There was a time when office communications served as project management tools. There's a reason why most companies transferred the information into digital platforms. Huge miscommunications took place during the management process, as critical information was often buried in everyday talks. Moreover, when the company had remote workers they felt immensely excluded.

In this day and age, agile project management has become a lifesaver for many companies. If you are a team of three or four developers working on an outsourced project, you need modern management software just as much as Fortune 500 companies do. Three platforms, namely Jira, Trello, and Asana have gained worldwide attention, which sparked our curiosity and we decided to try these software tools for our workflow at LavaPi. 

However, for obvious reasons, which will be mentioned in this article, Jira is the one that grabbed our attention away from other software choices. 

Why Jira? 

While Trello is a great basic project management software, it is just that - basic. Jira offers an extensive range of functionalities for complex projects and some of our favorite features are:

• Task management;
• Workflow management;
• Milestone monitoring;
• Various customizations;
• Tracking coding errors;
• Software update reports.

As you can vividly see, Jira's agile road-mapping tool, along with the above-mentioned features, is designed to meet software developers’ needs. While project management may have the same outline in different fields of work, development could be considered an exception. Jira has a few extra tricks up its sleeve, especially for software developers. For example, the platform integrates with Atlassian’s Bitbucket, allowing developers to work on coding, code testing, and other developmental tasks collaboratively. 

Customization 

If you want to use various ways to handle a project and to structure your workflow, Jira has your back. It's quite amazing to see the level of customization you can implement into this software. If you take your time to build one single template workflow that fits your project perfectly, half of the project management hurdles are avoided. We use Jira specifically for our outsource web development projects, to make sure every single task is divided among developers and UI/UX designers accordingly. When the designer completes UI/UX Design, the task is transferred to the developer to build the design that was given to them. This saves a lot of time as basic tasks are automated in this project management software. 

Reporting and Insights

Another valuable feature of Jira is reporting. Overlooking the past projects and analyzing them leads to generated reports that give insight into what could be improved. It can be a sprint report, burnup chart, or flow diagrams - you choose what exactly you want to see. 

Safety

Sometimes, we are so busy looking at the features and prices of software that we plan on using; we neglect the most important factor - safety. Jira has Enterprise-grade security, with a 2-step verification option and API token access. You can sleep well at night, knowing, that unwanted eyes will not be able to see confidential information you store on the software. Moreover, if you want to seek safety even further, you can integrate additional security add-on tools to make Jira impenetrable.