Atlassian Corp. PLC today upgraded its flagship Jira Cloud family of products with an automation engine for handling common actions such as notifying developers about code changes.

Jira is a project management tool that allows software teams to organize tasks in a virtual whiteboard. Atlassian also offers versions of the platform for customer support agents, as well as business users such as human resources professionals.

The new automation engine, aptly called Automation, reduces the amount of work involved in managing Jira boards. It allows users to create “if then” rules that trigger an action in response to a certain event.

For instance, if a project manager creates a new task in Jira that they tag as important, Automate can send a notification to the software team’s Slack channel. The engine also supports multistep workflows. A customer support team could craft a workflow that detects when a user complains about an issue previously marked as closed, reopens it and assigns the ticket to a help desk agent.

“According to a survey of existing Automation for Jira customers, more than half of people who have automated their work with Jira say it saves them more than six hours per month,” Matt Ryall, head of product for Jira Software, wrote in a blog post.

Automate joins Butler, a similar automation engine that Atlassian launched for its Trello project management platform last year. Rules-based automation tools appear to be well on their way to becoming table stakes in the productivity software market. Atlassian rival Asana Inc. added a workflow builder to its platform last year, as have Slack Technologies Inc. and Microsoft Corp. for its Teams service.

The next stage of productivity providers’ efforts to automate their users’ work may see the focus expand from rules-based workflows to artificial intelligence. AI features are already available on platforms such as Slack in the form of third party chatbots and extensions, but over time, providers may start adding more built-in machine learning features. 

At least some players have already started looking in that direction. In a 2018 interview, Asana executives outlined their vision for an AI-powered “team brain” that would analyze users’ work patterns to find ways of helping them become more productive. 

Photo: Atlassian