Jira is a fantastic technical project management tool

March 27, 2008   

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Nine months ago we moved all of OLX to Jira (http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/). We are extremely satisfied with the product.

It’s extremely important to input every single project your tech team is working on. If you don’t document very small bug fixes and changes, you can end up having a large portion of your tech resources on projects that may or may not be very important.

Also note that online project management tools like Jira and Trac (http://trac.edgewall.org/) are much more useful than PC based solutions. Everyone always sees the latest version of all the projects. Developers assigned to a project can comment on it or update the status in real time. Managers can update specs and track their projects.

There are many ways to organize your release schedule to fit your organizational needs. At OLX, releases are on an ad hoc schedule, but we average a release every 2 weeks. We also have a weekly product meeting where we cover what was released, upcoming releases and adapt project priorities as needed.

  • I would have wished that JIRA had more powerful search capabilities, for instance “find JIRA’s I resolved” – it is a pain to find JIRA’s that you resolved, but are no longer assigned to you, this becomes an annoyance in particular when you get duplicate bug reports/change requests, and there is an insistence to refer to the associated JIRA issue (which you can no longer find, because it’s ages since you resolved it and assigned it to someone else for verification).

    JIRA has many good sides, but it is important to not “manage a project by JIRA”, but instead use it as the support tool it is. I have seen managers completely take their eyes off the ball, just because something was not in JIRA – JIRA is a reactive tool by nature, not a proactive, and project management is all about proactivity.

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  • JIRA is a great tool for issue management. When dealing with big projects it’s better to use project server.

    Wille, I think there are some configuration steps you could do in JIRA to fulfill your needs.

    You could define a custom field to store the user that resolved an issue, and then create a work flow action to fill it. Then you will be able to search for the issues you solved.

    You can also subscribe as a “Watcher” to the issue, to avoid loosing track of it in the future even if it is assigned to someone else.

    I used Scarab, Mantis, Bugzilla, Sharepoint and many other and JIRA is my choice.

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  • Hello! Do you prefer Jira to trac? We use trac 10.1 and perferms reallly well! I didn’t know about Jira. Thanks!
    matias

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