3 JIRA Tools That Will Make Your Life Easier

Within the Atlassian Marketplace, there are a number of tools that look to make the day-to-day lives of product owners, testers, developers, and business analysts much easier.  These range from solutions that provide early stage requirements gathering, to development, testing and reporting.   With such a plethora of solutions out there, here are three JIRA add-ons that provide real value across the software development lifecycle:

1) Gliffy Diagrams – For Business Analysts

Gliffy is a tool whose purpose is to help visualize and easily understand information.  Specifically, users can seamlessly improve communication amongst team members because they can create visual flowcharts, diagrams, wireframes, and more to facilitate a better understanding of complex JIRA issues.  Learn more at gliffy.com   

2) qTest Scenario – For Developers

Tailored towards “Test-First”, and more specifically TDD/BDD shops, qTest Scenario is the first add-on for JIRA to support end-to-end workflow of test creation to test execution for TDD/BDD efforts.  Teams can utilize Scenario’s Gherkin editor embedded within JIRA to consolidate all of their TDD/BDD feature files and scenarios.  Associations between these native issues in JIRA can be tied to other JIRA issues for a full aspect of traceability and collaboration amongst team members.

3) Aha! – For Product Owners

Primarily used by product owners, Aha! is one of the sharpest tools out there to support your product vision and roadmap.  With a complete integration to JIRA, you’ll no longer have to use Powerpoint to draw out your product strategy and ideas.  Aha! comes with a magnitude of visualization features, helping with all the difficulties surrounding product management.

There hundreds of add-ons available in the Atlassian Marketplace that fill different needs within the SDLC process. With such a wide range to choose from, it can be hard to pick which ones to try. I hope this list gives you a good place to start your discovery process.