Matt Doar first discovered JIRA while writing Practical Development Environments (O’Reilly, 2005). Since then, his company Consulting Toolsmiths has helped dozens of organizations to use JIRA the way they want to. He is also the author of a number of significant plugins in the Atlassian Plugin Exchange.

Before that, he was a software toolsmith and developer for a number of networking companies in Northern California. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge.

Stafford Vaughan started using JIRA in 2005 after getting a Software Engineering degree in Australia and joining CustomWare, Atlassian’s leading services partner. He is a founding author of Atlassian’s official JIRA training course materials. During his four years as the Atlassian Training Manager, Stafford worked with many Fortune 500 companies, government entities, and universities, including NASA, Intel, Stanford University, The Pentagon, Wells Fargo, and The United Nations. Stafford currently lives in San Francisco and provides training for organizations in and around Silicon Valley.

Marcin Zręda specializes in business analysis and quality assurance. He has many years of experience as a programmer and designer. He is the author of many articles on JIRA and the owner of the testandtry.com blog. Has implemented JIRA for many departments that have more than 600 employees. He is currently directing the department of business analysis in a large international company.