Anybody migrate from JIRA?

[Jacob_Turley]

What were the pros and cons of migrating? What do you miss from JIRA? What makes Airtable even better than JIRA?

Just curious!

[Knut]

Many thanks for this post. As chance would have it, I am just trying to get people in a project that I am working on to NOT use Jira and go for Airtable instead. I am adding this reply primarily in order to ensure that I receive updates on the conversation; if at some point I can contribute something more substantial I would be happy to share our experiences using Airtable as a Jira-substitute.

[Jacob_Turley]

Yeah. Honestly it looks a whole lot better use-wise. Only thing this is lacking in my opinion is automation. I.e. can I even set a field to a specific value after the status changes automatically? That would be kind of sad(I may be wrong about this but I don’t think that is the case).

[Alex_Wolfe]

While I have not migrated anything from JIRA to Airtable, I am familiar with JIRA (moreso Airtable). The con, which I would argue is actually a pro, is that Airtable is completely do-it-yourself, meaning any functionality or features JIRA may do for you now will likely need to be recreated in Airtable. However, this also gives you even more flexibility to make the Airtable base what you need and add functionality as it becomes necessary.

That being said, and without knowing the ins and outs of your use case, Airtable has enough functionality to create a formula field which would auto-update based on another field’s value (in this case, a status change). However, you would need to write these formulas for what you need.

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

You mean like this?

[Jacob_Turley]

Not quite. If the status switched to closed, I would want a field called “resolution date” to be filled in with the date of the status change, and stay that way.

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

There are ways to accomplish that in Airtable, however, they do require some creativity. Not as straightforward as JIRA, probably.

[Jacob_Turley]

Can you give me a rundown? I know there is zapier but I would prefer not to have to do that!

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

Sure - so a simple way that comes to mind is to have your Resolution Date field be a link to a record in another table of Resolution Dates. When you are closing out a record in your main table, instead of putting in a static Date into the Resolution Date field, you create a new Resolution Date record whose “Name” is a TimeStamp of when it was created.

Here’s a really bare-bones instance to give you an idea:

Clearly, there’s a lot more you’d want to do there (like adding ID#'s or something to those Resolution Date records so they don’t all look the same), but it’s a way to timestamp the closing of a record with pretty minimal effort (and it could very easily be automated by Zapier if desired).

Airtable is capable of a lot of things that don’t appear possible on the surface if you apply a bit of creativity in using linked records and formulas.

[Tom_Vandervort]

Thanks for this thread. I actually want to use Airtable and Jira. Our developers love Jira and integration with Bitbucket is great among other things. However, I find Backlog management particularly before we begin to do work difficult. So I downloaded the Product Management Base. It seems a bit like overkill to me.

I would really like to start tickets with the Business Owners in Airtable then send them to Jira for execution. I would also like to close the loop once the ticket is done. I’m going to try what @Jeremy_Oglesby suggests above for status.