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Are specific project management tools/products questions off topic?

I have several questions about JIRA that i have yet to ask. I thought it maybe a good idea to ask in meta.PMSE first.

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I don't think they are necessarily off-topic; however, this could change in the future depending on community response (and the fact that we may be stealing traffic from Superuser).

Many of these software tools questions get answered regularly by other community members here, and there are plenty of pm-software tagged questions that I do believe have value to the community.

However, I think the main challenge is in making sure that the question is on-topic to project management, well-detailed, free of bias, and specific to a certain set of circumstances. There is only so many times that someone can ask "What PM Software do you use?" before those very plain, generic questions begin to degrade the value of the site.

Since we want this site to be a resource for not only the original question-asker, but any other professional or enthusiast project managers, the more detail in the question, the more valuable those answers will be in 6 months, 1 year, or 5 years from now.

So, if you do ask, I encourage you to provide lots of detail about the problem you're trying to solve. I feel that those questions encourage answers that are less of a popularity contest -- "I like X software" -- and encourage answerers to think about what tools will solve your problem, instead of just posting a link to their favorite tool, which may not solve your problem at all.

Good luck!

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@jmort253 brought up a ton of good points. I think it is helpful to have questions and answers about tools and problems since this is often a problem project managers face.

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This question comes to mind every time I see Jira-related questions. The last one I'm struggling with is THIS.

PMSE is oriented to questions a PM should face while managing the project, so Jira questions related to how the project (or even tasks within the project) can be managed are welcome. We have as of early 2017, 116 jira-tagged questions.

Excerpt from this discussion in Area51 around having a Jira-oriented Stack Overflow:

Questions about using Jira as an application can be asked on Web Applications. (11 jira-tagged questions)

Questions about installing Jira on a server can be asked on Webmasters (no jira tag) or Server Fault (81 jira-tagged questions). Update: Server Fault would consider on-topic "How to install Jira" or "How to connect it to our LDAP server". Dev tools and not system-admin related are off-topic in SF.

Questions about using Jira in a development workflow can be asked on Programmers, though for historical reasons you'll find more such questions on Stack Overflow where they are now off-topic.

Questions about interacting with Jira programmatically and integrating Jira with other development tools such as version control are on-topic on Stack Overflow (3.4k jira-tagged questions).

We also have the SuperUser that J mentioned (41 jira-tagged questions).

I'm pretty sure that out of these questions across the SE sites, at least a bunch of them could fit better in another SE community (not only PMSE).

Having that said, I believe we'll have to discuss with other communities to reach a consensus on how to address these questions, otherwise we might be losing accesses because people are just not getting the answers they need.

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