How well does an Atlassian Jira / Confluence QMS work?
For whatever reason, Confluence and Jira still seem to be popular choices among software companies. Why? I’m not so sure. Maybe it’s the same reason startups adopted microservices: It doesn’t make sense, but Google does it, so it must be great (spoiler: no). Anyway!
If you’ve noticed that this is turning into a rant, you’re damn right. I hate Jira and Confluence – they’re slow, customizing them is a full-time job, and they create so much complexity in teams that you’re wondering why the hell you introduced the tool in the first place.
But I’m going to attempt to stay objective here, and I’ll start by citing a lead auditor from a medical device Notified Body:
I hate Confluence and Jira.
A lead auditor at a Notified body
Confluence QMS Drawbacks
Some Auditors Don’t Like It
I recently was in touch with a leading auditor of a Notified Body (who shall go unnamed, for obvious reasons). His take on Confluence and Jira is that “it’s a catastrophe” due to the following reasons:
- The self-hosted version of Confluence / Jira is going away as they’re trying to move all their customers to their cloud-hosted, subscription-based offering. This introduces problems because they do something like “rolling releases”, i.e. they deploy new features to your instance whenever they want, with no prior notice. That means that stuff can randomly break (especially eQMS plugins!), with grave consequences (see below). But it also means that you can’t really “validate” the software which is a regulatory requirement. In short, you need to list all its features and how you’ve tested them and document that, and how the hell do you document that if the features are randomly changing all the time?
- The auditor mentioned one particular incident where a customer was impacted by this “automatic upgrade” issue which caused them significant data loss across their documentation. The auditor knew that this was related to Confluence / Jira because they had seen the documentation prior to the upgrade while it was still complete!
These and other incidents have made many auditors more cautious when auditing companies using Jira / Confluence for their QMS. The most important aspect of this is that companies are now often expected to have contingency plans in place in case their Confluence data (or parts of it) randomly disappear. So, in practice, you’ll have to build some sort of backup solution as the cloud-hosted Jira / Confluence instances can no longer be trusted for medical device compliance purposes.
The Data Loss Incident
If you’re wondering why this auditor also hates the Atlassian tools, it’s quite simple: Atlassian had a data loss incident in April 2022 which left a number of companies locked out of their accounts, or with data loss, or both. This is essentially the worst case for running a Jira / Confluence QMS: Imagine you’re getting audited, and you don’t have access to your documents. Ugh.
Exportability
While Confluence and Jira have export features, the output can be described as “well, it exists, but it’s not great”. What I (and auditors) typically see are lengthy Word or PDF files. The tables in those files typically have columns which are so slim that they are unreadable. Having any sort of other data export would involve coding effort on your side, so it’s not feasible for most companies.
That being said, there also are (gasp) benefits to choosing the Atlassian tools for your QMS.
Atlassian Jira / Confluence QMS Benefits
Pricing
The pricing is, like.. not super bad. It’s priced per user, and it’s reasonable.
And yup, that’s it. I don’t have anything else to say in favour of setting up your QMS in Confluence and Jira.
Conclusion
Definitely check out some of my other articles on the topic – startups ask me about setting up their QMS in Confluence and Jira all the time, so I hope this spares my inbox of these painful questions on this painful “software” in the future:
Also, check out this video I recorded in which I attempt to set up a QMS in these Tools Which Shall Not Be Named.
