Jira - A Necessary Evil?

I am wishing you success.. I too will soon have to manage distributed teams, and will need to use Jira, so any lessons or nuggets of advice from your journey will be gratefully received.

Alex (PO)

I was exposed to Jira for the last 3 years, here some of my learnings:
- provide access to all and train on 2 levels: 1) general Jira functionalities like agile board, issue types, … 2) team-specific tailoring like (examples): use of Story Points/hours, alignment of issue statuses with team agreements like DoD or in-sprint validation by PO, flagging a story to indicate the need for further refinement, constraints on issue status transitions, handling of questions via comment / assignment (of course only if f2f does not work), draft refinement via comments but the sprintable PBI has a User Story accompanied with test scenarios within the description field,…
- learn to use the Jira query language (JQL), it’s really straight-forward and a big help
- bulk edit is quite powerful
- exports to (XML/xls) can help generating all kinds of reports – but one can easily waste a lot of time without adding product value
- KISS: limit the number of fields, issue types, issue states where possible and encourage the ignorance of fields (Jira has too many = confusing particularly for business)
- with drag&drop the PB ordering can easily be done but equally easy it is to accidently move around important Stories.

I have used Jira many years and I know that it is not perfect. Now I have to use TFS and I miss Jira a lot!

We started with two team using Basecamp. And it didn't work out. So we moved to Pivotaltracker, but lack of customization meant need for hacks. And those doesn't work long term. Sooner or later, they will come back at you.
So Jira it was. And we didn't really like it. We were part of bigger group. So it wasn't just us in Jira. And they didn't want to give us administrative rights. So every change was pain as we needed to create ticket to our support team in different town.
And than we were sold. So once again, the choice was ours. And I didn't want Jira. I hated Jira. But after quite a lot searching, we didn't find anything better. So we bought Jira. If you want to use Jira, you have to learn Jira. Jira can be customized very well. But it's not easy. After doing so, you can use Jira to help you communicate. Integrate it with your deployment, so everyone (even marketing department) knows whats deployed. You can integrate it with Stash, so codereviews are easy even from home.
I still do not love Jira. It's far more complicated than it needs to be. But it's powerful if you now how to use it. If you don't, there is many easier tools, but easy comes with it's cost.

" sometimes a digital tool might be necessary when working with distributed teams"
- true, BUT .... why JIRA? Basecamp is arguably much easier to use, improved features and just felt more flexible. Closer to Scrum you have ICEScrum (much much lighter and IMHO the best replacement for an actual board in terms of flexibility and ease of use). Pivotal ain't half bad either (just didn't like the UI much 4 years ago when I was using it). JIRA is the one I truly dislike.
- one scrum, one PO, one PB. You shouldn't need to have everything in one always accessible place. While they may be legitimate reasons to do so (I've always worked with teams distributed across the globe), this seems to try and make up for lack of direct contact but eventually ends up in relying on the tool instead of people.

" sometimes a digital tool might be necessary when working with distributed teams"
- true, BUT .... why JIRA? Basecamp is arguably much easier to use, improved features and just felt more flexible. Closer to Scrum you have ICEScrum (much much lighter and IMHO the best replacement for an actual board in terms of flexibility and ease of use). Pivotal ain't half bad either (just didn't like the UI much 4 years ago when I was using it). JIRA is the one I truly dislike.
- one scrum, one PO, one PB. You shouldn't need to have everything in one always accessible place. While they may be legitimate reasons to do so (I've always worked with teams distributed across the globe), this seems to try and make up for lack of direct contact but eventually ends up in relying on the toold instead of people.

In my company, we’ve been using JIRA since 2007. We work with over 40 different
Agile Teams and 700+ JIRA-users. And we are still very happy with JIRA.

With every tool, an in-depth understanding of how the tool is supposed to be used and the basics do’s en don’ts, is a big part of the success on short- and long time! An in
company JIRA-administrator should have this knowledge. JIRA comes with a lot of
possibilities of configuring and creating custom-fields, workflows, screens and
so on. This is also a risk. Without proper knowledge of JIRA en the do’s en don’ts for an administrator, it can become messy very soon!

A good in company JIRA administrator should also have open eyes and ears for the needs
and problems the users have with JIRA. With his in depth understanding of the
tool, he should be able to come with the best solutions for the needs of the
users. Time after time. Keep it as simple as possible usually is the best.

If such knowledge is not within the company using JIRA, try to get it there as soon as
you can! And in the meantime, make use of the knowledge of the Premium
Atlassian partners around the world. Ask them for advice. And look on the web
for advice on how to handle similar ‘problems’. There is a whole lot of very useful
information about JIRA to be found there! Don’t try to re-invite the wheel yourself.
Instead take a proper driving-course and listen to the people that have the
knowledge and start learning!

Most recently we introduced in-company knowledge-sessions in which on different
levels JIRA-superusers explain their ‘smart JIRA-tricks’ to everyone who has an
hour to spare and listen and learn. This is greatly appreciated by the all the users.
And helps seeing JIRA as a blessing instead of a necessary evil.

What a great response to my blog post. Thanks a lot for these insights!

Thanks for the suggestions Andrew. I've used Basecamp for a while and had some good experiences with it. Will have a look at it again.

Yes indeed. When I use a tool like Jira I almost always put the Sprint Backlog on a physical board. Works like a charm!

Thanks for sharing your experiences Marek!

Of course, will do so!

Great, thanks a lot for sharing all these insights and lessons learned! Highly appreciated!

Very interesting post. Would love to add your JIRA review to IT Central Station.

Members of the IT Central Station user community interested in JIRA also compare them often to CA Agile Central. You can see a direct comparison between the two solutions, as well as read user reviews for other major agile development tools, here: https://www.itcentralstatio....

We are doing a lot to make the admin capabilities in Jira more flexible so a single team can design the way they want to work without being behonlded to the way the rest of the company prefers to work. We're keeping it powerful but dosing some simplicity in as well so that teams can get up an running faster and then layer in power as they advance their use.

I still believe that Jira is probably best tool for issue and bug tracking, as well as for project management. It will useful for both IT and non-It teams. Maybe, some people think that Jira is a bit complicated, because they don't know some secret Jira tips, like in this article: https://polontech.com/blog/... . Hope it will be helpful