You know the saying, a fool with a tool… Yeah, so true. On the other hand, a smart woMan with the right tool can do much more than without this tool.
I came across Atlassian Jira in my last project. It was used as bug tracking, specification, and UAT tool testing tool. As I accompanied the tester during the UAT with training, I had to dig into Jira as well. Was not really love at first sight to be honest. Just a bug tracker with a flexible database structure underneath was my first thought. Because of a bad customizing (or better said, almost no customizing) I did some Jira training bites as a Jira 101 for the tester. Seeing the quite complex solution for the first time plus using a new tool like Jira to get to the test cases and work through them, seemed to be quite a challenge to me, which I intended to level a little to better training material.
Jira is much more as I learned over the time. Now on my journey into Agile thinking, I came into Jira again. Luckily I got subscribed with my university teacher account to install all Jira tools locally on my machine for testing and playing around.
I have to say, I am a little bit falling for Jira nowadays. Still the first impression with list is not my favourite one, but Scrum boards, Kanban boards, Easy Agile user story and other plugins, it gets better and better.
So I recommend everyone working seriously with SCRUM et al to look into Jira.
I was even more excited, when I watch a webinar from Adaptavist with the topic „A pragmatic approach to SAFe® with Atlassian tools“. One of the rare webinars I liked. Highly recommended to look at it. You can find a recording on youtube:
I will write more about my experiences with Jira the next time. Have some Jira plugin development on my agenda as well.
Stay tuned.