Should your development team use Trello or Jira for task management?
Benefits of Trello
- Completely free.
- Less overhead work for managing/administrating the boards/projects/sites.
- Less time consuming for developers. (Less time needed to categorize stuff and update fields) (Rebuttal: at the expense of structure and reporting)
- Ease of use - A simpler tool like Trello is easier to use for non-technical persons. (Rebuttal: People like stakeholders and others who are not really part of the team should not use the board as it is too technically detailed. Stakeholders should refer to the roadmap and status updates from PM/scrum master)
- View access - Easier to give access to anyone who want to see what we are working on. (Rebuttal: People like stakeholders and others who are not really part of the team should not use the board as it is too detailed. Stakeholders should refer to the roadmap and status updates)
- Create access - Easier to allow external users to post new issues. (Rebuttal: People like stakeholders and others who are not really part of the team should not create items directly for the team.)
Benefits of Jira
- More efficient handling of large backlogs with more analytical triage/selection.
- Better overview and visibility of status and priority across projects (for everyone).
- Avoid loss of information and duplicates as you can more easily find issues with search, filtering, categorization, tagging etc. Also save time finding issues.
- Better plug-in strategy with more useful plugins.
- More options for integrating with other project planning tools.
- Support for external bug reporting interfaces - Jira has more options for APIs to allow external users to submit bugs and feedback via widgets or other external contact forms etc. and still preserve data quality.
- Better overview of all my assigned tasks across all projects prioritized in one view.
- Better support for grouping tasks together (related issues. sub issues, epics etc.)
- Compliance - More ISO compliant. E.g. Better audit-logs etc.
- More Agile - Better fit for supporting Scrum and KanBan dev processes. For example Jira supports Epics and Backlogs out of the box among many other things.
- More structure to ensure consistent use across projects (leads to better reports and less confusion/noise).
- Jira can be run on-premise (in case we in the future want even higher level of security or want to save money)
- Jira has time tracking and estimation support (without having to install quirky plugins)
- Professionalism - A more professional tool will inspire and strengthen the sense of professionalism and developer excellence.
Conclusion
Use Trello for non dev teams, small unstructured ad-hoc teams and short lived projects. Use Jira (or similar tools) if you are professional dev team.
