Dear Analyst #127: Spreadsheets vs. Jira: Which one is better for your team‪?‬ Dear Analyst

I wasn't sure if this topic should be it's own episode but it's been on my mind ever since I came back from Atlassian Team '24 (Atlassian's annual conference). At the conference, I had the opportunity to meet with a few people who are just as interested in spreadsheets as I am. We talked specifically how Jira can best work with spreadsheets (Excel or Google Sheets) and different workflows that result from the combination of these two tools. It was fascinating to hear how company culture and old ingrained way of doing things leads to the usage of spreadsheets when Jira and its add-ons can accomplish 80-90% of what the business need is. This episode highlights some of the things we discussed at the conference and implications for the future for teams using Jira and spreadsheets.







Source: Atlassian







What is Jira?







Since most people following the newsletter are data analysts, I thought it would be relevant to first share what Jira is. Most would say Jira is issue-tracking software used by engineering and product teams to track software projects. The software aims to mirror agile and scrum methodologies for accomplishing tasks versus traditional waterfall techniques. The rituals behind agile and scrum are codified in Jira's features, so that's why the software is loved by thousands of engineering teams around the world. This is a good video from Atlassian on what a scrum project in Jira looks like. Near the end, you'll see a backlog of tasks. The backlog is one of the most foundational principles of the scrum methodology and will serve as the launching pad for this discussion on Jira and spreadsheets.









https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOVGEsV5O9A









Why do teams export Jira issues to Excel spreadsheets?







One theme for why teams would want to export Jira issues into spreadsheets is reporting. We also talked about using other tools like Power BI for reporting purposes, but the intermediary step between Jira and Power BI is still a CSV export.







There are built-in reporting and charting capabilities in Jira. There are also a plethora of add-ons in the Atlassian marketplace for custom charts. The issue with the add-ons is they can get quite costly since you are paying on a per-seat basis. So even if the Jira admin is the one creating the charts, you still have to pay for the other Jira users who are simply viewing the charts. This charting add-on below is one of the most popular add-ons for Jira with 10,000+ downloads. Looks a bit like Excel, no?







Source: eazyBI







Digging a little deeper, we also discussed how the Jira backlog is kind of like a datastore for what the product and eng teams are working on. You can think of this almost like another table of data in your data warehouse. What does this mean for a regular business user who doesn't work on the eng or product team and still needs the data? Traditionally, they would write a SQL query to get the data they need, do their analysis, and call it a day. With Jira, they would need the Jira admin to export the backlog to a CSV and then they can go off into Excel and do their custom reporting, PivotTables, and dashboarding to show how the product and eng team's work aligns with the rest of the work of the company.







Story points,