[mwdalrymple]

I LOVE JIRA. The team that I run has a high level of overhead with the system that we have built and support (just due to the nature of what we do) ans we have constructed a great operations dashboard using Jira. I extensively use Epics, Labels and Components to slice and dice our tickets to keep track of where my team spends their time, what parts of our system are problematic, etc.

The Dashboard within Jira that we created has been really great as I have been using it along the charts it produces to communicate with my business partners. The data that we collect isn't perfect, but its good enough to construct a narrative that my business partners can grok. I have most recently used this information to help in successful pitch for a strategic re-design of our systems as well as an ambitious resourcing proposal to go along with it. Knowing how much of your time is lost to overhead allows me to plan ahead and justify the people that I need to make the redesign happen.

Jira having an API has been a real boon too. Personally I have used it with Python to mine for additional data that I need in reporting where the Jira dashboard is insufficient. I have also had my team's dedicate DevOps engineer drive all sorts of integrated work flow automation to ease the development process. My team operates within a large bureaucratic organization, so having the capability to automate all the artifacts for compliance has been a real time savings.

The integration with Confluence is awesome. It really makes managing my teams work so much easier. I love to collect meeting feedback notes in confluence and then tag the bullet points with Jira tasks that I create as follow up work. The Jira issue tables driven by JQL (Jiras Issue Query Language) are super useful when I need to create project plans that combine a mixture of content. I love just dropping in a list of all the tickets that we have outstanding.

I would not be nearly as effective w/o the combination of both tools.