Are JIRA usage questions on topic here?

Question

I recently asked Adding todos for myself to JIRA issues assigned to others, and it was quickly closed (and poorly received by multiple users) with a reason stating that it belonged on SO.

This is fine; I'll happily move it to another site if needed, but I was under the impression that it was on topic for this site.

There are a number of well-received questions tagged JIRA here, and the question does relate to software development lifecycles in a professional context. I've always looked at SO as more of a coding help site, rather than as a site for larger scale development topics. Additionally, JIRA (at least our usage of it), is very closely tied to our software development strategies and workflow. So I believe this question to be on topic here.

However, those top-voted questions are also a bit old, so perhaps something changed. Also, I can understand that my question isn't directly about development strategies for a specific piece of software.

Is this question OK here and, if not, where (if anywhere) does my question belong?

Answer 1

I do not believe that your question is on-topic here.

As defined in the Help Center's description of on-topic questions, one of the types of off-topic question types is "providing support for products or tools" and it links to this Meta question for additional details. I believe these fully cover your question.

The key difference between your question and the majority of other Jira questions is that the other Jira questions are more oriented toward various aspects of the software development life cycle. As some examples: this question is about defect management, this one is about risk management, this one is about traceability and configuration management, and this one is about requirements management. They all take place in the context of Jira, but are fundamentally about things that most professionals would agree are part of the SDLC - you would have to do them even without Jira.

Managing to-do items is not a part of the SDLC. It's not unique to software development. Teams outside of software development teams use Jira as a work management tool. We do not want to become a place to get Jira support.

Perhaps, with edits, the question can be more directly tied to the SDLC and activities that professional software engineers take part in.