Jira

Three strengths

• One shared workspace. Teams plan work, track progress and coordinate in a single workspace. 1
• Every issue logged. Each task or bug is logged with its details and history, which is why researchers use Jira's records to study how software gets built. 3 4
• Widely used. Atlassian reports more than 300,000 companies using its products. 1

What it is

When several people build software, the work needs a list: what's to be done, who's doing it, what's broken and what's finished. Jira is the tool many teams use for that list. Each item is an issue, such as a task, a feature request or a bug, and it carries a status, an owner and a history, so nothing gets lost in someone's inbox. Atlassian presents it as a shared workspace where teams "plan work, track progress, and move faster together". 1

The tool began as a fix for its makers' own problem. Atlassian started as a company that supported other companies' customer support teams. Its co-founders, Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, found their bug tracker lacking, built their own and called it JIRA, then chose to sell it in place of offering support services. The name is a play on "Gojira", the Japanese title of the original 1954 Godzilla film. 2

Jira's records are a popular source for researchers. One dataset collected the Jira trackers of four open source communities: over a thousand projects, more than 700,000 issue reports and over 2 million comments. 3 Another gathered about 509,000 issues from 44 open source agile projects, and noted that all 13 of its source repositories used Jira as their issue management platform. 4

We choose it where a client already runs on it, because the best way to report a problem is into the system your team already watches.

How we use it

Jira is the tool we reach for least. In some earlier builds we put a bug-report feature inside the app itself, so when someone hit a problem and reported it, it landed straight in the client's Jira. We haven't built one in the last two years, but we can again whenever you'd like one. And if your team tracks its work in Microsoft's tools, we work in Azure DevOps instead.

That's the heart of Integrations & Automations: joining your systems so information moves between them without anyone retyping it. For you, it means a problem reported in your app lands in the list your team already works from, which is the unified systems and efficiency gains the service is built around.

References

1. Atlassian, "Jira", atlassian.com. https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira (accessed 29 October 2026)
2. Atlassian, "20 years of Atlassian, 20 lessons learned", Inside Atlassian. https://www.atlassian.com/blog/company-news/atlassian-founders-20-years-20-lessons (accessed 29 October 2026)
3. Marco Ortu, Giuseppe Destefanis, Bram Adams, Alessandro Murgia, Michele Marchesi and Roberto Tonelli, "The JIRA Repository Dataset: Understanding Social Aspects of Software Development", PROMISE 2015: 11th International Conference on Predictive Models and Data Analytics in Software Engineering, 21 October 2015. https://researchprofiles.herts.ac.uk/en/publications/the-jira-repository-dataset-understanding-social-aspects-of-softw/ (accessed 29 October 2026)
4. Vali Tawosi, Afnan Al-Subaihin, Rebecca Moussa and Federica Sarro, "A Versatile Dataset of Agile Open Source Software Projects", MSR '22: 19th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, May 2022 (arXiv:2202.00979). https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/2202.00979 (accessed 29 October 2026)