Get ahead of the game: how Jira helps teams overcome common business challenges?

[#1]

Jira offers a wide range of features that can benefit teams from various industries and fields. Whether you are leading a software development team, a marketing team, or any other type of team, Jira has the potential to help you optimize your workflow, facilitate communication, and ultimately enhance your team's productivity in achieving project goals. In this article, I would like to focus on a few key areas where Jira can make a significant difference.

The 5 most common software development challenges that Jira solves 

Complex projects organization

Jira is well-suited to Agile development methodologies, no matter if a company uses Scrum or Kanban. At the beginning of a project, a user is asked to choose between the two methods and creates a transparent board accordingly. The Scrum boards are valuable tools for tracking sprints and backlogs, enabling teams to efficiently execute projects. Jira's Scrum board is especially beneficial for large-scale projects, streamlining the entire process and simplifying project management. Jira also provides the Agile Scrum issue type scheme which is a set of issue categories tailored for projects that follow the Agile framework. Furthermore, Jira allows setting up Scrum sprints as miniature Kanban boards for better visibility.

When it comes to Kanban, it's fully intuitive and transparent, especially after Atlassian acquired Trello. The cards on the Kanban board are a drag-drop, which makes it easier to move the tasks once their status changes. What's more, Jira offers customizable workflows, sprint planning, and backlog management features that assist businesses in adopting Agile practices and enhancing their capacity to adapt to evolving requirements.

Source: Atlassian

Actual issue tracking

Jira was initially designed for bug and issue tracking. This is why it is still mainly recognized as a project tracking software that monitors ongoing projects at every stage, enabling the stakeholders to stay up-to-date with all activities, such as issue updates, team comments, and assignments. This provides enhanced visibility and collaboration among teams and departments.

• With Jira's customized query language, JQL, users can filter issues based on specific criteria.
• The Jira sidebar provides immediate access to planning, releasing, tracking, and reporting.
• The flexible planning features enable the creation of tasks and stories from any screen
• The drag-and-drop functionality simplifies the creation of sprints and Epics in the backlog.

Jira is also a great solution for time-tracking. It introduces a color-coding system to monitor the amount of time allocated to each issue. All this information can be accessed in the time tracking section. Additionally, by integrating with Tempo, a dedicated time-tracking and resource management tool for Jira, users can gain further insights into their project's progress.

Maintaining data security 

Jira Cloud and Jira Data Center are secure solutions that protect user data through various measures. Jira Cloud is hosted on Amazon Web Services, while Jira Data Center allows for the customization of security configurations. Contrary to popular opinion, in terms of security, the Cloud hosting matches Data Center as Atlassian continues to invest in certifications. Both solutions have features like disaster recovery, enterprise-grade security, and compliance certifications to ensure the confidentiality and availability of data. What's more, when it comes to security levels inside and across the teams, specific permissions can be assigned to specific team members to restrict access to certain tasks. In addition, permission schemes enable the creation of a set of permissions for any project. For example, components are typically configured to only allow Jira administrators to modify them.

This can help organizations comply with regulatory requirements and protect sensitive information as well as ensure business continuity and minimize downtime. 

Up-to-date reporting

Jira, a project management tool, provides detailed reporting and analytics tools that allow businesses to track project progress, team performance, and issue resolution times. This helps businesses identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to optimize their processes. The reports in Jira are highly detailed, covering every workflow and task completed in the software. These reports provide information on task status, tracking period, time required for each task, and more, enabling project managers to create better project documentation. Jira offers various reports such as pie charts, user workloads, cumulative flow diagrams, sprints, and burndown chart reports to provide project statistics throughout the entire lifecycle. Reports that are easy on the eyes can improve readability and help readers quickly identify key insights and make informed decisions based on the data presented.

Source: Atlassian

Integration with other tools

Jira offers integration with a diverse set of tools and platforms such as GitHub, Bitbucket, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and many more. This simplifies the process of connecting existing workflows and tools with Jira and enables businesses to customize their Jira instance to meet the unique requirements of their projects. The benefits of integrating Jira with other tools include increased efficiency, improved communication and collaboration, better project tracking, and easier access to information. What's more, Jira offers native mobile apps that work seamlessly on both Android and iOS devices, allowing users to stay connected no matter where they are. 

It's worth mentioning that Jira can be extended with a wide variety of plugins available on the Atlassian Marketplace. These plugins, developed by both Atlassian and third-party developers, allow users to customize and enhance their Jira instance. With over 1,500 apps available, users can easily find and install Jira and Jira Service Management extensions for features such as agile boards, automation, reporting, and more. 

Interested in overcoming challenges in Jira and Jira Service Management? Read more  about common help desk problems and solutions on Deviniti's blog.