Groupware Tools – Confluence and JIRA

Confluence is a versatile wiki-like tool mainly meant for organizations to control, maintain and exchange information. Confluence is a great way to centralize and organize the information needed and used by a large group of people. The software is used by thousands of organizations and universities worldwide.

Examples of using Confluence could be creating a new section for a new project. The section’s creator can then choose which people can see that section and which people have the right to edit or write in it. In the section, users can add pages, documents and various other elements of different forms, and they can also be structured in different kinds of ways. Users can then comment on these elements and add attachments if they feel the need to.

I have used Confluence in a software project and found it really helpful along the way. It’s great to be able to access the information from anywhere with a computer, and you can easily monitor the progress of projects even if you are away. The organized structure of documents and projects also helps, as the needed information is quickly retrieved.

Another software created by the same company, Atlassian, is JIRA. JIRA is a proprietary issue tracking product, which includes uses for bug tracking, issue tracking and project management. JIRA is offered for free to open-source projects and organizations that are non-profit, non-government, non-academic, non-commercial, non-political, and secular. JIRA is most usable in software development projects.

The core mechanic of JIRA is managing project-related tasks. To put it simply, managers can create tasks, describe them, and assign particular people to that task. The people then update the status of the task, for example “in progress” or “complete”. JIRA also encourages to estimate the time needed to complete the tasks and compare them to the real times, which may help to estimate time usage better in the future.

The feature particularly related to software development in JIRA is bug tracking. Bug tracking works pretty much in the same way as task management, but bugs are tracked in their own sections. Any user can add bugs and write information about them, for example where the bug occurs and how it should or should not be fixed. Others can then solve these bugs and update their status to JIRA along with a description of how the bug was fixed.

References

http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/wiki.jsp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIRA