[kevinb7]

> I've tended to view JIRA as "the worst of all project tracking tools, except for all the other ones"

I've seen heard this opinion a number of times and I don't believe it's true. TargetProcess is a better project tracking tool. It has a deeper hierarchy for organizing work. It has the concept of teams built-in and allows you to view work across multiple teams and/or projects. It also provides a way to do roadmaps built-in. Everything is included and everything is designed to work well together.

As for the specific criticism about not being able to get a high-level and low-level view in one tool, I think the reason why JIRA does poorly at the high-level view is that it has a very shallow hierarchy of work entities. It has epics => user stories => sub tasks. While projects can also be used to organize work, JIRA unfortunately binds the concept of sprints which is more of a team thing to projects. Thus it's difficult for one team to work on multiple projects or multiple teams to work on a single project.

TargetProcess on the other hand has a separate entities for teams and sprints which allows projects to be used for organizing work. It also has an additional level in the work hierarchy providing the following levels: project => epic => feature => user story => task. This deep hierarchy allows you to group work into larger groups allowing you to see both the high-level and the low-level.

https://www.targetprocess.com

[jib]

JIRA does not have those problems.

Portfolio allows for multiple layers on top of epics. Boards can be set up to pull from multiple projects, and boards are what are tied to sprints, projects are not tied to sprints (mostly, there’s some oddities).

Portfolio is implemented somewhat badly (Why the hell can’t I do skip level relationships?) but it certainly has the features you say you’re lacking.

[escardin]

Target Process is worse for agile. It is at once too flexible and too rigid. For someone who doesn't take the time to learn the tool, they end up with frustrating and not very useful defaults. For someone who does, you run into limitations like your backlog is always on the left or top because it won't let you move it around. It also ends up that as a power user you end up with a wildly different view from what everyone else sees, which causes additional problems.

Having a few extra levels of issue types in jira would be nice, but if you treat epics like TP features, you can use portfolio to add however many layers the PM and management team want on top.

[perlgeek]

> JIRA unfortunately binds the concept of sprints which is more of a team thing to projects

I believe this has been fixed for some time.

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/How-do-I-c...

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/combining-...

I agree about the too small number of hierarchical nesting though.