JIRA Software

Vorteile

Flexibility in workflows and tracking separate projects and sub-projects in the same system.

Ease of creating multiple tickets as well as placing them into different projects without having to be in the projects portal.

Creating reports to review metrics is relatively easy, it was useful in an integrated project to review estimated times reported in previous sprints to project development times for other projects.

The flexibility of how tickets look and editable fields as well as workflows to tailor to the team and/or project being worked on.

Nachteile

The bad part of Jira's flexibility is that settings are all over the place and you typically need to refer to Jira's knowledge base on how to configure custom settings whether it is for fields inside of tickets, workflow settings and automations, and many other settings.

The standard Jira end user interface is not exactly user friendly and some things may not make sense depending on the team using it such as a ticket being in a closed state however the resolution state has separate "states" such as do, don't do which is more used by software development teams.

Jira typically requires a lot of customization when setting up new projects either for project managers, agile software development teams, or integrated project teams. As an administrator this can be difficult to convey to my end users who want to track their projects in Jira. This is where you need to have great communication with your end users to be able to setup and tailor the Jira project to their needs and improve the overall Jira experience.

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

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

Vorteile

1) Releases/Versions:
Releases allow us to work in parallel on multiple efforts with the same team.
2) Parallel Sprints:
Same as releases, we are a lean team and we have to work on Product features and polish/bug fixes simultaneously.
3) Custom Filters: I like these the most!

Nachteile

They have taken out small pieces of functionality and made them separate products. These products are now paid and for those small pieces of functionality, you have to make extra purchases. e.g. Pages

Vorteile

The fact that tasks can be organized and prioritized in every structure you can think of. I have used Jira in three companies and it was perfectly tailorable to all their processes. Also, it interacts beautifully with the other Atlassian-tools. Lock-In is no argument because you just don't go with Atlassian if you dislike the way their stuff works.

Nachteile

Jira really has to stay ahead of its way less expensive competitors (FLOSS-guys, think Redmine). Also, it's weird how I saw some of our partners manage processes with Trello without having too much restrictions: that kind of made me think. You can probably go with a cheaper solution, but for us being a 250+ software-company, Jira was worth the price.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.