Jira is an issue- and project-tracking system made by Atlassian, the Australian software company founded by Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar. Atlassian’s own company timeline marks the launch of Jira 1.0 in 2002 as the moment “Atlassian becomes real,” its flagship product launch.
When it first shipped, Jira was aimed squarely at software developers, giving them a place to track bugs and tasks. Atlassian’s getting-started guide notes that the early product was purely for software development, and that the company reached 1,000 customers by 2005.
Over time Jira expanded into agile project management. The acquisition of GreenHopper in 2009 added release planning, burndown charts, and other agile features, and Jira became a common home for Scrum and Kanban boards. Atlassian later added a cloud-hosted version, originally branded JIRA OnDemand.
Jira matters because it became the default issue tracker for a large share of commercial software teams, tying bug tracking, feature requests, and sprint planning into one workflow. Where Bugzilla showed open-source projects how to keep a shared bug list, Jira packaged issue tracking with agile planning for the enterprise market.