practical_jira_administration.pdf

If we had told people we were going to build a new bug tracker, they would have told us we were com-

pletely nuts. A little research into the market would tell you that there are scores, maybe hundreds,

of potential competitors, from mega-expensive corporate systems and free open source projects, to

on-demand software-as-a-service applications and homegrown tools purpose built to do one thing

and do it well. And then there’s Microsoft Excel, the all-in-one list builder and charting tool, which is

still incredibly popular among small software teams.

Had we considered the massive competition out there, we may have never created JIRA. Fortunately

for us, we had some naïveté in our favour, and no one told us not to do it. We built JIRA to help us

track our own consulting business, which is what Atlassian was in 2001, and in 2002 it became a full-

fledged product.

There’s two reasons JIRA was successful: an unexpected business model and its flexible architecture.

In 2002, Atlassian’s sales model was unlike any other business-to-business software tools. It wasn’t free

like an open source project, but it wasn’t expensive either like products from big corporations. It didn’t

require any professional services to use. And there were no sales people. It caused some confusion in

the market. Can you help us set up an evaluation? Um, just download it and try it. How can we make

changes to the license agreement? Y ou can’t. It’s one size fits all. How much for a support agreement? It’s

included. Free. Can I send you a purchase order? Sure, or you can use your credit card. A credit card?

To purchase enterprise software?

Of course, JIRA’s popularity is more than a price point and business model. Most of the develop-

ers who started working on JIRA in 2003 are still at Atlassian today, building atop one of the most

feature-rich and flexible issue trackers available. Depending on which company is using it, JIRA has

been called a bug tracker, issue tracker, defect tracker, task tracker, project management system, or

help desk system. It’s used by waterfall and agile development teams. It’s used by some of the largest

corporations in the world to help build their biggest products, and some people use it to manage their

personal cross country moves. The permissions system has allowed JIRA to work for both private and

public-facing projects.

An ecosystem has been built up around JIRA. As of the time of writing this foreword, there are 273

commercial and open source plugins to JIRA on the Atlassian Plugin Exchange, and hundreds of oth-

er integrations built by companies for in-house use or by vendors who sell complementary products.

We’re extremely excited for Matt’s book, too. Matt has been a terrific partner who has built custom

integrations for JIRA, extending it far and beyond. In some ways, this book is another plugin to JIRA,

helping customers to squeeze more value from the application. It’s sure to provide assistance to all the

aforementioned customers—the big companies and the small ones, the ones looking to configure it as

a bug tracker, and those looking for project management tool.

The final word is about our customers who have pushed the product, our product and support teams,

and our imaginations, further then we could have ever done by ourselves. It’s been a lot of fun, and

for that, we say thanks, mate .

Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, Atlassian co-founders and CEOs

Practical JIRA Administration