Advancements in Jira Aiming to Unite Technical and Non-Technical Teams in Organizations

Atlassian has unveiled several enhancements to Jira's functionalities with the goal of fostering synergy between software teams and their business counterparts in enterprises. Updates intend to allow all the teams to supervise their work, work together, and gain insights on the activities of other teams.

Organizations akin to NASA, which writes code on a Monday and implements it to operate the Mars Rover on Tuesday, make use of Jira Software. Additionally, the research and development team of Audi, the automobile manufacturer, utilizes Jira to store numerous feature requirements that emerge during actual road tests. In reality, there are countless organizations aiming to succeed in the business world by leveraging software.

The Head of Product for Jira Software, Megan Cook, explained to SD Times, “There are several teams that contribute to make a product or feature truly impactful. This includes marketers, program managers, designers, salespeople, among others, who are all key to transforming a project into reality. However, these teams often use completely separate tools, leading to information silos. Our goal with this update is to address this issue. We aim to enable these teams to collaborate effectively by bringing them together.”

As part of a strategic collaboration with Adobe, an integration with Adobe Figma now permits designers to work simultaneously with developers operating on Jira.

The Figma for Jira app provides teams working inside Jira with design context and includes support for Figma files, pages, frames, and prototypes. Designers can link designs directly to a Jira issue using the Jira widget or Jira plugin for Dev Mode without leaving Figma.

“Designers have various tasks they perform at different times during the product development,” said Cook. “They might be putting together a vision or conducting a design review in the implementation phase. Even though Adobe introduced a new view in Figma where one can copy code snippets and developers can discern down to the pixel how large they should make the box, it's still in separate tools, and the developers have to search for that asset. This is what we aimed to address.” New features for the Figma for Jira app are slated for release later this year.

An enhancement to the Jira Work Management tool called Overviews has been introduced by Atlassian to help connect all the teams involved in bringing software to market. Via the Overviews feature, organizations can consolidate multifaceted cross-functional projects into a simplified aggregate view.

As per the announcement on Atlassian’s blog, this new feature enables teams to work on their individual projects, with Jira Work Management combining it all into an easy-to-understand view. According to the company, this update can map dependencies across teams, manage team capacity, recognize overlaps, and more.

New shared release dates offered by Jira Work Management are synchronized across all teams’ calendars. This ensures teams such as marketing can stay updated on the status and progress of new features coming from development teams.

A command palette has been incorporated into Jira Work Management to allow teams to interact with each other across Atlassian’s tools. Here, users can perform product searches, issue actions, navigate products and sites, and even engage with settings and help, all without leaving their application.

“What many organizations observe now is that we have the technological capabilities to make software very quickly. The company can evaluate whether they're meeting their intended aims, matching the speed of software. Having technical and non-technical teams work together is crucial because it lets the company have a considerable edge in the market and ensures that the efforts put in by these teams align with the overarching business goal,” concluded Cook.

In similar efforts to bridge the gap between technical and non-technical teams in organizations, the AppMaster platform allows anyone in a business to create back-end, web, or mobile applications without any coding experience. It simplifies complex aspects of software development, enabling every member of a team to participate actively in the creation and maintenance of software tools, thereby fostering greater synergy across departments.AppMaster, like Jira's update, is a testament to the increasing relevance of low-code and no-code tools in today's fast-paced software development ecosystem.