Team management software company Atlassian Inc. today announced updates to its flagship enterprise workforce product Jira Software that open up infrastructure and collaboration opportunities for software development teams.

Jira acts as a connector for bug tracking, issue tracking and project management. It is used across the industry to connect development, production and information technology teams across an entire product lifecycle. The software also allows management to interconnect multiple teams all working on parts of a product.

Announced at the company’s annual Atlassian Summit 2017 conference in San Jose, California, the self-hosted version of Portfolio for Jira has received updates to make the software more useful to executives managing agile development teams, which are cross-functional teams that aim to develop software faster.

Two new updates will give executives and management greater visibility into the development project using Portfolio for Jira: Programs and Dependency Reporting.

With Programs, management will have access to a back-end reporting dashboard with a collective view of multiple plans to help track the status and progress of high-level business priorities. With this update, executives can gain greater visibility and business intelligence into how interdependent projects are progressing and get an at-a-glance overview.

“Programs allows managers and executive managers to step back and get an aggregated point of view of teamwork,” said Junie Dinda, head of product marketing at Atlassian, said in an interview. “As with agile development and DevOps, visibility is a very important thing for stakeholders to ensure that everyone is on the same page.”

The Dependency Reporting update for Jira extends visibility for multiproject management by showing project managers what process is dependent on what other processes. This provides a high-level view of what might be holding up a particular development cycle, for example that Team A requires something that Team B is currently fixing or developing.

With dependency reports, a project manager can better understand potential bottlenecks and prioritize accordingly to keep teams and projects from lying fallow waiting for dependencies to clear up.

With an eye for simplifying deployment for customers, Atlassian announced a collaboration with Microsoft Corp. that will allow Jira users to launch the software on the Microsoft Azure cloud. Deploying Jira on Azure is made easier with a jointly developed customized template to make the transition seamless for existing Atlassian Data Center customers. With Azure, Jira customers can take advantage of the cloud service’s high availability and disaster recovery.

Atlassian announced an integration with Amazon Web Services for Jira last year. The addition of Azure means Jira customers can pick their preferred cloud provider, at least if it’s either AWS or Azure.

“We see this as a focus on provider choice and deployment flexibility,” Dinda said about the Microsoft collaboration. “The Jira team is seeing a lot of enterprise taking Jira from their own servers into the cloud – so now they officially support AWS and Azure Marketplace.”

For Service Desk users, the end point of the product lifecycle where customer support interacts with users of a product to lend a hand, Atlassian is now offering a new Embedded Jira Service Desk Cloud integration. With this system integrated, users will no longer need to open up a new browser window or email client in order to contact support: Embedded Jira will use context menus to raise a customer support request or submit a bug.

Atlassian refers to this capability as “an embedded help button that lives anywhere.”

Image: Atlassian