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.

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.