Jira: How Much Do You Actually Know About It?

The Phenomenon Of Jira

If you are working in IT or at least had something to do with this are a business-wise you probably have noticed how many companies are using Jira in their everyday work. What is Jira? How does it work? And how much do you actually know about this software? How come, despite the price (higher than its competitors) and dynamic market activity of its biggest rival - Monday.com, Jira still - with no doubts remains the market leader? Why is this happening? Is this long-term hegemony on the market caused by the habit and routine of the IT managers or the Jira products’ family is, in fact, the best there is in the IT project management world? Learn about the roots, applications, and possibilities that Jira brings upon you!

Jira - The Short History Of The Software’s Name

Jira is a software created and commonly used for bug tracking and project management. It has been developed by an Australian-owned company named Atlassian and has become widely popular when agile development teams started to commonly use it in bug tracking as well as in other tasks.

If the name “Jira” sounds at least a bit familiar - no worries - you are right. There is some background to this name sourced in pop culture - the cinema. Jira’s product name comes from the second syllable of the Japanese word “Gojira”, which is a Japanese name for the famous and deadly movie reptile - Godzilla. It started when Atlassian’s developers were working on this product in its early days and started referring to the program as “Bugzilla”, which was the name they have previously used internally for their bug-tracking system.

Jira Usage

Jira forms a part of a greater family of software products developed by Atlassian's team. It has been created to help teams to manage their work. Since it was founded in 2002 it has been already deployed by more than 65 000 companies around the world. According to Atlassian, Jira nowadays is being used for bug tracking and project management by over 180 000 customers in 190 countries.Among them, you can find such big names as Spotify, Cisco, Airbnb, Dropbox, Audi, Domino’s, Blend, The Telegraph, and NCR.

Only Bug Tracking?

Even though most of the teams and companies that use Jira come from the IT sector -this is not always the case. Originally launched in 2002, Jira was created purely as an issue-tracking software, targeted at software developers. But with time this software was adopted by many non-IT organizations, to be successfully used as a project management tool. This helped to significantly speed up the launch of Atlassian Marketplace in 2012 and therefore invited third-party developers to offer project management plugins for the app. Today Jira has become something much more potent. It has developed into a powerful work management tool for all possible applications - from test management to programming and software development. It is appreciated by many people for its intuitive UX, many helpful functionalities, and incorporation of an Agile methodology. 

What Programs Form The Jira Family?

Jira is a greater family of products. It offers four different packages - each offering different options and functionalities.

Jira Work Management

Jira Work Management was intended as a top-quality, easily operated yet mostly generic project management tool. According to Atlassian - Jira Work Management makes it easier and more comfortable for different business teams to plan, collaborate, align, and successfully deliver projects. It offers many different functionalities, such as easy to-do list creation and edition, a wide range of calendar options, meeting scheduling, reporting, and more.

Jira Software

This version of the software includes the base Jira app augmented by agile project management features - previously offered only as a separate product: Jira Agile. This is a great management solution for all agile teams, where they can:plan, track, and ship their software. What functionalities will you find there?Scrum boards, organizations roadmaps, reports and insight tools, customized workflow creator, and plug-ins to easily integrate with many tools.

Jira Service Management

This tool is intended for use by all IT teams and their operations. It is also great for business service desks, HR, legal, and finance teams. It can empower DevOps, and business teams' operations, allowing them to collaborate at high velocity. delivering all service experiences faster than ever. Jira Service Management also allows tracking work across different teams through an open, collaborative platform, providing helpful contextual information to quickly respond to all requests, incidents, and any changes necessary. Another helpful option is an audit available for your DevOps teams and a full tracking system to follow all changes with ease.

Jira Align

This app was created for strategic product and portfolio management. Jira Align connects the business strategy of your company to its technical execution. This tool provides real-time visibility by aggregating all team-level data and making it all visible across the company. It helps your business to determine the scope of work, prepare the roadmaps and visualize all dependencies across all teams and their portfolios. Another useful advantage of using Jira Align is the fact that it helps you to ensure that all software is running smoothly, and all resources are perfectly allocated among the teams with the goal to secure an on-time delivery

License

All Jira packages are commercial software products that can be purchased and licensed for running on-premises. Additionally, you can connect access to its services as a hosted application.

Apart from commercial use, Atlassian provides Jira for free to certain companies and institutions. This type of use is available for many open-source projects, as well as some non-academic, non-commercial, non-governmental, non-political, non-profit, and non-religious entities. For academic and commercial customers, the full version of the software and its code is available only under a developer source license.

Who Can Benefit from Jira?

As previously mentioned, Jira is a great tool for almost all IT workers and not only.

QA And Test Management Teams

Jira Software those days is becoming a hub for all the coding, testing, and deployment stages. There are many useful options for each test stage, in both: manual and automated types of testing. Jira integrates with lots of plug-ins and add-ons so the QA’s testing can be incorporated effortlessly into the software development cycle. Jira helps teams to test effectively and iteratively. QAs will appreciate the customized screens, fields, and workflows to help with their everyday tasks.

Agile Management

Jira is THE PERFECT solution for any team who practices agile methodologies. Jira Software provides tools and solutions such as scrum and kanban boards, improving them with customizable workflows. This provides transparency across teams and their work as well as offers visibility into each task's status. Managers will appreciate the time tracking capabilities and real-time performance reports, allowing them to avoid any overtime if not imminent.

Project Management

Jira Software can be helpful to manage any type of project. You can use a project template or create your customized workflow. There is also a workflow and tasks tracker available. By using it you are making sure that you had passed through each workflow step to complete your task. Another benefit for project managers is the customizable permissions. This helps admins to determine who can see and perform which tasks. With all project information easily accessible, PMs can also obtain all types of reports - generated to track advances and productivity and help to avoid any failures.

Software Development

Jira Software consists also of many functions essential for software development, such as planning tools and roadmaps. This helps your teams to communicate and visualize the progress of the clients and stakeholders. There are also budget and requirement-connected options. Another advantage is the fact that Jira easily integrates with most CI/CD tools providing transparency throughout the software development cycle.

DevOps

Jira Software’s DevOps template is designed for high-performing units. It allows to save time and decreases the errors number. What ensures it is the fact that a wide variety of tools can be centralized and managed from one place. For DevOps teams, it is very important that Jira Software easily integrates with first-and third-party tools throughout the DevOps lifecycle. This includes many different apps and platforms, such as Bitbucket, GitHub, and Gitlab. It covers also documentation and knowledge management provided by Confluence (also powered by Atlassian), as well as monitoring and operating tools e.g., Opsgenie. Jira allows collaborations on a variety of categories all due to helpDevOps to ship better software. 

Bug Tracking

The function that lies on Jira’s core. It allows an assigned team to fix the problems within the software that is currently being built. Providing to view all the tasks and bugs in the backlog, allowing them to assign priority to each of them and see the progress in debugging. Once captured, bugs can be quickly prioritized and assigned to a specific task member.

Did You Learn Something New?

To sum up, Jira offers some great project management functionalities and tools. And not only for the IT sector! It will perfectly prove itself in areas such as project management, task management, budgeting, legal issues, and finances.It provides a transparent view of the project’s progress and facilitates cost management. All data can be easily exported and forwarded to the intended recipients. All users love Jira for its practical and intuitive UI/UX design, highly customizable workflow, and rich integration options. All of this provides you with great support and makes Jira very adaptable to any type of project.

Did you learn anything new while reading our article? We hope we only have sharpened your appetite! If you have some thoughts or insights about Jira or other Atlassian products, please do not hesitate to contact us, by clicking the link below.

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