Atlassian has debuted a new cut of its project management and bug-tracking tool Jira, which for the first time allows users to deal with things other than “issues”.
Jira is Atlassian’ first product and after its launch in 2002 found a largely appreciative audience among developers who enjoyed its bug-tracking prowess. Over the years, Atlassian has tried to grow out of the IT ghetto, adapting its products to the needs of other teams.
“Language issues were preventing those teams from feeling at home in Jira,” said Jira head of product, Dave Meyer. The term “issues”, he said. “doesn’t appeal in the same way to describe a type of work those teams are doing.
Hence Jira now being able to track “tasks”, or even “blockers”, a “launch”, “incidents” or a more complex matter such as “onboarding an employee.”
Jira is also set to gain “custom templates” that encapsulate all of the issues/tasks/blockers involved in delivering a project. Meyer said this is among Atlassian customers’ most-requested features.
Developers have not been forgotten in this release: Atlassian has added AI tools that will analyze info from Jira or Confluence and suggest new tasks – and even code to make them easier. A video seen by The Register shows this tool analyze a document titled “Investigate crashes from build 304” and create a plan to fix it, even proposing code changes and initiating a pull request – all without leaving Jira.
Jira has also been made more customizable, with personalized color schemes and backgrounds now possible – another nod to users beyond development teams, but also one that Atlassian thinks hardcore users will appreciate.
A customized Jira layout that will apparently make your life better – Click to enlarge
Other new features link to Rovo, the AI agents that Atlassian teased in May as its attempt to tackle the perennial problem orgs face when trying to figure out what’s useful amidst their unstructured data. Rovo does that with “connectors” that link to different information sources and build a “team graph” that can then be prompted to find info.
Rovo became generally available this week, with connectors for Slack, Teams, SharePoint, Google Drive, Figma, and GitHub.
Atlassian also offers connectors for datacenter editions of Jira and Confluence, the on-prem versions of its products that it has come to recognize some of its customers may never abandon because they have good reasons to eschew cloudy or SaaSy operations.
Atlassian plans to deliver another 40 to 50 connectors in coming months, and wants 80 in market half a year from now.
At that point, the company images the RovoChat conversational interface will take on the role of a chatbot that knows your corporate info inside out, understands the projects your team is working on, and can therefore answer questions about the status of their efforts. And of course Rovo can link to Jira, so the to-do-list-generating features added for developers can be offered more widely.
This is all part of Atlassian’s plan to have its wares more widely adopted beyond tech teams.
Jira product boss Meyer also wants coders to revisit his product, declaring that many assume it hasn’t changed since 2010. ®
