I know a _lot_ about JIRA. I worked at Atlassian for almost four years, in engineering management and product management roles. (Left in 2011, if you care).

JIRA is a total nightmare to configure sensibly, and the UX is complex enough that there's a real learning curve to get your team using it effectively.

The kicker is, that once the combination of JIRA, JIRA Agile, and Confluence are setup correctly, and your team is using them well, there's nothing else like it. It's spectacular for:

- tying specs to issues to code

- surfacing status to non-devs sensibly

- allowing interested folk to keep abreast of projects without having to attend meetings

- getting rid of huge messy email conversations

- figuring out "why the hell did we do that?!"

I'd recommend JIRA + JIRA Agile + Confluence to any team with more than 10 members, with the caveat that you need to find/hire an expert to configure the product and help your team use it effectively.

ninja edit: JIRA will allow you to faithfully model+enforce your fucked-up development process. So, badly-configured JIRA can be one of the least fun experiences of your working life.

We use Jira + Agile + Confluence.

Please help - where can I learn to configure our setup correctly? I think our Agile is pretty ok but the integration with Confluence is almost zero. Where do I find an expert to help with the setup?

How would you say TFS (Team Foundation Server) and related tools compare to JIRA? I'm working through TFS training right now and haven't found too many weaknesses with it as of yet.

Do the total nightmare comments apply to JIRA OnDemand/Cloud?

Jira is insanely configurable - if using jira is painful, that means that your jira admin has not configured it well for your workflow.

The config my company is using makes it somewhat more pleasant than stock bugzilla or trac (though not nearly as convenient as github issues was).

The amount of crap you can turn on if you like can make the interface completely unusable, of course. But that's true in anything with a lot of configurability. It's the cost of being able to build your own process onto the tool.

Small teams generally not looking to pay someone to spend a long time configuring their tools. Configurability is good, but I'd rather have sensible defaults if I can only have one.

The JIRA Agile defaults are ... okay.

I've been a JIRA user for years, and I love it. Rather than turning down jobs over their choice of ticket tracker, consider it an opportunity - take the job and convince them to switch to what you want to use. I made the case for JIRA at several employers because I got tired of less feature-rich alternatives, and the productivity gains were always substantial.

At my current job we use Jira and personally I think it's a pretty good product, at least for a SCRUM workflow. Definitely beats any similar tools I've used in the past. I think the scrum board looks clear, it's easy to create user stories and tasks and it's also easy to switch between an operational and strategic workflow.

We also use Confluence which also seems to do it's job properly as a wiki.

I'm personally considering using Jira for my own projects in the future.

Agreed. We switched to JIRA for a few months and we all HATED it. Back to good old fogbugz :D

Wait what? I've used both and I can't see anything good about Fogbugz over JIRA?

JIRA is awful. But fogbugz? fogbugz? It's the worst piece of crap I've ever used.

What do you use then?

Both, unfortunately. But if given the choice, I'd go with JIRA, simply because I know of no better solution. To clarify, maybe there are better tools, but it's not my job to assess all the PM tools out there.

Interesting - we switched TO jira about a year ago (onsite version), and I love it. Yes, it took time to set up our workflow, but I find it does both the small tasks (day-to-day management and issue tracking) and large tasks (cross-team planning) very well, while other tools we used fall down on one or the other. Also, it integrates with everything under the sun.

Jira screens & workflow can be configured as simply as you would like, enabling advanced features as the team grows. If you had a bad Jira experience, it may have been due to those who came up with development policies, rather than the software which implemented those policies. Any specific issues with the software itself?

Interesting.

So if a successful & profitable software company is about to hire you but you would decline the offer just because She is using JIRA.

Apparently this also says how hard it is to manage people rather than dealing with just code and tricking the compiler.

What is your preferred alternative? My company is looking at changing to another platform from Redmine.

I would suggest to look at Tuleap[1]

Open Source full featured ALM, self-hosted or SaaS[2] consistent & easy to go upgrades.

(Disclosure: I'm part of the dev team)

[1] https://tuleap.org [2] http://mytuleap.com

I prefer Pivotal Tracker by a mile.

I only used Jira briefly before leaving that job for another, what didn't you like about it?

I'm not the OP, but the last fintech startup I worked at used the hosted version. It was slow (server and client side), a memory hog in the browser, every extra feature was more $$$.

It took a few weeks to get a suitable workflow set up, and in spite of my gripes it's one of the best issue trackers around. I miss working with it on other projects.

What I really want is a fast and lightweight Jira.

I've unfortunately had the same experience with hosted JIRA.

If there should be one place in the world where JIRA runs quickly, it should be on Atlassian's own hosting platform, yet I continue to be amazed at how slow it can be.

Are you outside the USA? Atlassian's Cloud (previously OnDemand, Studio) offerings are only hosted in the USA.

So they're clunky and slow on any other continent. Including, amusingly, Atlassian's engineering HQ in Sydney.

Yes, UK here!

Oh and I forgot: the UX is abysmal and has to be learned. It's definitely a 'modern' web app shoe-horned onto the front of an older app.

That's bold. What's a better alternative?

For the past two years we have been developing a commercial product that we consider to be a Jira replacement. It is much faster, as easy to use as Facebook, and profoundly more intuitive to work with and learn. Plus it provides full PSA capability (time, billing, expenses, forecasting/scheduling), and can be used for to model the entire business process, not just software development.

Like anything else, there are things we've chosen not to implement in a V1 release, that we will add in later releases. We focused on differentiating ourselves in the market, not just doing a better job of what Jira does.

So, there is hope. :) It's 'real'. It's awesome. And it's just a few months from Release.

Cheers

> Absolutely horrific; using it genuinely makes me hate my life.

First world problems indeed.