Atlassian has released JIRA Studio 2.0, a hosted suite of tools for development teams. Studio 2.0 includes JIRA 4, the latest version of Atlassian's issue tracker, and Bamboo, a continuous integration (CI) server that allows builds to be run in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
The introduction of OpenSocial dashboards lets users create customized dashboards containing information from any of the applications included in JIRA Studio, as well as external applications such as Gmail and Google Calendars. The new JIRA Query Language (JQL) enables team members to run complex queries using a simple SQL-like syntax enhanced with auto-completion, and then save and share their reports anywhere.
"JIRA Studio combines Atlassian's most popular development tools with Subversion source control in a fully-integrated system to let development teams get up and running in minutes," says Atlassian's Mike Cannon-Brookes. "Organizations are realizing that hosting their development tools is secure and efficient and are increasingly turning to solutions like JIRA Studio to save time and hassles."
JIRA Studio includes the latest agile planning and tracking features of Greenhopper, a JIRA plugin. Teams can manage multiple product backlogs and then assign tasks to iterations using a simple drag-and-drop interface. Burndown charts can be displayed in any dashboard, and task-tracking is done by simply dragging tasks between customized states like "To Do," "In Progress" and "Done." JIRA Studio supports the most popular agile methods including Scrum, Kanban, Lean and Extreme Programming, without forcing a team into a specific approach.
JIRA Studio 2.0 includes Atlassian Bamboo, a continuous integration server that supports running builds in the Amazon EC2 cloud. With Bamboo, teams can run as many customized "build agents" as they want using EC2 resources and only pay for the time that their build agents are running. Build agents can be started and shut down based on known peaks in demand, and the Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) can be customized to include any tools needed, such as compilers and automated testing.
