Jira

Jira is the enterprise standard for issue tracking and project management in software teams. It's been around long enough that many developers have opinions about it—not always positive—but it remains dominant because it handles complexity that simpler tools can't. The configuration options are extensive. Workflows define how issues move through states—from backlog to development to review to done, with branches for bugs versus features versus support tickets. Custom fields capture data specific to your organization. Schemes control what appears in which project. This complexity serves a purpose. When you have a hundred developers across multiple teams, with compliance requirements, cross-team dependencies, and detailed reporting needs, you need a system that can model all of it. Jira does. Jira Software includes agile boards—Scrum and Kanban—that visualize work in flight. Sprints plan iterations, backlogs prioritize future work, and velocity charts track team capacity. These tools support standard agile practices without dictating exactly how you work. The integration ecosystem is vast. Atlassian's own products (Confluence, Bitbucket, Trello) integrate deeply, and the Marketplace offers thousands of apps for everything from time tracking to test management. Enterprise IT teams can build sophisticated toolchains around Jira. JQL (Jira Query Language) enables powerful filtering and reporting. Once you learn it, you can find anything—issues assigned to your team due this week, bugs created last month that aren't resolved, or complex queries combining multiple criteria. The criticisms are valid: Jira can feel slow, configuration is overwhelming, and the UI has accumulated cruft. Atlassian has been modernizing, but the legacy shows. For teams that need the capability, these trade-offs are acceptable.