What is Jira Used For and Why You Need It for Your Business: A 360-Degree Overview

The Jira software includes a complete family of products designed to help teams manage their work, irrespective of what team they are. Originally, Jira was a bug and problem-tracking tool, but it has now become an excellent work management software for various use cases, from agile software development to test cases and requirements management.

Jira can be used by project managers across various teams, depending on their requirements. Non-technical, IT, agile enterprise planning, and software development teams can all use Jira for their specific needs.

Jira’s robust reporting ability is probably its most significant advantage. From time-tracking, pie charts, and user workload to velocity, release burndown, and cumulative flow diagram reports, Jira offers 16 reports to provide project managers with holistic data on tasks and performance. Besides, working with Jira includes access to powerful, agile tools, seamless bug tracking, and enhanced security.

There are a plethora of tools that can be integrated with Jira, depending on the team using it. For instance, design teams can integrate Gliffy, Adobe XD, Figma, Draw.io, Miro, etc., into Jira. Similarly, business teams can integrate apps like Slack, Trello, Google Sheets, Microsoft Teams, Gmail, Microsoft Excel, etc. Additionally, IT teams can integrate GitHub, Jenkins, Opsgenie, Slack, Zendesk, and other relevant tools with Jira. With Jira, software engineering teams can integrate CircleCI, Jenkins, Zephyr, Optimizely, and other relevant apps.

Apart from its robust bug-tracking capabilities, Jira’s extensive range of reports is a strong reason project managers prefer it. Currently, Jira offers 16 reports, such as average age, user workload, release burndown, burndown chart, control chart, and resolution time reports. All these offer project managers a complete toolbox to assess their teams’ performance, whether for a project or an individual team member.

Jira provides project managers with excellent visibility over an ongoing project, at any given stage, by letting them track all activities. These include any issues in the project, updates, assigned team members, team comments, and much more. Plus, it has Kanban and Scrum boards to support agile software development, which is a major benefit.