Advanced Roadmaps (formerly Portfolio)

Does not work with Jira core

I found this very confusing to use, possibly because we are using the Software Development Issue Scheme, not an agile scheme. It was very confusing what was a task and subtask. Initially it scheduled everything at once, even though people were assigned to individual tasks, it ignored this. I had to assign each task to a person again in the chart. The “Gantt like chart” is not a Gantt chart, and I found it confusing because each row could contain multiple tasks, for different people. The Gantt chart is industry standard for good reason, it tells you what you want to know; if some developer thought they could improve on it, they were wrong.

I was one of the early JIRA Portfolio adopters and in retrospect it was one of the worst purchases I have ever done in my entire life, I'm not exaggerating. Years of hoping this product would come to mature and telling myself "wait, it's just a phase", I have to come to the conclusion this tool will never come to it's right. Although the idea behind the tool is good, the execution of it is appalling. In use it feels rigid, limited and with zero regard to the end-user. The usability is disastrous. Just try to move the order of the columns in the overview; it is impossible. Just try to navigate to an issue, it takes you a few clicks (too many) Such simple, simple features and enhancements. One of the fallacies of the product management of this tooling is they keep on adding new big features to this product, but completely disregarding getting the basic functioning in order. I'm a big fan of Atlassian and JIRA, but my thumbs down for this. one. I'm so sorry. Wish we could get a refund for all those wasted years never ever being able to use this tool.

My Product Owners absolutely HATE using this product, and many of them have resorted to using spreadsheets and PowerPoint to communicate progress rather than fight with this tool. On this basis alone, I would give it less than 1 star. However, it does technically do all the things that it says it does, and as far as I can tell, there is no other plugin on the Marketplace that does these things, hence the 2 stars. The interface is clunky, and I find it not as pretty or polished as other tools. I can deal with that especially if the tool is relatively easy to use once you figure out where things are. But it's not. Atlassian mentions below that there is a "powerful" scheduling algorithm that needs to be well-understood to maximize the effectiveness of the tool. This understanding is CRUCIAL. Let me say it again. CRUCIAL. Otherwise, you will spend hours with each plan trying to understand why the changes you made took no effect. For example, you can set a story to start no earlier than August 1, but if its assigned to a release that can start on July 1, your setting is ignored, your story will start on July 1, and you get no helpful message to explain why. There are a number of non-intuitive things that happen like this. I wrote up a 5 page FAQ for my users explaining all of the things that may go wrong and how to fix them in their plans. For a $6000 app, I should NOT have to do that. Atlassian, in case you're listening, here's my advice to you: (1) Charge less for this thing in its current iteration, or make it awesome enough that it warrants the price. Because right now, it's not, and it doesn't. (2) Your scheduling algorithm might be "powerful", but it's wrong. In the case mentioned above, when would it ever be correct for a story to ignore its earliest start date just because the start date of a release occurs before it? Doesn't seem likely. (3) Even if you disagree with my assertion that the scheduling algorithm is wrong, at least pop more warnings about why user specified values are being ignored. (4) Please do something with the UI. For example, seeing the Gantt-like chart is an eye test that most of us fail. Figuring out how to include additional items in a plan took far longer than it should have. I could also make piles of suggestions for how to make working with the product a more delightful experience, but I'd settle for it not to be a bad experience. (5) It seems like you're trying to do too much with this. Pick one aspect (preferably epic and release scheduling) and make it work great and delight your users. Then charge less. And create another add-on to do the other more advanced stuff like vacation/resource management. And charge for that assuming that there is value in it. (6) If you haven't already, get your developers out in front of some of your customers who need to use this thing and watch what they do. Don't assume that just because you do software development a certain way that everyone else does too. Note that I wouldn't be so harsh in this review except that you are charging a LOT of money for this and my users hate it, not to mention that one of them hates it so much that he's writing his own app. I'm happy to correspond further about this offline if it would be helpful.

Not impressed. I do not need every JIRA user to have access to Portfolio. Only Team Leads and Project Managers. Have to unnecessarily stick to MSP because of this policy.