I think Jira's knobs and settings can get in the way, but I've found it to be fairly effective when used in a focused way (and recent updates seem to have optimized for that)
Our JIRA is kinda our external memory and our input for external teams.
For team members, it's easier and more effective to bob a post-it onto the right white board and explain it during standup. Hosted JIRA is just infuriatingly slow for that workflow, tbh.
For everyone else, yeah. Put in a JIRA ticket, one of us will put in clarifications there. If it's something weird, we'll document steps there and convert them into a runbook later. It's good enough for that.
I find that it's very effective at providing a "collective memory". People come and go, but as long as they document what they did in a ticket that information is easy to search and can save a lot of effort.
And by "document" I don't even mean a fancy design doc and pages of spec. Just a few sentences on why something was done, or a couple of copy-pasted command lines used for testing or reproducing a bug can be a big help.
Like any tool for managing the health of something, it all depends on the quality of the data in the system.
What I have not seen, is evidence that it helps improve the data. So, if you have someone that is good at keeping the data healthy, they can make the tool look amazing. The tool doesn't really help people get there, though.
I don't think there is a universal answer here, yet. :(
For team members, it's easier and more effective to bob a post-it onto the right white board and explain it during standup. Hosted JIRA is just infuriatingly slow for that workflow, tbh.
For everyone else, yeah. Put in a JIRA ticket, one of us will put in clarifications there. If it's something weird, we'll document steps there and convert them into a runbook later. It's good enough for that.