News

Developers Get New Features via Atlassian's Jira Software Cloud

• By John K. Waters
• December 15, 2020

Software development and collaboration tools provider Atlassian has announced four new features in its Jira Software Cloud designed to allow developers to visualize and measure progress "from idea through to production" across Atlassian and third-party tools.

Jira is the company's issue- and project-tracking service. The new features are specific to the Jira Software Cloud version of the service that allows developers to plan, track, release, and support their application in the cloud.

"DevOps teams today use many tools from multiple vendors, and while data is available in these tools, the burden is on teams to turn that data into actionable insights," the company said in an emailed statement. "It requires a slow, manual process of connecting the dots within huge amounts of information across numerous tools. It's totally contrary to the goals of DevOps…. We're eliminating that process by making Jira the connective tissue for the assorted tools teams use throughout the software development workflow."

The company describes Jira as "the backbone of the modern software development toolchain, where developers can plug in the tools they want while management and product can have the visibility and reporting they need."

The list of features announced by Atlassian includes:

• Code in Jira: A new view that gives everyone on the team visibility into the most recently active repos across Bitbucket, GitHub, or GitLab automatically surfaced right in Jira.
• Deployments in Jira: Anyone on the team can get a real-time view of where a deployment is, across any CI/CD provider, as it moves through the pipeline. Teams can track and measure from idea through to production since every work item across Atlassian and third-party tools is linked to a Jira issue.
• Deployment Frequency: Jira automatically calculates how often your team is shipping value and how this is trending over time with the metric that high-performing software teams care about most.
• Cycle Time: Jira is the only tool that can track down to the granular view of each segment of the development workflow and surface actionable insights on bottlenecks to optimize the team's workflow.

Jira Software is part of a family of products Atlassian makes and supports. It has evolved over the years from a stand-along tool into an integrated work management tool for a range of use cases, from requirements and test case management to agile software development. The list of other products in that portfolio includes the Bitbucket Git code manager, the Confluence document collaboration tool, the Opsgenie incident management solution, and the Statuspage communications tool.

The company's products are listed in the Atlassian Marketplace.