What is Jira?

Jira is Atlassian’s flagship software and project management platform for software development teams. Released in 2002, the core product – Jira Software – provides developers with the tools to plan, track, release and report throughout the software development lifecycle.

Nearly two decades later, Atlassian announced the addition of Jira Work Management to the Jira family of applications in 2021. Through a collaborative platform, Jira Work Management provides teams across industries with the capabilities the vendor has built for developers and IT services teams.

What is Atlassian?

In 2002, recent college graduates Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar founded Atlassian in Sydney, Australia. shortly after, Jira and Confluence were released, and the company grew slowly until the start of the cloud computing revolution in the late 2000s.

Between two funding rounds in 2010 and 2014, Atlassian raised $210 million before becoming a publicly traded company (NASDAQ: TEAM) in 2015.

Through two decades of growth, Atlassian has strengthened its portfolio with nearly two dozen acquisitions, including Cenqua (2007), Bitbucket (2010), Trello (2017), OpsGenie (2018), and Jira Align (2019). In summary, Atlassian’s portfolio extends to collaboration, code management, security, and help desk applications.

What are Jira’s Key Features?

With Jira, there’s no shortage of ways to stay in the loop. Whether you prefer to receive updates via email, chat, or by checking in on your mobile device, Jira has you covered. At your desk or on the go with the new mobile interface, Jira helps your team get the job done.

Issues are everywhere: Tasks, ideas, and requests are hiding in documents, people’s heads, and deep in your inbox. Use Jira to capture and organize your team’s issues, prioritize and take action on what’s important, and stay up to date with what’s going on around you. Jira makes all of this easy, so your team can spend less time managing the work and more time building great software.

Work the way you want: Your process is at the heart of everything you do. Don’t shoehorn your team’s work into the default workflow defined by your project tracker. Jira has workflows to match your existing processes, that you can easily adapt as your team evolves. Use the tool that fits your team, don’t change your team to fit your tool.

Productive, powerful planning: Teams that need to be effective and efficient choose Jira to help them capture, assign, and prioritize their work. Ensure that everyone on your team knows exactly what needs to be done and then watch the job get done flawlessly. And when you add the power of agile to Jira– with the Jira Agile add-on – you can even plan agile sprints!

Collaborate easily: On any team, it’s important that people can easily share information and reach out for help when they need it. JIRA’s simple, intuitive interface allows you to collaborate with teammates and get the job done more efficiently. If you think that’s awesome, you’ll love it even more when you combine JIRA’s @mentions and assignment features with the power of Confluence and HipChat.

Visibility at the speed of light: Watch the issues that are most important to you, monitor activity streams, and share information with powerful dashboards, wallboards, and more. With Jira, you’ll always know what’s going on.

Collect, service, and report: With Jira Service Desk, the Jira platform becomes a modern, flexible service desk experience that streamlines customer requests and boosts your IT team’s efficiency.

Agile project management: These days, just keeping track of your work isn’t enough – you’ve got to be agile. Jira Agile adds agile project management to the power of JIRA.