Last year, ActiveLAMP began to feel the natural growing pains that a company starts to feel when it begins to transcend into its next degree of awesomeness. As the number of projects increased, so did our need to upgrade our system to a hardier one. One that lended itself to scalability beyond what we had at that time. Hence, the search for this unknown system began.

Through our network of developers, managers, and clients, we heard of a highly praised tool called JIRA that would be more than capable of alleviating, if not solving, our growing pain issues – or confuse us to no end due to its robust nature. JIRA provides a collaborative environment for bug and issue tracking (not to mention project management functions) through a predefined workflow. All of which are customizable to fit the needs of each simple or complex project, team, or client. JIRA's scalability and robust nature intrigued us, due to the boundless possibilities that we could use it for. Due to our intrigue, we decided to try it out.

Fast forward to today, after 9 months of using JIRA we are by no means experts, but we have found a smooth groove that works for us. With each month that goes by we tweak the system so it can solve unearthed problematic intricacies of our ever-evolving system. Here are five ways that ActiveLAMP uses JIRA:

1. Reports Galore Using JIRA Query Language (JQL) and Confluence Charts!

2. Tracking Time Relative to Tickets using Tempo.

3. Planning and Scheduling Time to Keep Moving Forward with a Bird's-Eye View.

4. Using the JIRA Capture Browser Extension for Reporting Bugs.

5. Confluence Integration for Tracking and Organizing Project-Related Documents

JIRA's robust characteristics and - at times - overwhelming configurable settings was just what ActiveLAMP needed. Though, in the beginning it was confusing to navigate and configure JIRA, the detailed documentation has helped us get JIRA to function as we need it to. Having said that, while we continue to refine our system with integrations, plugins, and custom tools that we build, we're full steam ahead to our next destination ready for what the road has in store for us.

How does your team use JIRA? There is definitely more than one way to use a tool as flexible as JIRA. Share your thoughts, workflows, tips, and lessons learned in the comments below. Don't be shy. Join the conversation.