Understanding the Jira platform

Jira started as a popular tool used by software development teams to track and manage their projects. As the IT industry changed over the years, Jira has also grown to meet the demands and challenges faced by its users. Today, Jira has transformed from being a single application to a platform with many applications and solutions that can run on top of it, and it provides additional features and capabilities that go beyond issue tracking.

Atlassian, the company behind Jira, has several other products that make up the Jira family. These include the following:

• Jira Software: This is a product that focuses on software development. It allows project teams to run their software development projects using traditional waterfall and agile methodologies such as Scrum and Kanban.
• Jira Work Management: This is a product that is designed for non-software development teams, such as marketing, operations, and legal. It is perfect for general-purpose task management.
• Jira Service Management: This is a product for service desk teams. It is designed for running Jira as a support ticketing system, with a simplified user interface for the end users with a focus on customer satisfaction and Service-Level Agreement (SLA) goals.

At its core, the Jira platform provides many of its common functionalities for various products, such as user interface customization, workflows, and email notifications, while Jira Software and Jira Service Desk add specialized features on top of it.

Of course, being a platform means Jira also allows other third-party developers to develop solutions for it. Atlassian has a huge thriving ecosystem of products and solutions made by partners that add even more features to Jira. We will look at some of these solutions later in this book.

In this book, we will primarily focus on Jira Software, but we will also cover all the common features that are shared by all the applications, and how they can be used by them in their specific use cases. For this reason, the term Jira will be primarily used to refer to Jira Software, unless a specific distinction is needed.

Now that we have learned about the Jira platform and its various products, it is time to look at the newest member of the Jira family.