Jira

We used several bug tracking tools in the past but Jira is by far the best one. What I like most:
- user friendly interface, provides a nice user experience
- Agile SCRUM/Kanban support out of the box
- extremely configurable on almost everything
- extendable through custom scripting, either built-in or via addons
- very collaborative
- there are thousands of addons in the marketplace; you can even write your own

Being so flexible to be configured, the learning curve for admins is a little steep.
The price is based on the number of users and if you experience wide user adoption in a big company, you end up in paying more for upgrading to the next tier, than if you would pay for that tier first time.

1. Great User Interface and User Experience.
2. The ability to create custom queues and automatically re-direct issues to these queues saves a lot of time. 3. The inbuilt SLA management and the option of integrating it to third party alert and notification software is impressive.
4. Adding attachment, links and other resources to JIRA ticket is easy and straightforward.
5. It has great audit trail tracking and can act as a source of truth for all parties involved.

1. The issue search feature could have been a little more customizable and faster.
2. The options available to format the comments on an issue are limited and not very intuitive.

Jira is excellent at keeping track of our issues and linking between them on a kanban board. It was our introduction to a Kanban system of tickets. There are also many features we see ourselves using that we are on the verge of delving into, allowing us to focus on the tickets now but expand in the near future.

I like that tickets are easily linked to each other. Our previous system made it difficult to know which tickets were related, while Jira has several options for relating tickets (related to, duplicates, blocked / blocks/ etc)

I think the price can get high depending on how big your team is. We were just over the free limit which becomes a large cost, especially once you include subscriptions to confluence etc.

I think the load times and UI can get buggy at times, there are multiple times a day I have to click through menus several times for it to register. This is by far the most frustrating thing, especially when you have many tickets on a page.

One issue we had was that our current ticket system allows us to CC users onto tickets so they (+ anyone else we add) can get an update. This was not possible through regular Jira, however something similar could be done with effort on the Jira Service Management side.

1. Different user roles can be defined to allow for segregation of duties.
2. Epics can be defined to assist with long and intermediate project planning.
3. Duration of sprints can be defined according to project requirements.
4. Statuses for user stories can be used for tracking progress as well as workflow management.
5. Allows for bulk import of epics and user stories which can fast track administrative tasks where this information has been captured elsewhere e.g. CSV format

1. Only users from within the organization can be assigned to tasks and user stories. This can cause unnecessary delays where external users need to provide urgent input or contribution.
2. Statuses (user stories) cannot be defined specifically for a board where multiple boards exist within a project.
3. Only two types of users can be assigned to user stories, which are assignees and reporters. JIRA does not allow for multiple users (assignees) to be assigned to one user story.