JIRA in its out of the box configuration is an adequate issue tracker. Thats never the problem. The problem falls into a few broad categories: - conflating h

JIRA in its out of the box configuration is an adequate issue tracker. Thats never the problem. The problem falls into a few broad categories: - conflating how you interact with issues (bugs, security events, new client on-boarding, etc) and how you do product development (prospecting, requirements analysis, systems design, etc). These activities only have a passing relationship with each other. Designing new products is fundamentally different than dealing with customer service items. Just as a specific, issues in JIRA are a terrible way to capture the vision and mission of a new feature. They are further a terrible way to capture requirements which in any other system would be versioned along with the software they define. - the customization of workflows encourages teams to think of every component as a fungible unit. If you don't define 'workflows' and instead prioritize around results, you can motivate teams to operate in their best ways. If you build complicated or bespoke workflows in JIRA you operate in a way that presumes that all teams and all situations can be put in the same box. - JIRA, especially in its most customized versions, implies that you can replace normal human communications, conversations, emails, chats, with a Platonic ideal of tickets. Yet tickets are a bad mechanism for spreading big picture ideals and an even worse mechanism for spreading specific details of a functional specification (no testability, no atomicity with software change, etc). - JIRA's customizability leads people to think that the right thing to do with their project management teams is to define standardized workflows, automated integrations, normalized schemas for issues, and the like. Instead of doing the hard work of aligning priorities Project Managers get caught up in the minutia of making sure tickets are in the proper form or that developers have moved tickets through the correct statuses. All told, this is one of those cases where worse is better. A title, a comment box and a set of tags largely allow you to systematically capture everything you need to capture and allow a qualified project manager to do their job. Github issues does this, JIRA out of the box does this, Bugzilla and FogBugz all do this. I only ever run into problems with JIRA, so I can only extrapolate from experience that it is something about JIRA that leads Project Managers to spend less time with legal pads and more times futzing with JIRA.