Hi everyone,
Those who transitioned from Jira to Azure Devops, how was your experience?
Did you use Jira Portfolio Management?
If you did go from Jira to Azure Devops (or have used / are using both), what’s your experience and what you like better from each of them?
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I found Azure Devops to be a lot easier to use - in fact I loved it. The view customizations, reporting, dashboarding, workflows, UI, etc. was heads above Jira. Speaking of Jira Portfolio Management, we never used it for portfolio management.
However, I will need to mention in the org where I used Azure Devops I had very high level admin permissions that allowed me to configure things to how I wanted them to work, while I did not, both times I had to use Jira. But even before I received those permissions on Devops it was just overall easier to use than Jira.
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DevOps/TFS can get the job done, and in a MS shop is very dev friendly but not necessarily project management or product management friendly. Jira is miles ahead for the latter, and has plugins that can hook into Azure for devs that are using a lot of that infra. Jira also has the Jira Portfolio Management tools which are very useful and handy.
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I haven’t used Jira in a while but a new product I manage (through acquisition) uses Devops. If you like nice, forward-thinking, modern features stick to Jira or another alternative… especially if you do some form of agile.
You can 100% make Devops work for your team, even in an agile environment, but it is sometimes like pulling teeth. To me, it falls into the classic enterprise software where it can do everything but not necessarily do it well (which is in line with MS).
Finding that one thing you’re looking for, whether a report, specific ticket, article, etc is surprisingly difficult depending on the level of detail you put into the system. For example, if you’re super thorough and have an item that is a “requirement” and then another which is the “story” to do the work, and then “tasks” that have the actual work to accomplish the story finding the right item you’re looking for can be very difficult because all of those are interconnected and without proper names, you may have to dig. So, what should be fairly quick in most applications is not here.
Another example our team struggles with is estimating with points and where those should/shouldn’t be assigned. (what level of granularity; story vs task). This impacts reporting and planning in inconvenient ways but not detrimental ways.
Ultimately, I do think a lot of this comes down to how well the system was set up from the get-go and in our case, I don’t think that was done particularly well. Whether that’s because Devops makes configuration difficult or the team we acquired was using a very perverse style of agile, I’m not sure. So I’d encourage you to try it on your own and definitely get some more opinions than mine.
Another couple of thoughts…
- How big is your org?
- How many projects are you managing?
- How formal is your SDLC/engineering?
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@NaomiNwosu, Moving off AzDo for basically this reason. It is extremely opinionated about how you can view certain information under different conditions and becomes a huge pain if your devs don’t become overnight experts.
Microsoft has stopped all development on Azure DevOps to focus on Github Issues/Projects anyway, so I wouldn’t recommend this jump to anyone.
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Curious where you ran in to problems with Devops in an agile environment?
My team had no issues at all. We had our backlog of stories ready to go, we had all of our future sprints in the system, and we would just move stories in an out as needed. We were able to quickly see the dev/qa hours we had available each sprint and keep track of our story point velocity smoothly.
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@Nathan, Like I said, I think you can absolutely use this in an Agile environment and our scenario is likely due to the original configuration.
A lot of my frustrations are that I come from tooling with a better UI/UX. I’ve used pivotal tracker, Asana, and Jira for Agile projects and I’ve found I like any of those better than ADO but that’s not to say ADO cannot work.
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They look quite different but overall they’re the same, and more importantly can be configured and tweaked to act the same through their settings.
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My company using Jira was acquired by a company using TFS, and I hated using TFS with a passion. Jira is not the greatest at everything, but my team found Jira much easier to use.
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I pray daily for the sweet, sweet release from Jira and a move to ADO. 
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IMO Jira and ADO have their own pros and cons and both of these platforms are quite capable to fulfil the project management needs. I personally have used Jira Portfolio Management tool and am quite happy and impressed with it. I came across this article which quite relates to the topic.
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An article in Forbes has very nicely compared the two.
Azure DevOps and Jira are two popular tools that developers use to track and manage projects. Though Jira can be used as a project management tool for teams beyond the scope of software development, we’ll compare the two tools as they are used in connection with software development.
| Feature | Azure Devops | Jira |
|---|---|---|
| Technical Support | Support ticket system and Twitter | Support ticket system |
| Free Plan | Free for up to five users | Free for up to ten users |
| Starting Price For Paid Plans | $6 per user per month or $30 per month for up to ten users | $7.50 per user per month for teams of 11 to 100 |
| Free Trial | 30 days | 7 days |
| Primary Purpose | Develop software applications from start to finish | Project management tool |
| Tracking Features | Advanced traceability | Built-in roadmaps for development teams Limited traceability Supports Agile methodology |
| Search Functionality | Limited search functionality | Strong search functionality |
| Customization | Custom dashboards | Custom dashboards |
| Coding | Integrates with Git for coding | Integrates with Bitbucket |
| Satisfaction Guarantee | Not available | 30 days |
Jira supports Agile methodology, such as Scrum and Kanban, and allows teams to adjust workflow iterations and add more features while in progress, which isn’t available with Azure DevOps.
Conversely, Azure DevOps allows teams to view a project from start to finish, along with the connections between various stages and work items, but Jira doesn’t allow teams to view previous tasks or iterations. For instance, users of Jira can’t see whether a completed Story is associated with a software release. Using Azure DevOps, teams can track and view every step in the project from ideation to deployment.
Bottom Line:
Both Azure DevOps and Jira are popular and useful software development tools, though your best option will largely depend on how you plan to use the tool. If you are looking for something to help you manage the entire life cycle of a software application development, from ideation to deployment, Azure DevOps will probably be your best option. If, on the other hand, you want a project development tool to be used for software development, as well as other projects, Jira can better meet your needs.
Source: Azure DevOps vs Jira (2022 Comparison) – Forbes Advisor
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