The world used to feel a lot bigger, maybe it was because some of us were smaller then, but in today’s world the vastness of distance or timezone have been tamed by technology. Seeing your friend on a video call from another country or texting someone completely out of their network has become common place. The distance doesn’t really affect us like it used to. Both consumer and business technology products have quickly closed the gap for friends, families, and businesses alike. No where has this change been more apparent than in the international business market. Companies now find their employees in multiple countries and multiple timezones but working towards the same goal.
To do this effectively, especially in the development and IT space, there needs to be standardized, real-time software platforms in which teams can coordinate regardless of the time or distance. Over the last decade or so we have seen an explosion of sophisticated project management tools based off the Agile methodology being utilized by companies large and small. In forward thinking companies building software, a leader has emerged is this space. Atlassian, founded in 2002, is an Australian based company that has dedicated themselves to reinventing the way that employees and business units interact during the software development life cycle. Its very first introduction to the market was with a product that you might be familiar with or utilizing within your company. JIRA project management tool .
Today JIRA can be found in a significant majority of software companies across the world, both enterprise and startups alike. Their success can be attributed to a number of factors. Atlassian has always been, first and foremost customer focused, both in their software and in their support of their product. From its inception, their platforms have been intuitive, easy, bug free, and incredibly reliable at an international scale. The founders had a radical thought from inception, if they put most of their effort back into the software it will begin to sell itself. Boy, did they hit that one on the head. By spending significantly more on R&D than on marketing or sales, they have built some of the most robust platforms for collaboration the world has seen.
JIRA project management tool was designed for development teams in mind. Upon utilization of the product, the most noticeable part of the UI initially is a fully customizable sidebar window. In this sidebar window not only can you integrate third party applications but you can also fully customize its contents from HipChat (messaging) groups, tab quickly back and forth between current sprints and epics, as well as run reports and check on product specs in a few clicks.
To the right of the bar in the main interface there will be the current list of sprints. With a quick drag down of the mouse these stories can be grouped into epics in a matter of seconds and ranked by importance or amount of issues. Sprints can easily be created and regrouped from the backlog page. Furthermore, color coding of each story allows teams to quickly prioritize daily issues within each story and work on the most critical aspects first and move down to the less important tasks. With the ability to accept Query Language, there is endless dashboard flexibility and functionality that can be easily built in to the system.
When JIRA is paired with other Atlassian products there are significant time saving attributes that allow this software to stand out from its competitors. Automatic branching can take place between BitBucket and JIRA giving developers the ability to jump directly to the part of the code being built. Other branching allows issues to be tied directly to the spot in the code enabling easy navigation to the problem areas. When a part of code has too many issues, the sprint will turn red and raise the level of importance for the story having the issue. If major issues occur, the software will automatically ping the team and ensure quick triage of incident through HipChat, Atlassian’s messaging platform, as well as other methods.
To make deployment of the software after review and testing even easier, JIRA has a built in Release Hub that allows developers to take code and deploy it directly through the platform. If the code repository GitHub holds the new deployment, the process takes only a few seconds to ship the code to your customers, clients, or internal stakeholders. The more Atlassian products integrated into JIRA the easier the product becomes to manage, build and ship code quickly and effectively.
Atlassian has excelled in creating their products to have“out of the box” functionality. However, depending on the needs of the team and the organization as a whole, there is some integration that is required. Clovity is a certified Atlassian Solution Provider able to integrate these products effectively into the company ecosystem and ensure complete customization for your needs. We have effectively been using Atlassian products internally for years with great success and have effectively deployed the software at numerous client sites so far. If there is consideration of JIRA, or any other Atlassian product, please reach out to speak with us.
