Day 28… stay at home.
Jira is a great tool to have for issues management. In fact, replace the word ‘issues’ with ‘work’.
Why I use both Jira and Confluence? From my perspective, here is why:
I can use Jira to record my work. I can use Jira to manage my ‘flow of work’. I can use Jira to accumulate my work into my ‘backlog’ of work; from the backlog, I can prioritize my work… then work on it to completion.
I can use Confluence to record almost anything about my work, my thoughts, artifacts about my work, blog about it, etc. Think of it like a website with a blog!
Both Jira and Confluence are under one company — Atlassian, an Australian company. https://www.atlassian.com/
As such, having both products under one company, these two products work together as one and like a charm. Atlassian made it so simple to make these two products work together, seamlessly. Example, I can have a Jira report shown on my Confluence page… and it gets its value, live and refreshed automatically from Jira. Another example: I can highlight a potential work item mentioned on my confluence page and out if it, I can create a record of work in Jira.
Jira is a flat database — no concept of ‘relational database’. Meaning, I can ‘link’ — albeit manually — related work with ease without the restrictions put forth by hierarchies like those found in relational databases. Jira has a great set of reporting tools too… all of which could be powered by Jira’s own query language (the Jira Query Language). Confluence is basically a tool to build ‘websites’. Put a database and a website together working as one, complementary to each other, is very powerful for managing work; and great for communicating and coordinating work amongst self-organizing people (i.e. an Agile team) or teams of self-organizing people (i.e. team of Agile teams).
October 15, 2022: My new book, “SAFe Is Like …“, is now available on Amazon. 
You will get a FREE SIGNED COPY if/when you register, pay, and complete a class by the Lean Agile Guru.
