Software development company without JIRA – is it possible?

Working in a team is not easy. Especially when there are more than a few members and tasks. An important role in the development of the project will be the coordination of workflow, so that everyone was occupied and did not go in the somebody else’s way. The solution to these problems lies in ready-made systems / applications. One of them is the broadly recognized JIRA.

Coordination of workflow is the key to project success.

JIRA offers its users an extensive task model. It allows you to share tasks and check up on their results with just a few clicks. In the system, we first take so-called user stories, which will create a backlog, a to-do list. Team members with JIRA access will immediately receive an email notification with a link to the relevant issue, previously described by the Product Owner. JIRA will also enable you to set a priority level, a list of issues to address within the next sprint, and the ones you can do later.

Documentation of work. JIRA remembers for us.

JIRA is a reliable documentation tool. The system records all activities of our team. Delegating tasks, assigning issues, and reporting time worked- it is all easy. The system also records who, what, when and to whom has delegated tasks. Thanks to that, none of the task will be lost in the mailbox, nor will any of our team member forget about its implementation. JIRA documentation and efficient filters make the job easier and faster. Integration with JIRA also makes it much easier to work with – BitBucket allows you to quickly look up changes to the repository for a given job – preview commits, pull requests and their statuses, etc. Integrating with Jenkins makes it easy to check on what environment is the issue at.

Planning and control. JIRA keeps hand on the pulse.

Extremely useful is JIRA’s tool Tempo Timesheets. It records worked time, displays how much time is spent on each task and informs on the time left to complete it, basing on the entered estimated time. It helps customers to discern what specific developers are doing and how much time they devote to each task. Also, thanks to Jira we always know what stage of the task is located (e.g. Open, In Progress, Code Review, QA <Quality Assurance>, Resolved). With Jira you can always return to previously closed tasks, in case they require, for example, modifications to the operation.

Customer aware. JIRA provides dedicated reports to the customers.

The tool is very useful in work with customers. The system generated reports of our activities are sent directly to them. This makes it very easy to work together. This makes the cooperation transparent, the client sees the hours worked for each task and can compare them with the original estimation.

If not JIRA, then what?

Working without any system that improves teamwork seems impossible. Especially when it is a multi-tasking job. Of course, we stick to the thesis that without JIRA it is impossible to manage, but there are alternatives. Maybe less complex, but still useful. One of them is Asana. Relatively simple to use, uncomplicated and free. It will help us check up on orders and deadlines, specify the date of the planned accomplishment. It is also possible to create subtasks. However, the system does not have the option to log the working time. Redmine, a system more akin to JIRA, especially in regards to cooperation with the customer. As with JIRA, Redmine integrates with customers to report development tasks or possible errors. The system helps in budget planning. It has a time tracking function – which will be useful when settling accounts. Although the above task management systems meet many important criteria for good teamwork, we remain convinced that the best one of them is JIRA. The largest corporations of the world have recognized this as well. From Nasa and Ebay, Spotify and Tinder to Audi, Skype and Twitter…