Usage of JIRA is not painful
JIRA is an Atlassian tool. JIRA was basically designed to be used as a bug tracking tool. But,
with the advent of plugins built around JIRA tool, JIRA can be used as a Project
Management Tool.
I work for an Agile Solutions company called Leanpitch as an Atlassian tools expert. As
part of my consulting work, I have numerous discussions with various teams across
industries. Most of the people that I have met had initially feared of using JIRA. JIRA must
have been introduced by their higher management or process teams for various reasons:
streamlining the team activities, tracking purpose, report purpose, forecasting and so on.
If JIRA is intended to be used for these purpose, then why does the team hate to use it?
The reasons for team hating JIRA is because of the way its configured. JIRA is a highly
flexible and configurable tool. It let’s team to decide what their project has to be and how
their SDLC has to be. It also helps team to decide what each member in the team sees and
works on. It let’s team to configure whole of the project attributes as per their wish.
Thus, JIRA gives the power of configuring it according to the team’s need. But, with the
power comes the responsibility. The people who configure the JIRA has to do it properly.
For eg., when a project is created, the project manager/team lead or whoever is
responsible for the project should know what his/her team needs are. That has to be
communicated to the Admins who will configure it accordingly and the same thing is to be
known by whole project team.
I have heard developers say usage of JIRA reduces their productivity. It’s true that it does
take some time of developers as each developer has to update the JIRA issues. This will be
the case if JIRA is not integrated with tools that team is using for delivery cycle. For eg., if
a developer has to update the JIRA issue status once the code is checked-into the version
control, he has to log into JIRA and update the respective JIRA Issue. The developers I
have interacted with say that this is the most painful and unproductive thing that they
need to do. I completely agree with them. But, what people should also know is that JIRA
can be integrated with the Version control, Build tools, review tools and etc. Once the
tools are integrated with JIRA, developers needn’t log into JIRA for Issue updation. From
the Version control, we can make use of web hooks and push the commit message and its
related information to JIRA issue automatically. Similarly, we can push the Build results to
JIRA issues automatically. With this all that developers need to do is what they are happy
to do: just code and push the code to the version control and JIRA Issue will be updated
automatically.
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