I expected to read this as a "Ah yes, another JIRA bashing article." I've tended to view JIRA as "the worst of all project tracking tools, except for all the other ones" so I like to rise to its defense when I see folks complaining about it without taking into consideration the needs of other stakeholders.
That said, I've found myself agreeing with pretty much everything in this article. While I believe that JIRA (if properly configured) can serve as a good issue tracking system, attempts to do top-down, high level planning on it have always left me with nothing but frustration. My advice would be to completely ignore any of these features (e.g. all the "portfolio" add-ons), do high-level planning down to the epic-level in something else like Excel, and then map that to tickets in JIRA. The "Nirvana" of having complete visibility from very high, enterprise executive level planning down to the "what am I as an individual developer working on today" level in one tool is a false idol and just not possible.
That said, I've found myself agreeing with pretty much everything in this article. While I believe that JIRA (if properly configured) can serve as a good issue tracking system, attempts to do top-down, high level planning on it have always left me with nothing but frustration. My advice would be to completely ignore any of these features (e.g. all the "portfolio" add-ons), do high-level planning down to the epic-level in something else like Excel, and then map that to tickets in JIRA. The "Nirvana" of having complete visibility from very high, enterprise executive level planning down to the "what am I as an individual developer working on today" level in one tool is a false idol and just not possible.