With multiple projects and many tasks taking place simultaneously in the workplace, it is necessary to have collaboration tools that enable us to have a place to keep track of all the project-related information.
Atlassian, a company that provides collaboration tools for the enterprise, has created two of the most popular ones, Jira and Confluence. From software development to project development, these tools are crucial to documenting and sharing various resources with other team members.
Jira is designed for software development and provides the features needed by software development teams. It is the software used for tracking tickets across multiple projects and is the most effective way for project managers to keep track of productivity in the workplace. Jira also gives project managers the ability to create reports and provide them to higher management. Another great aspect of Jira is that it allows members of the team to collaborate with one another when the involvement of multiple people is required for a certain task. For example, a ticket may start out as assigned to a developer but may later be passed on to a member of the QA team or project owner for final evaluation. It allows ease of tracking changes and requirements as you move through sprints. As sprints advance you can see how tickets progress and go through different statuses/assignees. This helps to keep a birds-eye view on everything while also providing all the necessary details when needed. Jira is also great for integration with version control tools like Git or SVN and allows you to keep track of your commits on individual tickets.
Below is an example of what a Jira board might look like on a daily basis. You can see the multiple statuses available, as well as the tickets progressing through the workflow.
Image source: https://www.softwareadvice.com/project-management/atlassian-jira-profile/
Confluence software is used for collaboration. Using Confluence, teams can keep track of all their documents, share tutorials, track progress on projects, etc. The list is long as far as what Confluence can be used to document, similar to a wiki page. Confluence offers many different options on how to document, such as attachments, tables, forms, reports, and many more. For a project, you generally need to communicate and share different items with your team—documenting your weekly meetings, keeping your team calendar up-to-date, sharing ‘How-To’ documents, setting deadlines and assigning tasks. It, therefore, provides an easy way to collaborate with your team and share resources.
Atlassian provides Jira and Confluence for on premise installation or as part of its cloud-based offering. The Artemis team has significant experience with maintaining a complete Jira and Confluence installation for large clients, as well as running Jira/Confluence projects on the cloud version for its development projects.
As you can see, Confluence and Jira are valuable tools to have in the workplace because they establish great intrapersonal communication and provide an ongoing schedule of progress on projects. It in turn translates to higher levels of productivity that creates a more efficient work environment. Talk to us if you are interested in understanding how the Atlassian suite can help you or your organization.