JIRA (ˈdʒɪərə )
is a proprietary issue tracking product, developed by Atlassian

Atlassian

Atlassian is a software company based in Sydney, Australia which makes business enterprise software, targeted at software developers. On 1 September 2010, the World Economic Forum announced the company as a Technology Pioneer for 2011.- Products :...

, commonly used for bug tracking

Bug tracking system

A bug tracking system is a software application that is designed to help quality assurance and programmers keep track of reported software bugs in their work. It may be regarded as a type of issue tracking system....

, issue tracking

Issue tracking system

An issue tracking system is a computer software package that manages and maintains lists of issues, as needed by an organization...

, and project management

Project management

Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing, securing, and managing resources to achieve specific goals. A project is a temporary endeavor with a defined beginning and end , undertaken to meet unique goals and objectives, typically to bring about beneficial change or added value...

. The product name, JIRA, is not an acronym but rather a truncation of "Gojira", the Japanese name for Godzilla

Godzilla

is a daikaijū, a Japanese movie monster, first appearing in Ishirō Honda's 1954 film Godzilla. Since then, Godzilla has gone on to become a worldwide pop culture icon starring in 28 films produced by Toho Co., Ltd. The monster has appeared in numerous other media incarnations including video games,...

. It has been developed since 2004.

License

JIRA is a commercial software

Commercial software

Commercial software, or less commonly, payware, is computer software that is produced for sale or that serves commercial purposes.Commercial software is most often proprietary software, but free software packages may also be commercial software....

 product that can be licensed for running on-premises or available as a hosted solution. Pricing depends on the maximum number of users, with approx. $50 per user for in-house and $7 per month per user for the hosted version being typical prices.

Atlassian provides JIRA for free to open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 projects that meet certain criteria, and organizations that are non-profit, non-government, non-academic, non-commercial, non-political, and secular.

For academic and commercial customers, the full source code is available under a developer source license.

Starting with JIRA 4, a 10-user starter license costs $10 with all proceeds benefiting Room to Read

Room to Read

Room to Read is an international non-profit organization with its global headquarters in San Francisco, California. Founded on the belief that World Change Starts With Educated Children, the organization focuses on literacy and gender equality in education...

. Starter licenses are also available for other Atlassian products that can integrate with JIRA, such as Confluence

Confluence (software)

Confluence is an enterprise wiki software. Written in Java and mainly used in corporate environments, Confluence is developed and marketed by Atlassian. Confluence is sold as either on-premises software or as a hosted solution...

, GreenHopper, Bamboo

Bamboo (software)

Bamboo is a continuous integration server from Atlassian, the makers of JIRA, Confluence and Crowd.Bamboo is free for philanthropic and open-source projects. Commercial organizations are charged based on the number of build agents needed...

, FishEye and Crowd.

History

• JIRA 3:
  • 3.0, released 24 August, 2004
  • 3.13, released 9 September 2008
• JIRA 4:
  • 4.0, released 6 October, 2009
  • 4.1, released 7 April, 2010
  • 4.2, released 21 October, 2010
  • 4.3, released 16 March, 2011
  • 4.4, released 2 August, 2011
• JIRA 5, not yet released, but Beta 3 was released on November 1, 2011

Architecture

JIRA is written in Java and uses the Pico inversion of control

Inversion of Control

In software engineering, Inversion of Control is an abstract principle describing an aspect of some software architecture designs in which the flow of control of a system is inverted in comparison to procedural programming....

 container, Apache OFBiz

Apache OFBiz

Apache Open For Business is an open source enterprise resource planning system. It provides a suite of enterprise applications that integrate and automate many of the business processes of an enterprise....

 entity engine, and WebWork 1 technology stack. For Remote Procedure Calls (RPC), JIRA supports SOAP

SOAP

SOAP, originally defined as Simple Object Access Protocol, is a protocol specification for exchanging structured information in the implementation of Web Services in computer networks...

, XML-RPC

XML-RPC

XML-RPC is a remote procedure call protocol which uses XML to encode its calls and HTTP as a transport mechanism. "XML-RPC" also refers generically to the use of XML for remote procedure call, independently of the specific protocol...

 and REST

Rest

Rest may refer to:* Leisure* Human relaxation* SleepRest may also refer to:* Rest , a pause in a piece of music* Rest , the relation between two observers* Rest , a 2008 album by Gregor Samsa...

.

JIRA integrates with source control

Revision control

Revision control, also known as version control and source control , is the management of changes to documents, programs, and other information stored as computer files. It is most commonly used in software development, where a team of people may change the same files...

 programs such as Subversion, CVS

Concurrent Versions System

The Concurrent Versions System , also known as the Concurrent Versioning System, is a client-server free software revision control system in the field of software development. Version control system software keeps track of all work and all changes in a set of files, and allows several developers ...

, Git

Git (software)

Git is a distributed revision control system with an emphasis on speed. Git was initially designed and developed by Linus Torvalds for Linux kernel development. Every Git working directory is a full-fledged repository with complete history and full revision tracking capabilities, not dependent on...

, Clearcase, Visual SourceSafe, Mercurial

Mercurial

Mercurial is a cross-platform, distributed revision control tool for software developers. It is mainly implemented using the Python programming language, but includes a binary diff implementation written in C. It is supported on Windows and Unix-like systems, such as FreeBSD, Mac OS X and Linux...

, and Perforce

Perforce

Perforce is a commercial, proprietary, centralized revision control system developed by Perforce Software, Inc.-Architecture:Perforce is a client/server system.The server manages a central database and a master repository of file versions....

. It ships with various translations including English, Japanese, German, French, and Spanish.

JIRA's flexible plugin architecture spawned a large number of integrations developed by the JIRA development community and third parties, including IDE's

Integrated development environment

An integrated development environment is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development...

 like Eclipse

Eclipse (software)

Eclipse is a multi-language software development environment comprising an integrated development environment and an extensible plug-in system...

 and IntelliJ IDEA

IntelliJ IDEA

IntelliJ IDEA is a commercial Java IDE by JetBrains. It is often simply referred to as "IDEA" or "IntelliJ."-History:The first version of IntelliJ IDEA was released in January 2001, and at the time was the only available Java IDE with advanced code navigation and code refactoring capabilities...

 using the Atlassian IDE Connector. The JIRA API

Application programming interface

An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...

 allows developers to integrate third-party applications into JIRA.

Adoption

Atlassian claims that JIRA is used for issue tracking and project management by over 14,500 organizations in 122 countries around the globe.

Some of the organizations using JIRA for bug-tracking and project management are Linden Lab

Linden Lab

Linden Research, Inc., d/b/a Linden Lab, is a privately held American Internet company that is best known as the creator of Second Life....

, JBoss

JBoss

JBoss Application Server is an open-source Java EE-based application server. An important distinction for this class of software is that it not only implements a server that runs on Java, but it actually implements the Java EE part of Java...

, Spring Framework, Zend Framework

Zend Framework

Zend Framework is an open source, object-oriented web application framework implemented in PHP 5 and licensed under the New BSD License.-Licensing:...

, Hibernate

Hibernate (Java)

Hibernate is an object-relational mapping library for the Java language, providing a framework for mapping an object-oriented domain model to a traditional relational database...

, OpenSymphony

OpenSymphony

OpenSymphony was an Open Source computer software project dedicated to providing enterprise class Java EE components. OpenSymphony shut down sometime around 2009-2010, but some of the subprojects are now maintained elsewhere...

, Fedora Commons

Fedora (software)

Fedora is a modular architecture built on the principle that interoperability and extensibility is best achieved by the integration of data, interfaces, and mechanisms as clearly defined modules...

, Codehaus XFire

Codehaus XFire

is a Java SOAP framework for development and consumption of web services.Unlike earlier similar products, such as Apache Axis 1.x that use in-memory tree models for XML, XFire uses StAX resulting in better performance..Apache Axis2 also uses StAX....

 and Skype

Skype

Skype is a software application that allows users to make voice and video calls and chat over the Internet. Calls to other users within the Skype service are free, while calls to both traditional landline telephones and mobile phones can be made for a fee using a debit-based user account system...

.

The Apache Software Foundation

Apache Software Foundation

The Apache Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation to support Apache software projects, including the Apache HTTP Server. The ASF was formed from the Apache Group and incorporated in Delaware, U.S., in June 1999.The Apache Software Foundation is a decentralized community of developers...

 uses JIRA and Bugzilla

Bugzilla

Bugzilla is a Web-based general-purpose bugtracker and testing tool originally developed and used by the Mozilla project, and licensed under the Mozilla Public License....

. Projects currently using Bugzilla

Bugzilla

Bugzilla is a Web-based general-purpose bugtracker and testing tool originally developed and used by the Mozilla project, and licensed under the Mozilla Public License....

 have the option of migrating to JIRA at any time.

Security

In April 2010 an XSS vulnerability

Cross-site scripting

Cross-site scripting is a type of computer security vulnerability typically found in Web applications that enables attackers to inject client-side script into Web pages viewed by other users. A cross-site scripting vulnerability may be used by attackers to bypass access controls such as the same...

 in JIRA was the stepping stone to the compromise of key Apache Software Foundation

Apache Software Foundation

The Apache Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation to support Apache software projects, including the Apache HTTP Server. The ASF was formed from the Apache Group and incorporated in Delaware, U.S., in June 1999.The Apache Software Foundation is a decentralized community of developers...

 servers.

See also

• Atlassian Seraph
  Atlassian Seraph
  Seraph is a very simple, pluggable J2EE web application security framework. It is developed and maintained primarily by Atlassian, who use it in their JIRA and Confluence products. It is licensed with a simple 'Open' licence from Atlassian....
  
  
• Comparison of issue tracking systems
  Comparison of issue tracking systems
  This article is a comparison of issue tracking systems which are notable, including bug tracking systems, help desk and service desk issue tracking systems, and asset management systems...
  
  
• Confluence
  Confluence (software)
  Confluence is an enterprise wiki software. Written in Java and mainly used in corporate environments, Confluence is developed and marketed by Atlassian. Confluence is sold as either on-premises software or as a hosted solution...