Atlassian today announced at the Team '24 event in Las Vegas that it is merging Jira Software and Jira Service Management into a single product branded “Jira.”
Atlassian's flagship project management tool, Jira, has its roots in software development and issue tracking for developers, but over the past few years, the company has also started releasing versions of Jira for other teams. These include Jira Work Management for business teams such as marketing, sales, and human resources. It was released in 2021 and replaced a previous product called Jira Core.
“We believe that great teams are built on a foundation of common goals, coordinated work, and information flowing freely between departments,” said Dave Meyer, Head of Product at Jira. said in today's announcement. “That's why the latest evolution of Jira provides a shared place for all teams to align goals and priorities, track and collaborate on work, and get the insights they need to build great things together. We've taken the best of Jira Work Management and Jira Software to create a single project management tool that helps any team become a better team.
The idea here is to provide cross-functional tools that allow different teams within a company to more easily collaborate and track their work. While there was already an integration between Jira Software and Jira Work Management (and Work Management is included for free with every Jira subscription), Atlassian believes this integrated version will reduce friction and allow different teams to work together. states that they will be able to coordinate towards a common goal. For example, engineers, marketers, designers, etc.
Please note that Jira Service Management for IT teams is not affected by this change.
More AI in Jira
With this change, Atlassian is also introducing a number of new features to Jira that enable this type of collaboration. Unsurprisingly, these include some new AI-based tools.
Perhaps the most interesting of these is the new AI work breakdown (coming soon to Jira and Jira Premium users). This allows teams to automatically split epics into individual issues (or issues into subtasks) for editing. Manually, of course. This takes some of the tedious work out of project management and allows project managers to focus on bigger-picture items on their to-do list.
Soon, Jira will be able to automatically summarize comments on issues. This functionality is also available in Confluence, Atlassian's wiki-like workspace tool.
Currently, to become a Jira power user, you need to learn Jira Query Language (JQL) to search for issues on the platform. Thanks to the power of an extensive language model, users will be able to create these JQL queries using natural language.
Image credit: Atlassian
And in case you don't know exactly what to write, Atlassian is introducing a new generative AI writing tool to Jira that lets you create, summarize, and improve your descriptions and comments. These same features are coming to Atlassian's Trello and Bitbucket, with Jira Product Discovery and Confluence soon to follow.
set a goal
Because the main purpose of combining these two tools is to facilitate collaboration, Jira has also added some new features to help teams align around their overall goals. The feature, imaginatively named “Goals,” is expected to roll out over the next month and will allow users to “create goals in a list in Jira, publish views, and see how each task contributes to a higher goal.” The purpose is to allow users to visualize how they are mapped. It also creates a directory of goals and a goal progress table that “allows you to view goals in the context of a project.”
Image credit: Atlassian
new view
Jira also introduces some new ways to process and visualize issues. For example, you can now view all your projects in a spreadsheet-like list view and make inline edits. Atlassian says this also makes bulk editing easier.
To better track complex projects, Jira Premium and Enterprise users now have access to a new Plans feature. This allows users to track issues across different boards and projects in a single view.
Image credit: Atlassian
“Everyone from leaders to program managers to team members can now estimate release dates for cross-team projects, answer questions about staffing and resources, and plan annual goals in one view. Meyer explained in today's announcement.
Speaking of time, we've also added a new calendar view for tracking business projects with issues organized by due date. This allows business teams to more easily coordinate their work in sync with upcoming software releases, Meyer said. However, it will still be several months before this calendar feature is fully released.