Atlassian Jira vs. OpenText Silk Central

Jira facilitates software development, bug tracking, and sprints. It's ideal for structured workflows, issue management, and customer communication. However, more straightforward tools might be more efficient for highly creative, unstructured tasks or tiny, agile teams with quick visual overviews. Jira's complexity can be overkill for basic task lists.

Incentivized

We didn't just select Borland Silk Central randomly. In the selection process, we actually evaluated in total 26 available test management tools in the market. We sent surveys to all potential users in the department to collect their wish list of our next management tool, converted them to a criteria list, and used that list to evaluate all 26 tools. We reduced the possible candidate tools to five and organized a small committee to pick the final three. Top management then checked their price tags and selected Borland Silk Central. Based on this evaluation process, I would say Borland Silk Central is suitable to an organization which has no more than 60 testers; needs both manual tests and automated tests; needs on-line support; needs a low learning curve and has a limited budget. My personal view is that this tool reaches the balance points among ease-of-use, budget and support.

Incentivized

• As a developer, it is easy to create, track and manage tickets efficiently.
• Customizable issue types (eg: Bug, Task, Story, Epic) allow teams to categorize and priorizate work.
• Great text editor and markdown support for detailed issue descriptions.
• Assign issues to team members, set due dates and define priorities.
• Integration with Jenkins, GitHub and other CI/CD tools to automate builds and deployments.

Incentivized

• Borland Silk Central is good for the users to associate test requirements, test cases, execution plans and test reports together. Each asset (test case, requirement, etc...) provides links for the users to jump to other assets in a click, and the users can jump back and forth between two assets.
• Borland Silk Central is also good in test automation. Although Micro Focus does provide a client tool for test automation, the users don't really need it to automate the tests. In our case, we are using Python to automate the tests and use a batch file to launch tests, and in Borland Silk Central we just call that batch file from server side. The test result is automatically fed back to Silk server.
• Micro Focus also publishes the schema of the database behind Borland Silk Central, so it is very easy to extend its function beyond its original design. Moreover, because its schema is published, we can easily retrieve and process its data for business intelligence purpose.

Incentivized

• The interface is not intuitive to learn for new users
• JQL is similarly challenging for newbies
• It's possible to accidentally move issues from one sprint to another without realizing your mistake
• Certain issue attributes aren't available in certain view (e.g. story points from the epic overview)

Incentivized

• On the other hand, the plugins of Borland Silk Central with third-party tools are programmed poorly. In our case, the plugins for JIRA have a lot of limitations and were almost unusable in our test environment. (They did improve the plugins a little bit later, however.)
• The tech support people are located in UK, so frequently it is difficult to get a hold of these guys due to different time zones. Also, most of them obviously don't have enough experience and sometimes drove us nuts in emergency situations.
• The last thing I feel is that Micro Focus possibly doesn't provide enough manpower to maintain Borland Silk Central. There are tons of feature requests for Borland Silk Central pending there. Although they have frequent hot fixes every few months, they don't digest these requests quick enough.

Incentivized

JIRA is highly integrated into our organization. Nearly every department uses it, and many have multiple JIRA projects set up to track different types of work. We rolled out JIRA in a staged manner, but it continued to be adopted by more and more people and departments because it continues to show results. I expect we will continue to renew our JIRA license for years to come

Incentivized

Atlassian Jira is relatively easy to use, but there are several ways to configure it, which can make it more complicated if you configure it incorrectly. Keeping the customizations and complexity limited to being the project would be suggested to ensure you don't lose in-built Atlassian Jira features, then change the configuration as you find things aren't meeting your exact needs.

Incentivized

Did not face any issues and whenever they plan maintanance they update all of us very well in advance also so in that view we are good with the product stability.

Incentivized

Performance is really good though it holds lot of data it loads quickly especially search operation also get the results very quickly as needed hence its good

Incentivized

I have not had a chance to contact JIRA's customer support. It does offer extensive documentation, although it often feels too technical for me. There is also a JIRA training app that lets you take little lessons and quizzes on different areas (e.g., JIRA basics, agile). I did find it a helpful way to teach myself.

Incentivized

Had received training from our own internal user so it was good and also very easy to understand topics and many tasks in the UI are self explanatory and we can do by our own

Incentivized

One of their strong points i stheir documentation. Almost all of the basic set up needed within JIRA is available online through atlassian and its easy to find and very precise. The more critical issues need to be addressed as well and hence the rating of 8 instead of a 9.

Incentivized

Take your time implementing Jira. Make sure you understand how you want to handle your projects and workflows. Investing more time in the implementation can pay off in a long run. It basically took us 5 days to define and implement correctly, but that meant smooth sailing later on.

Incentivized

Jira is more feature-rich than Trello and also has better integration with other tools. Trello is a lot more focused on work tracking, while Jira can do a lot more than that. Both can also be combined, although they're often considered mutually exclusive alternatives—I've seen cases where companies choose to use either one or the other, but I haven't met an actual case of a company using both.

Incentivized

We had evaluated, for example:

• IBM Collaborate Suite - it is way too complicated and the learning curve is too high.
• HP Quality Center - it is OK but a little bit expensive.
• TestLink, Squash TM and other open source tools: The capabilities of open source tools just can't compare to commercial tools. Although we can modify the source code to improve the tool, we are just test engineers, not developers.
• Zephyr: Our testers simply didn't like its UI - too weird.

Incentivized

Atlassian Jira is highly stable and good with its performance and its has all the required scalability features as business needs

Incentivized

• JIRA has increased the teams' productivity and efficiency; the sprint timelines have improved by 15-20%.
• JIRA's integration with tools like Bitbucket and Confluence has improved functional collaboration, leading to faster decision-making and issue resolution by approximately 10-15%.
• Additional functionality requires additional third-party plugins, which require additional costs; the requirements of these plugins increase the costs by approximately 15%.

Incentivized

• Borland Silk Central provides a centralized test platform for multiple test departments in the company, so now all of the departments know what each of them is doing. In turn, all departments can coordinate with each other to reduce the duplicated test items and increase the overall test efficiency.
• Also, Borland Silk Central enables the users to publish the test procedure (steps) of each test case so all the users can know how each test case is performed. It is not like what we had before, the test procedures resided in difference place from Excel to Google drive or some other weird locations.
• Also, because all departments are using Borland Silk Central, all testers of the departments have better communication regarding testing methods. In the past, the department used different test management tools and it was hard for the testers to understand each other's testing methods.
• Finally, because all departments share BorlandSilk Central, they also share the same set of reports published to Atlassian Confluence, so now they use the same set of reports to evaluate the test progress.

Incentivized