Jira is an incident management tool developed by Atlassian Inc., an Australian Company. It is a platform-independent tool. This tool can be used with any operating system. Jira supports MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server in the backend. It can be integrated with many other tools − Subversion, GIT, Clearcase, Team Foundation Software, etc.
Jira is a commercial tool. It is also available as a trial version for a limited time. To utilize Jira services, it requires a license. Jira provides free licenses for academic projects. A 15-day trial version is also available for a person to use.
A project manager uses Jira for bugs, issues, and change request tracking. They also use it in the help desk, support, and customer services. They use it to create tickets; and also to track the resolution and status of the created tickets. It is also useful in project management, task tracking, and requirement management. And most especially in workflow and process management.
Jira Core Features
- Boards – Jira supports Scrum and Kanban boards. These boards provide an immediate snapshot of the project to the team. This helps the team quickly review the progress of the projects. And also to see the status of the individual tasks. The team can customize the board workflow to fit the way they want to proceed.
- Business Project Template – Jira supports several business templates to manage tasks. These tasks can be simple and complex tasks like workflow. The team can customize the templates based on their preference. They can also customize it based on the team’s approach.
- Task Details – a person can look into a task individually to track the progress. The status of tasks, comments, attachments, and due dates are all stored in one place.
- Notifications – the user can receive emails regarding specific tasks. The voting and watching features help keep an eye on the progress. Using the @mention is a feature for calling a specific team member. A user can be tagged in either the comments or description box. The user will receive a notification if someone assigns a task to him or her. If a task requires feedback, the user will also receive a notification.
- Power Search – Jira supports a powerful search functionality. This includes basic, quick, and advanced features. The team can use the search tool to find answers. Answers refer to the due dates, the last update of a task, the unfinished tasks, etc.
- Reports – Jira supports more than a dozen reports to track the progress. This is done over a specific timeframe, due dates, individual contributions, etc. It generates different reports to help analyze how the team is doing.
- Scale with Team Growth – Jira supports any business team. It also supports any project regardless of the size and complexity.
- Add-Ins – Jira supports more than 100 add-ins. These add-ins can connect with different software to make work easy. The wide range of add-ins makes it universal across the globe.
- Multilingual – Jira supports more than 10 widely used languages. For example, English, French, German, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, and Russian.
- Mobile App – Jira is also available as a mobile application on Google Play Store and App Store of Apple. It makes it easy to stay connected with the team while the user is out.
