JIRA, a product from Atlassian, began its life as a simple alternate bug-tracker, and has since evolved into a popular and robust product and issue management tool. JIRA 4.0, to be released tomorrow, has made several enhancements and additions including an improved dashboard, JIRA Query Language (JQL) for enhanced search features, and activity streams. The most notable new feature is the integration of OpenSocial, a set of common open API’s to exchange data between social networks, into the product.
Atlassian believe that software development and collaboration is a process that is inherently social. As such, they integrated OpenSocial into JIRA 4.0 in order to increase awareness of all aspects of a specific issue. Activity streams were added for this same reason and as such, any user can drill down into the progress being made on a certain issue. OpenSocial gadgets are integrated into JIRA 4.0 through their new customizable dashboards. JIRA 4.0 ships with a multitude of pre-built gadgets and supports gadgets from other Atlassian products, such as Confluence. JIRA also displays other OpenSocial gadgets and can be displayed in OpenSocial containers like iGoogle and Gmail.
JIRA 4.0 also introduces a more powerful and intuitive search query mechanism, JQL. Users are able to create their own queries, save these results as a filter, and then create a gadget to embed into the dashboard for future access. Furthermore, JQL has an auto-fill feature, so even those without experience will be able to find what they want at a granular level.
Atlassian currently has over 12,000 customers and has a reported $50M in sales. Their products compete with opensource alternatives such as Bugzilla, as well as enterprise products such as IBM’s Rational Jazz.
JIRA 4.0 Dashboard</strong
