10 one-time payment (on-premise license) for the first 10 users, which gives startups a great value-to-cost ratio. The pricing model is transparent and available online, so you can easily predict the necessary investments as your organization grows

 

Is that all?

No, it’s not. After reading all of this information you could think, “Wow, this JIRA software is awesome, I should get it too!” and you would be right and wrong at the same time. Why is that? Because JIRA, like every other piece of software, can sometimes be difficult and, well… let’s say mildly infuriating 😉 That’s why we also prepared a second part of this article called “5 reasons NOT to choose Atlassian JIRA for agile projects”. See you soon!

Now that you know why we are using JIRA, meet 5 reasons… not to use JIRA and give up on JIRA project management completely!

 

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Sensinum Team
Sensinum Team