GuruHut announce the release of JIRA 4

29 October 2009

GuruHut has announced the release of Atlassian’s JIRA 4, a widely used issue and bug tracker for software development and project management, with nearly 1 000 features and improvements.

JIRA, developed by software house Atlassian, is used for issue tracking and project management by over 11 500 organisations in more than 107 countries around the world, with customers like BMW, Yahoo, Adobe, Disney and the Apache Foundation endorsing the product with their ongoing custom.

Locally distributed by software development house GuruHut, who now have the in-house expertise to implement and support the product, the latest version features OpenSocial gadgets and social networking capabilities to create a truly interactive and customisable working environment for users.

“The upgrade of JIRA 4 extends the issue-tracking capabilities of previous versions throughout the enterprise,” says Len Weincier, a director and software architect at GuruHut. “It’s embracing the social networking capabilities of the product – that’s social networking in a business sense – and is the first commercial business application to do that successfully.”

JIRA 4 incorporates a range of new features, all architected to help organsiations collaborate better. It features new-look and easily customisable dashboards that ship with dozens of pre-built gadgets, as well as supporting gadgets from other Atlassian products like Bamboo, FishEye and Confluence.

It makes use of JIRA Query Language (JQL) to enable users to trace elusive issues within the system. Its interface has been refreshed, simplifying access to key functions. New Facebook-like activity streams display the latest activity for JIRA issues, projects and people, that can be displayed on the dashboard or added to any RSS reader.

A new pricing model has made JIRA more accessible to smaller teams and companies. For US$1 200, companies can buy 25 user licenses.

JIRA also boasts a broad collection of agile project management capabilities, courtesy of GreenHopper 4, which allows users to track progress and assists with future estimates.

GuruHut is in the process of finalising an upgrade implementation of JIRA 4 at one of their clients, VOX, and are confident that the new features and capabilities will radically improve the issue tracking and project management at the site.

“We're confident in the capabilities of JIRA 4 because we use it, and other Atlassian products, in our own software development,” says Weincier.