From the course: Complete Guide to Jira Administration: Configuration, Management, and Automation

What is Jira? - Jira Tutorial

From the course: Complete Guide to Jira Administration: Configuration, Management, and Automation

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What is Jira?

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- In this section, I'll introduce you to Atlassian and show you how Jira helps all teams of all types manage their work. The vendor that makes Jira, Jira Service Management, Confluence, Trello, and other software, is called Atlassian. The company was founded by two college friends in Australia in 2001. When pronouncing the company name, think of an atlas or a collection of maps. The company name was inspired by Atlas, the Greek Titan, who was condemned to hold up the sky for eternity. The company logo has changed a lot over the years, but you can see some of the early examples depict the man holding up the sky concept. Atlassian's first product was launched in 2002. It was named after the Japanese name for Godzilla, which is Gojira. They dropped the go and ended up with the name Jira. I cringe when people pronounce these names wrong. Don't say Atlassian or Jira, It's Atlassian and Jira. Jira is for task tracking, software development, project management, and more. You may see it referred to as Jira Software, JIRA Work Management in cloud, or Jira Core in Server and Data Center. In May, 2024, Atlassian announced that Jira software and Jira Work Management are combined under the brand name Jira. This means they're now a single unified platform. So what is Jira? It's software for issue tracking, bug tracking, and project management. It digitizes your wall of sticky notes and helps teams of all types track and manage their work. Instead of a physical wall of sticky notes, users can view their work as cards on a board. Users can also view their work as a list, or in calendar, or timeline formats. Each piece of work is reflected as an individual issue. Here's an example bug for the development team. Each issue has an assignee and fields to capture all the details about the work. And all issues have a workflow, so you know whether the work has started, is in progress, or is complete. As you can see from these old screenshots, Jira has come a long way. When it was first released in 2002, it was purely for software development. But these days, all kinds of teams like marketing, finance, facilities, HR, and IT use Jira. Any industry can use it to track their work and their team's to-do list. Here's an example task for the human resources team. Jira is not just for software development anymore. There's another application type called Jira Service Management, or JSM for short. JSM adds additional support specific features on top of Jira, like queues, service level agreements, a simple customer portal, and integration with Confluence as a knowledge base. Here's an example incident for the service desk team. This issue looks similar to others we previously viewed, but has additional support specific features. Finally, Jira replaces the need for sticky notes, static lists, and spreadsheets. With Jira, your data is searchable, sortable, and structured. This means it's easy to find, classify, compare, and report on. When information is updated, everyone sees the changes right away. Each issue has a single assignee, so you always know who to contact for more information. And each issue has its own status so you can track real time progress.

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