We are a small software consulting studio. In the end of last August, we spent half a month studying and testing Atlassian JIRA Cloud, but finally decided to stay with Redmine. And here is the story we’d love to share.
Atlassian JIRA Cloud seemed a perfect choice!
JIRA is one of the greatest workflow software and Atlassian offers very affordable cloud-hosting plans for small companies of less than 10 staff.
At Studio theYANG, we’d really love to get our clients on board of our systems to keep everyone on the same page. We love the concept of JIRA Service Desk a lot because it offers a lightweight web interface that allows clients to submit, view and approve tickets, thus a very easy learning curve for our clients.
JIRA’s workflow is what people love the most. With JIRA Service Desk, we can even configure to separate what clients can do and what consultants can do. To give you an idea, here’s the workflow that we were to use:
Our clients have access to the transition between NEW, BACKLOG and CANCELLED states and is also exclusively permitted to accept a DONE ticket at consultant’s end. What’s more, we can also configure automation to switch a FEEDBACK ticket to IN PROGRESS whenever a client replies – going perfect with our business workflow.
And the best of the world is that JIRA allows unlimited client users and unlimited projects. Its per-consultant pricing strategy is really sweet and reasonable. In our studies, there were very very few products that support the concept of “client user.” Since no other one is as reputed and educated as JIRA, “why not JIRA?” we were smiling.
The only thing JIRA Cloud fails
Some people don’t like JIRA because it’s complicated, but we finally stepped away because the email system on JIRA Cloud is awful. We found this at our very last steps of testing and this is not really configurable on the system.
How bad is it? Compare what its inbox looks like compared to Redmine:
I should say Redmine emails look much more elegant and our clients would feel cheerful receiving emails from Redmine.
JIRA doesn’t seem to be well-engineered for continuous support with email contacts. If you look closely at the sender, you will find JIRA Service Desk puts the consultant’s name on top of its system email address. This is a severe issue if you have common sense of email software, and sadly it hasn’t been fixed since 2014 (see JSDSERVER-702).
To continue using JIRA, we don’t have much options other than: 1) setting up self-hosted JIRA and relaying outbound emails through our own domain; 2) asking all clients and consultants to append a “(JIRA)” string to the end of their name; 3) leasing a plugin from Atlassian Marketplace for a comparative functionality of Redmine Service Desk – no web interface for clients.
Finally, we try to bring JIRA’s good parts to Redmine
We have been using hosted Redmine for a year and half and there have been over 500 tickets. We were generally happy and so were our clients. Although the exploration of Atlassian JIRA Cloud was not successful, we learned its good parts and try to bring them back to our Redmine.
A real pain with our hosted Redmine is that there lacks the functionality of automatically bringing an issue from FEEDBACK status to IN PROGRESS when a client replies. It happened a few times that we missed a client’s update and always thought the ticket was not yet responded but the client was in fact waiting for us.
Coming back from JIRA, the idea we came up with is to automate via Redmine REST API, using a Python script to query and update. This is what we are really good at.
The simplicity of Redmine actually allows more home-brew extensions as the specifications are clear. We tried to write a similar extension from JIRA’s webhook automation to deal with the aforementioned email issue, but it is rather difficult for an outsider to walk through the lengthy JSON payload and numerous customfield_* keys.
Again, although we are a small consulting studio, we strive for the best experience we can ever deliver to our team and our clients. We hope our review can be helpful in your operational decision, and good luck!
Studio theYANG 