From the course: Jira Core Concepts and Advanced Features by Pearson

What Jira is and why it’s useful to learn - Jira Tutorial

From the course: Jira Core Concepts and Advanced Features by Pearson

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What Jira is and why it’s useful to learn

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Let's kick things off with what JIRA is and why it's worth the time to learn. JIRA is a project status tracker and planner made by the Australian software company Atlassian. The name is derived from the famous giant monster Godzilla, smasher of many buildings. Godzilla is pronounced Go-JIRA in Japanese. Jira began life as an Atlassian in-house developed alternative to Bugzilla, an open source bug tracking tool, so they called their internal tool GoJira instead of Bugzilla. Atlassian developed Jira initially as a help desk, service management style tool. Not long after, they realized they had a commercially viable product and the rest is history. These days you can find Jira anywhere, but especially in the field of software development and information technology. It's a product that has had staying power. No matter how the business world and technology change, work efforts always need to be planned and tracked. The fact it is so widely used makes it a good tool to learn, and many of the reasons it has such a large client base are also reasons why Jira has market staying power. The early spread of Jira was largely due to its support for Agile software development, which initially came from a third-party plug-in to Jira. Atlassian embraced that plugin, and it is an Agile software development shop themselves, using their own tool. So, basically, Jira's usage expanded right along with Agile's. Atlassian releases new features and fixes to Jira frequently, multiple times a year, as part of their Agile philosophy. So, Jira's not static. It's always changing and staying relevant. Atlassian's friendliness to third-party developers for add-ons dates back to the beginning of the product and continues, and this is something that sets it apart from some of the other tools in the space. They have long supported third-party extensions both from a marketplace perspective and architecturally. Partly as a result of this, Jira integrates with a high number of other products, another aspect that keeps it relevant and popular. Jira is also highly customizable. This can add some complexity to using the tool, but on balance, its adaptability to different situations has also helped it spread in usage over the decades. Jira is a useful tool in many situations. It's highly supported and unlikely to disappear anytime soon, so it's a great tool to learn. Atlassian offers Jira in a variety of ways. In terms of platform, there is Jira Cloud and Jira Data Center. Jira Cloud is newer and is Atlassian's software as a service offering for Jira, hosted for you by Atlassian at Atlassian.net. So you don't need to install anything, you can just access your Jira Cloud plan through your web browser and get started. There are several payment tiers that add in additional features as you move up the tiers. Jira Data Center is a Java application that you download and install on a server. It's the older offering for Jira, and companies that legally aren't able to keep data in the cloud, or prefer not to, still go this route. Newer features tend to show up in Jira Cloud, but Atlassian has enough customers on Jira Data Center that it's unlikely to see end-of-lifetime anytime soon. Atlassian has also offered some specialized Jira products over the years, and still do. At one point, there were three flavors of Jira – Jira Software, Jira Business, and Jira Core – but they've now rolled those back under one hood. There have also been a number of Atlassian products in the past that were related to Jira in some way. For instance, Jira Service Management is an offering they still have, which is Jira specialized for handling customer incidents and requests. Jira Align is an example of an Atlassian product that has Jira in the name, but it really isn't Jira at all. It's a separate product that Atlassian bought from another company that integrates with Jira. In this course, we'll just be learning plain old Jira, and primarily we'll be in Jira Cloud. But since we are learning essential Jira capabilities, what you'll learn will really cross over into all of these offerings.

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