Comment by tomjakubowski

This is a good way of using a ticket tracker: bottom-up, where engineers, testers, and other stakeholders are empowered to create and manage tickets as a means of communicating about their work and what they are blocked on. It's part of the writing culture mentioned in TFA.

In some places, the ticket tracker works top-down: only the manager creates tickets, and the manager makes measurements about tickets closed, velocity, and so on to assess the productivity of their team.

I think the great divide on JIRA and JIRA-likes often comes down to which culture people have been exposed to.