Change Request - ability to associate add-ons with individual products as well as globally

Question

We are an early adopter of Jira Work Management.   It has been successful and we would like to consider scaling up across our wider business - beyond IT and Software.

Unfortunately, we are unable to do this due to the impact on the cost of add-ons that are used within our software development area. As a non software development shop, we only have a small team that configure SaaS software.  Our costs and budget are relatively low.  If we attempt to license 500 JWM users, that will blow our IT budget.  The plugin are not used for JWM, so it is not logically in any way to increase the cost of our plugins because of the increase in JWM licenses.

We would like Atlassian to change their add-on licensing to reflect the use of JWM outside of software development. Companies like Zephyr are currently forced to offer a non Cloud solution as a workaround.

Douglas Bain · Answer

I have voted & commented on one of the most popular requests for this. It was originally raised 7 years ago. In 2023 it was responded to by Atlassian  with a no immediate plans but we will consider.

Going back to your point regarding software development. Not all companies may want to develop their own software. Many will outsource many chunks of development.

They might have a very small (say 2 person) development team for small Excel Macro product work, whilst at the same time have 1000 JWM users.  All other work is OTC SaaS that does not require JIRA / SDLC.   In this situation, should the client pay for 1000 users of plugin 'X' that supports the 2 development team members?    Of course not.  This is a new issue that only really manifests with JIRA being used for non software development activities - JWM.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

I remember the days when it did work that way.  I don't think Atlassian are ever going to go back to that.

You will need to raise this with support if you want to get Atlassian to pay any attention to it, the Community is not a place that they look to for suggested change, not unless a lot of us show huge interest in an item, and it often needs a leader to point it out to them.

You'll find a lot of people have already raised this as a problem and had their requests set to "done because we're not going to change this", but go to Jira.atlassian.com to search for, vote on, and raise new issues about it.

For me, a common quote (which I cannot remember the source of) jumps to mind when you said "does not make sense to classify all companies as software development".  You're right about the software piece, but actually it makes massive sense if you remove the "software".  The quote is "all organisations are doing development".  If they're not, they are going to stagnate and fail.

Douglas Bain · Answer

This is indeed something we are considering.    However, it does tend to conflict with our strategy of having our company operating within a single instance of Service Management, Work Management and JIRA software.   That said, the software side and the work management side do have a natural separation.

We see similar situations with other SaaS vendors where architectural or license 'debt' create a situation where the products implementation needs to be degraded.

In Clinical research, it is not uncommon to have to login and check tasks for literally 10's of systems every day.    Atlassians great strength is that we avoid this and present to every stakeholder ALL of the activities they might be involved in.