May 17, 2017
Best Jira Alternatives for a Growing Dev Team
What is the need for JIRA alternatives? Well, Jira is a popular software development tool used by agile teams. It is, undoubtedly, a feature-rich tool that offers great functionalities to the development teams. But in reality, not every software development team needs a powerful tool like Jira.
In the majority of cases, the needs of a growing development team can be addressed with a simpler, cheaper tool. You can select the right tool for your team by considering several factors such as the budget, project requirements, team structure and expertise.
In this article, we are going to discuss whether Jira is truly suitable for a growing development team. We will also discuss the potential problems that a growing development team might face if they use Atlassian Jira. In the end, we will list down a few Jira alternatives for a growing dev team.
Is Jira suitable for a growing Dev team or you should go for JIRA alternatives?
Let’s ponder a bit over this question. First, you need to understand the dynamics and requirements of your growing development team to answer this question.
Jira is more suitable for a stable and big software development team. A team which has all technical people on board; even the business people also have basic technical expertise. A growing dev team might not all technical people. Besides, the technical people might also not have that level of skills and expertise.
Jira becomes powerful with its modules that are available separately. It is affordable by the big companies as they can procure all required modules separately and integrate them all together. All modules are tightly coupled so any activity in one module will reflect its effect in the other related module. Usually, growing teams do not have enough budget to afford the expensive Jira tool with its all modules.
A growing development team may need to change its process every now and then. For such growing teams, it will become a burden to customize the Jira accordingly. Jira is more suitable for a stable team which has already established its processes and workflow.
In our opinion, the answer to the question we posed ourselves at the beginning of this section is a big ‘no’. You need to go for JIRA alternatives.
Problems with Jira from a Growing Dev Team’s perspective
The team structure and requirements for a growing team are different from a well-established, stable software development team. The same features which make Jira a popular tool might prove to be problematic for a growing development team. We are listing down a few common factors that you need to consider while deciding whether to use Jira for your team or not.
Initial Setup
Getting started with Jira is not a quick process. The initial set up is a painfully slow process. You can set up projects, project boards, sprints and backlog with Jira. You can set up the desired workflow of your software development process in Jira. You can add all your team members, set their access rights and permissions in Jira.
All this sounds really good as long as you have an administrator to set up and manage your projects in Jira. Setting up your system is pretty hard and time consuming. The system is complex enough to compel you to read Jira help documentation before you can customize the system for your team.
Learning Curve
Jira is not an easy to use software for any beginner. Non-technical people can easily loose track of what is happening and how to use Jira. The technical people, on the other hand, also require a reasonable time duration to completely understand how Jira works. It will take a technical person 4-8 weeks to fully grasp and utilize the power of Jira. The learning curve is steep and needs considerable time before your team can actually become productive with Jira.
Too Much Configuration
Jira is considered as the most widely used tool for project management by the software development teams. The diversity in the needs and choices of users encouraged Jira to offer a customizable solution to its users. In the efforts to serve the needs of all users, Jira has become overly customizable.
You need to configure each and every feature and plug in of Jira to make it work for you. Every software development team does not require this much configuration. They are rather looking for some tool that is easy and quick to get started with. The customization and configuration of Jira modules become cumbersome for a growing development team.
Visualization of Requirements
Jira has an agile board for the active sprints on which you can stick the tasks and stories. However, there is no way to visualize all requirements of a project at a single place. You need to click on all tasks and stories to read the details. Personally, I like the visualization of requirements in the ReQtest tool where you can see all requirements at one place and group them together into folders, as needed.
On the other hand, you might easily lose tracks of stories in the backlog and active sprints of the Jira. There is no way to filter out the tasks which have pending response from the customer/client. You need a separate person, a project manager, who is responsible to keep a track of all tasks and move them into backlog or the active sprint board.
For a growing development team, you may or may not have a project manager. Generally a growing team has less people with more workload so they might easily loose the track of tasks to do in the Jira.
Best Jira Alternatives for a growing Dev Team
We have researched out the following project management tools as an alternative to Jira for your team. Let’s take a brief look at each one of them:
ReQtest
ReQtest is a complete project management suite for your team. It is designed to be customized according to your software development methodology. If you are an agile team, you will find the agile board helpful. The basic reporting features allow you to gain insight of the project progress.
It has requirements management, test management and bugs management tool. I particularly like the way requirements are handled and stored in ReQtest at a single place. Life becomes easy for the team when you are able to avoid all the fuss and see the requirements at one place. The requirements are well organized in the form of hierarchy and categories. The best thing about ReQtest is its ability to link all related items together i.e. requirement, test case and bug. This means that you don’t need to go at three different places to get complete information of a requirement and its progress.
You can always integrate ReQtest with Jira to get the best of both tools.
Breeze
Just like its name, Breeze gives you a breath of fresh air by offering a minimalistic design in comparison to an overly complex Jira tool. Breeze tool was created with the idea of simplicity in mind. It is an easy to use project management tool with minimal features to fulfill the requirements of a growing development team. Its simple interface makes it easier for everyone on the team to get started – including the business people, accountants, marketers, project managers, designers and developers.
You can quickly get started with Breeze. It is only a matter of minutes to create projects, boards and invite people on the project. Like many other task management software, Breeze organizes tasks in different columns. Use filtering to filter out the information you need. You can easily drag and drop your tasks from one list to another. Breeze allows you to create a to-do list under a specific task. You can collaborate with your team members on tasks using comments.
Now, you must be wondering about the time management and resource management features of the Breeze. There is a timer against every task which can be used to log actual effort invested in a task. You can also assign tasks to resources/people in your team. View team assignments in the calendar to get a clearer insight of project planned and actual progress.
The best thing about breeze is its mobile version of the website. This means that you can go quickly take an overview to see what is happening in your projects, on the go. Breeze has native mobile apps for iOS and Android to make your lives easier.
Assembla
Assembla is a good alternative to Jira for a growing dev team. It is a project management software that allows the software teams to manage tasks by collaborating with each other through tickets.
Assembla is a customizable software. By default, Assembla is set up for agile development. Jira derives its power from four main components. The first is task management and issue tracking components. A Kanban board is used to stick the tickets. These tickets can be dragged and dropped into different columns as the team progresses. You can also switch to a simple, list view. You can create sub-tasks and log your hours against a ticket. Development teams can also set milestones for the project to control and track the progress.
The second component is the version control which includes the Subversion, Git and Perforce. This means that unlike Jira, Assembla does not require any add on to integrate subversion and Git hosting. This allows the software development team to push their code into the code repositories with versioning capabilities.
The social collaboration tool set is the third component. You can use the handy way of addressing your team members i.e. @username. It will notify the mentioned user that a conversation needs his attention. The fourth component is the Team/Client management to provide the features of access control, time tracking, view ticket activity and user support.
Taiga
If your team is looking for an open source tool, Taiga is the choice for you.
Taiga is a simple and intuitive project management tool. It is suitable for the agile teams. There is epic story board on Taiga which opens up a lot of planning opportunities for managers who are managing multiple projects. Epics allow you to establish and track hierarchical relationships between user stories on different projects. Taigo offers common features of project management tools including setting up a team, maintaining a list of issues, management of tasks and a wiki space. Taiga also allows integrations with other tools so your developer can code in any language and integrate the work through API.
There are several other JIRA alternatives. You can find the comparison between Jira and the JIRA alternatives on the official website of Jira.
Conclusion
You will find a long list of JIRA alternatives for a growing development team over internet. ‘One size fits all’ is not the solution in software industry. You cannot find the right tool either simply by paying the highest price or adopting the most commonly used tool. Instead, you need to analyze your budget, project requirements, team structure, team needs and technical expertise. Keeping these parameters in mind, you can shortlist a few JIRA alternatives and decide which one works best for your team.
We have listed a few JIRA alternatives for your ease such as Breeze, Assembla, ReQtest and Taiga. Each of these tools has a specific competitive edge. Breeze is a simple tool for technical and non-technical people too. Assembla is user friendly tool with adequate features to fulfill the needs of growing and stable software development teams. ReQtest is a powerful suite with requirements management, test management and bug tracking modules. Taiga is an open source software for small agile teams.
Each tool serves the needs of a different team. Each tool has some pros and cons. You only need to identify which tool works best for your team.
Are you a part of a growing dev team? What are your expectations from a project management tool? Which JIRA alternatives you have used? Don’t forget to share your experience with us through the comments section below.
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