Why Jira Software Became So Popular?


Since the year 2002, an amazing tool is being used by many organizations for issue tracking, bug tracking, and project management functions. Yes, you are right! we are talking about Jira software. Jira is a popular issue tracking and project management tool developed by Atlassian.

History behind the Name

You may be aware that Jira is not an acronym; actually, it is a part of the word “Gojira” which means Godzilla in the Japanese language.

Later, as many organizations moved towards agile processes and practices, the popularity of Jira software increased to manifolds. That’s because Jira software has many supporting features to the agile practices, you can plan, track and release the application effortlessly using the well mapped user-friendly dashboards. There are many user-friendly options available in Jira software where you can create and organize your Scrum and Kanban boards easily to manage your project.

Jira software is popular among project managers across the industries including many big brands. It’s easy to plan and track the project works using the interactive dashboards.

You can prioritize the issues, track them from start to release easily, and at the same time, your team can view the real-time updates on the dashboards itself.

Moving forward, let’s discuss some of the key features of Jira which multiply its popularity among users.

What makes Jira Software Popular?

  • A single tool for project management needs, be it planning, tracking or releasing the software applications.
  • Plan the sprint, create user stories, task, issues and assign them to the team members with few clicks.
  • Track the work items easily and at one place by using the interactive dashboard which is visible to everybody in the team.
  • Knowing the updated status of each work item regularly, you can have better visibility on the progress, thus can plan the release process smoothly.
  • Real-time reports enable you to check the actual progress and estimated amount of time to complete the work.
  • Reports such as Burndown Chart, Sprint Report, Epic Report etc are useful to track and estimate the project work.
  • Freedom to create your own workflow, you can easily create a process as per your needs.
  • There are over 1000 add-ons available in Atlassian marketplace which can be used as per your requirements, such as the test management tool – Zephyr, time tracking and reporting tool – Tempo Timesheets or the agile portfolio management tool – Portfolio for Jira.
  • Seamless integration of Jira with other tools, such as Confluence, Bitbucket, Bamboo, HipChat and much more to makes your work easy.
  • You can easily convert a requirement in confluence into the backlog item of Jira Software
  • When developers commit the code in Bitbucket, the related issues in your Jira Sprint board gets automatically updated.
  • Integration of Bamboo with Jira software allows the user to monitor the build statuses from Jira itself.
  • Notifications can be sent to the team members directly with the help of HipChat, which helps you to speed up the communication channel for quick action.

What’s New in Jira Software?

There are some new features recently added to the crown of Jira software for both cloud and server platforms. Let’s see those features which are also mentioned in the official site of Atlassian.

New Features for Cloud

  • Track your issues; keep an eye on the progress of your project from anywhere, you just need an android or IOS device, that’s all. Yes, Jira software can be used for both android and IOS devices and allows you to perform all the activities from anywhere at your convenience.

  • Now you can prioritize your work items as per your requirement on the new Kanban backlog board.
  • Another interesting feature added to the Jira software is the creation of sprint goal. Now, you can add a clear message to display on your sprint dashboards which will be your sprint goal. It helps the team to keep the focus on the goal of the sprint and works towards to achieve that.
  • For the Jira Admin, a sidebar icon is provided to quickly add a new team member. The admin can send the invitations in just a few clicks, no need to go to the admin page, this can be possible from the sidebar being on the dashboard.
  • Sprint level permissions to role based users such as scrum master, team lead, scrum team members etc. to provide the required access control when needed.
  • The issue with epic drop down is resolved now. The epic drop down list will not show the closed epics or epics from other projects.

So, before you rush to install Jira Software on your server or to use Jira over the cloud, let’s see its licensing costs.

Licensing and Pricing

You can use Jira over the cloud or host in your local server – the choice is yours. It won’t cost much if you have a small team of 10 or fewer users but in the case of more than 10 users, the license cost will be little high. There is also a free trial period of 7 days with the cloud and 30 days on self-hosted servers.

Jira on Cloud

  • For a small team of 10 or fewer users, you just need to pay $10 per month
  • But for a big team of 100 users, it requires $450 per month.

Jira for your Local Server

  • A onetime payment of $10 requires for 10 users for a single server deployment. You have the complete control over it with 1-year free maintenance.
  • While setting up a data center for 500 users it will cost $12000 per year, this is not a one-time payment, you have to pay annually.

Jira software is popular in the agile world due to its well-managed workflow mapping and issue tracking ability. To support agile development cycle it has Scrum and Kanban boards along with various reports. There are many other features such as watch list to get notifications of any changes to the issue you were watching on, audit log to view all the changes of an issue etc to carry your work smoothly. In short, a perfect tool to manage your agile project at one place with lots of features and add-ons. There are many other features such as watch list to get notifications of any changes to the issue you were watching on, audit log to view all the changes of an issue etc to carry your work smoothly.

In short, a perfect tool to manage your agile project at one place with lots of features and add-ons.

Samual Sam
Samual Sam

Learning faster. Every day.

Updated on: 20-Apr-2022

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