Atlassian overhauls Jira for the cloud

Atlassian has overhauled its flagship Jira software by rebuilding the program from the ground up as a modern cloud application hosted on AWS.

The changes include improvements to the UI, APIs and functionality with the goal of simplifying the experience for the now 16-year-old program.

There are four main changes that Atlassian highlighted.

The first is a simplified workflow automation engine, which Atlassian says will make the platform more accessible for teams building software. Users will be able to move cards and create columns on a board similar to Trello, which can trigger updates to the workflow engine.

Atlassian said making changes like this in the past would require a "deep understanding of the product and complex configuration."

The next update is the ability for each team member to make changes on the fly without the need for central administration to step in. Customers will now be able to manage permissions and user roles, as well as add custom issue types and create custom workflows.

The third update is a rebuild for Jira Issues, the prompt that indicates a bug or task has been raised in the project. The update will allow users to elevate relevant information for each work item, no matter what the file type is, as well as label each issue to give co-workers better real-time context.

The last major update is more APIs for other tools that software dev teams use such as Bitbucket and GitHub for real-time status updates, Bitbucket Pipelines, Jenkins, Adobe, Sketch, Slack, Gmail and Facebook for Work.

In addition to the four major updates, Atlassian introduced a new roadmaps feature that gives teams a wider view of the project's timeline that can be viewed and adjusted organisation-wide. Atlassian said this would remove the need for separate timelines created in spreadsheets that quickly become outdated.

Atlassian has also increased the user limit for Jira Cloud to 5000 seats and has improved overall performance.