[ryanbrunner]

Serious answer: there's a relative dearth of project management tools that have anything approaching useful reporting and analytics, and the requirements of the organization outside of engineering often require that that reporting exists (if not in the pointy-haired boss "measure the productivity of your individual engineers" sense, at least the "tell me when big project will be done and how many resources you need" sense).

GitHub issues and Trello have more or less just abandoned the idea of being able to do any useful analytics or reporting, tools like Pivotal Tracker have some but require that you work in exactly the process they dictate, and the other big ones that have reporting generally are even worse than JIRA.

[scott_w]

This is a huge thing. Also, if Jira doesn’t directly support your specific workflow, the API and Export functions provide a lot of information to do this for you.

This reporting gets useful once you have a stable team and you want to identify issues in your process and back your theories up with data.

Let’s say you struggle to meet expected delivery dates (based off estimates), have a look at a chart of your cycle times. Do they take longer than a week, with a wide variance in when they get delivered? Maybe you’re not breaking down work enough, or you’re getting blocked (committed too early).

Check a chart of the number of tickets in each status every day, that might tell you that things get backed up waiting for review or deployment, so discuss that.

Simpler tools don’t really provide this information. Is it always necessary? On greenfield work with a smaller company, almost certainly not, but as your product and company gets more complex, having access to this, and presenting it to your team, gets more valuable.