RT is a nice ticketing system, but Software Development Organizations run into a wall pretty much immediately (as in, once they grow beyond 40 or 50 employees) because of their lack of support for more sophisticated software development methodologies. The plugin and developer community is limited, and there is almost no commercial third party support for an ecosystem on top of RT.

Finally, it may have changed since the last time I used it (it's been about 8 years), but it had limited issue<-->code checkin integration (which is critical) and I don't even think Agile tools are part of it's vocabulary.

Nice ticketing tool, and, if Jira wasn't available in a 10 user license version, RT and Trac would be on my shortlist for quick-n-dirty ticketing tools for smaller software devel shops.

Actually - I agree with you about Jira not being an enterprise solution - it's fundamental flaw (and I'm being 70% serious here) is that it's a $10K package that can be set up in 10 minutes in a market where enterprise tools like Remedy go for $750K + a couple headcount (that usually cost $75K-$125K/year depending on your geography) and took us 3 months to do an out-of-the-box-no-customization ITIL deployment. I also agree with you that it's probably perceived as being weak on the SOX/Audit standards.

But some of your comments are describing features of an SCM "managing changesets", "tracking codebase" - TFS/Serena are full fledged SCM suites - and, I'll agree with you right now, they are definitely perceived as enterprise worthy systems.

But Jira is a lightweight issue tracker. It can link issues to an SCM (and indeed, fisheye/crucible are great additions that we use to connect to perforce) - but, at it's heart, it's an issue tracker.

Re: Workflow - Yes - could be more sophisticated. In particular, last time I tried, I couldn't find a way to (easily) gate an issue with multiple voters - that is, if I had an issue that required approval by five departments before it could move to the next stage - couldn't do it in Jira, and that's a pretty common use case for Workflow - so they have a ways to go. With that said - there are workarounds - JRA-10042 was a way of delivering equivalent functionality. Also - The 4.4 Visual Workflow Designer is elegant (and included in the base package of Jira)

Re: Meaningless Reporting - Problem is, what one person's "Meaningless report" is another person's "Must have" feature.

But, the overall theme of your comment, that Jira is not a heavy weight enterprise product - is accurate. It's functional, fast, and has a beautiful interface, and, for $12,000 for the unlimited user Greenhopper+jira package, is basically being given away for free to companies, and, at $10 for a 10 user license - is for all intents and purposes, free for individuals.

I've thought long and hard about this, and (to bring this back on track) - I've decided that Jira is such a beautiful product, is so elegant, and is so versatile, precisely because Atlassian _doesn't_ charge very much for it and doesn't have sales people or "Technical Account Managers" - large corporations paying seven or eight figures for software, expect to have some ability to influence the feature set, and, if you just charged someone $10mm+ for a product, you feel somewhat obligated to do so. And so your software ends up being this huge crappy enterprise system that yes, is fully SOX compliant, and is completely ITIL certified - but honestly - is just an absolute mess.

I'll state my position: I don't think there is a commercial issue tracker that I've seen, that can track issues, as effectively and beautifully, as Jira can, at any price.