JIRA is an affordable workflow management system developed by Atlassian. JIRA provides significant benefits when there is a need for people to work together as a team to manage issues, work requests or implement a project. If team mates are geographically dispersed, JIRA’s becomes invaluable as a remote collaboration tool, as team mates can easily collaborate wherever and whenever there is an Internet-enabled PC or “smart phone”JIRA is ideal for organizations and professionals involved with system and software development. Due to the flexibility in configuring JIRA applications, the JIRA user community has also used JIRA to manage a wide variety of business applications, including customer issue management, change control management, help desk request, work request and task management, and as a tool for managing system and software deployments (project management).
JIRA provides issue tracking and project tracking for software development teams to improve code quality and the speed of development. Combining a clean, fast interface for capturing and organizing issues with customizable workflows, Open Social dashboards and a pluggable integration framework, JIRA is the perfect fit at the centre of your development team.
JIRA application development requires configuring JIRA according to stakeholders, managers and end-user requirements. While no programming along the lines of using programming languages like Java and C++ is required to configure a JIRA application, using structured system and software development approaches and methodologies to develop JIRA applications will yield scalable JIRA applications with happy stakeholders, project managers, department supervisors and end-users.
JIRA is a proprietary issue tracking product, developed byAtlassian, commonly used for bug tracking, issue tracking, and project management. The product name, JIRA, is not an acronym but rather a truncation of "Gojira", the Japanese name for Godzilla. It has been developed since 2004.
| Developer(s) | Atlassian Software Systems |
| Initial release | October 12, 2004 |
| Stable release | 4.2 / October 19, 2010 |
| Written in | Java |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Type | Bug tracking system, Project management software |
Atlassian provides JIRA for free to open source projects, and organizations that are non-profit, non-government, non-academic, non-commercial,and non-political. For commercial customers, the full source code is available under a developer source license. JIRA integrates with source control programs (SCM) such as Subversion.
JIRA has a plugin architecture and a large number of integrations developed by the JIRA development community and third-parties, including IDE's like Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA using the Atlassian IDE Connector. The JIRA API is designed as an extensible way for developers to plug applications into JIRA.
Atlassian, a private company based in Australia, developed JIRA in response to a need for a more robust Open Source software defect tracking system. As JIRA developers continued to expand the flexibility of the application, the JIRA community found users for JIRA in other business areas that required a workflow management approach to managing issues and work requests. The JIRA user and development community includes dozens of notable companies and nonprofit organizations.
JIRA is used for issue tracking and project management by over 14,500 organizations in 122 countries around the globe — across Fortune 1000, public enterprise, science and technology sectors.
JIRA lets you prioritize, assign, track, report and audit your ‘issues’, from software bugs and helpdesk tickets to project tasks and change requests. More than just an issue tracker, JIRA is an extensible platform that you can customize to match your business processes. JIRA improves productivity by cutting down on time wasted on tracking issues and coordination. JIRA improves quality by ensuring all tasks are recorded down with all the details and followed up till completion.
The key to developing, deploying and managing JIRA Enterprise class applications is to treat each project as a system (or software) development initiative. This involves applying a structured development methodology when tasked to develop a JIRA application for a team, rather than viewing the task of delivering a JIRA application as a configuration task for your system administrator.
Using the approach to JIRA application development, we can successfully designed, deployed and managed several dozen JIRA Enterprise class applications for a 1000+ user community.
Atlassian allows JIRA software to be freely used by qualified non-profit and charity organizations through a JIRA Community license. For nonprofit organizations that meet the definition of use via a JIRA Community License, this means JIRA can be accessed by an unlimited number of JIRA users (unlimited number of JIRA user accounts may be setup), with the JIRA application hosted on the nonprofits web application server.
USES OF JIRA
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JIRA WORKFLOW
A JIRA workflow is the set of steps and transitions an issue goes through during its lifecycle. Workflows typically represent business processes. JIRA ships with a default workflow. The default workflow cannot be edited, but you can customise the issue lifecycle by creating additional workflows. Each workflow can be associated with particular projects and (optionally) particular issue type.
A workflow consists of steps and transitions:
- A step represents a stage in a workflow for an issue. An issue can exist in only one step at any point in time. Each workflow step corresponds to (and is usually named after) a 'linked' status.
- A transition is a link between two steps. A transition allows an issue to move from one step to another step. For an issue to be able to progress from one particular step to another, a transition must exist that links those two steps.
JIRA FEATURES
Bug Tracking:
Bugs are an inevitable part of software development for every team—large or small. We believe your bug tracker should be simple and intuitive without sacrificing functionality or forcing you to change the way you work. JIRA makes bug tracking personalized and painless, so your team focuses energy on what matters most great code.
Powerful, yet simple:
JIRA simplifies every step of tracking bugs for everyone involved. Creating, triaging and resolving bugs is a snap with a clean, intuitive interface.
· View issue details including custom fields, attachments, workflow actions and recent activity
· Create new bugs in seconds from your browser, email, IDE or smart phone client
· Navigate JIRA and execute issue actions using keyboard shortcuts
· Quickly triage issues with auto–complete entry fields for labels, components and versions
Projects organize bugs into components for sub-grouping, and into versions for identifying affected and target fix releases.
Project Tracking:
JIRA is a flexible project management tool whether you are tracking bugs for a single application, managing software development for several products or running countless projects throughout your entire company. Map customizable workflows to any business process and integrate JIRA with existing systems to manage tasks, track activity and ensure you meet your deadlines.
Projects in JIRA help you manage issues and task for a team or product. Setup user, role and group level permissions to restrict access to content and actions at any level of your project. Define project-specific workflows and issue fields to handle unique processes and reporting needs.
Project components allow you to group issues for managing sub-teams and for more granular reporting. Project versions allow you to schedule work to meet your release dates or milestones.
Metrics and Reporting:
· For project managers, JIRA provides many different ways to generate reports and track team progress.
· Browse project pages for vital statistics, recent activity, progress towards upcoming milestones, past changelogs and future roadmaps.
· Select from a set of pre-defined reports for tracking time spent, user workload and issue metrics.
· Use JIRA Query Language to run ad hoc reports for exporting data and adding charts to JIRA dashboards
Software Development:
JIRA meets the needs of every development team whether you are a seasoned developer working on a major enterprise application or a small team just getting started on the next killer app. In addition to bug tracking and project tracking, JIRA integrates with other Atlassian development tools to show you related source code, builds, code reviews and more. Plus, available plugins provide everything from agile project management and time tracking to test management, release management and more.
Software development is inherently social. Managing software development projects using JIRA helps teams stay in touch not only within the team, but with other teams as well.
View activity streams for any project to find out what's currently going on. Engage in the conversation by commenting directly on the activity stream. Hover over any user to view profile details and recent activity. Drill into any user or issue to view their specific activity streams.
Developers can stay connected via virtually any browser, IDE or mobile device to quickly create and triage issues. Integrating Crucible with JIRA is a simple way to add painless, iterative code review to your software development process.
View all reviews related to an issue under the Reviews tab, and if you are using FishEye, you can create reviews directly from any changeset on the source tab. Reviews are also rolled up on a project level, so you can quickly see all issues currently under review as well as recent reviews.
Reporting and Analysis:
The power of search can never be understated, especially in an system at the centre of your development team. JIRA Query Language (or JQL) does for issue tracking search what Google did for Internet search. Use it once and you'll struggle to imagine an issue tracker without it.
Use Quick Search to find issues fast
View search results in the issue navigator and further refine your search, if necessary. Toggling to advanced mode displays the corresponding JIRA Query Language (or JQL) for you to modify.
Configure the columns you want to display in your search results and make bulk changes directly from the tools menu. Create direct links to your search results, export as RSS or save as filters added to your JIRA dashboard.
JQL is a structured query language which let's you find issues using a simple SQL-like syntax. Using JQL is simple even for those who have no clue what "DBA" means. Just start typing and the auto-complete feature starts to suggest fields, operators and values for you to build your search. Your query history is always there for you in case you need to jump back.
JQL allows you to use standard boolean operators and wild cards to perform complex searches including fuzzy, proximity and empty field searches.
Issues and Workflow:
Customizing JIRA to fit your development process or business practices is just as important as being able to adapt to changes as you evolve over time.
The basic steps of this workflow are perfect for bug tracking and most development tasks. Standard issue types include bugs, features, improvements and tasks. Modify these or create custom issue types by associating any combination of fields to match the context of your workflow process. Create custom fields to capture any type of data that you may want to search or report on later.
Adapt your workflow as you evolve
It's easy to configure multiple workflows in JIRA to reflect your organisation's unique needs. Define custom workflows for different departments, projects and even specific issue types. Edit active workflows on the fly without disrupting work that is in progress.
Define any of the following actions for each transition from step to step:
· Conditions: These determine if an issue can commence the transition from one step to the other.
· Validators : Once the above conditions are met, validators check to ensure that any required fields are entered during the transition
· Post Functions: These are automated events triggered immediately after validation (e.g. email the project manager)
Plugins and Extensions:
JIRA's plugin system makes it easy to customise and extend JIRA for your specific issue tracking, project management and agile software development needs. The Atlassian Plugin Exchange is the largest plugin ecosystem of any issue tracker.
CONCLUSION
JIRA is a capable issue management application especially designed for system and software application developers. Over the years, JIRA has grown into a capable workflow management application that can be used to manage just about any business process that can benefit from workflow automation.
The variety of users benefited from using custom JIRA applications to manage and automate everyday business applications, including managing projects and documentation configuration change management.
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