Atlassian brings new automation tools to Jira Cloud
A few months ago, Atlassian acquired Code Barrel, the Sydney-based company behind the popular Automation for Jira low-code tool for - you guessed it - automating many aspects of Jira. Unsurprisingly, Atlassian then set out to integrate many of these features into the core Jira experience and today, the company is launching these new built-in automation features for all users of Jira Cloud.
"What's really exciting about automation is that we're bringing this no-code automation engine to all our customers. If you look at the industry, you know automation is typically seen as a premium feature - you have to pay a bit extra for it," Matt Ryall, Atlassian's head of product for Jira Software, told me. "We actually believe it's a key part of how teams operate today is giving them the control over their own workflows, the ability to automate things in a no-code way, so that every team can automate their workflow and take the pain out of keeping work status information up to date, which is really what Jira does."
While all Jira Cloud customers, including those on free plans, will get access to these features, paying users will get access to additional features, depending on their subscription level. The base functionality, however, is indeed available to all.
This means the roughly 65,000 customers that use Jira will be able to automate a lot of repetitive tasks like automatically closing tasks, send notifications when there is a high-priority issue, etc. All of this can be done with the help of a drag-and-drop tool that lets you define rules and workflows. Atlassian notes that this also works across multiple Jira Software and Service Desk projects.
What's just as important, though, is that the tool now integrates with more third-party services. After acquiring Code Barrel, the Jira team focused on building out more of these integrations, which already included support for Microsoft Teams, Slack and Twilio before the acquisition. But now, the automation tools are connected to pretty much all of the data sources that Jira already integrated with, including the likes of Gitlab, GitHub, CircleCI and Jenkins. "It makes Jira much more of a source of truth for the whole organization," said Ryall. "Now you can keep that data connected, keep the status of work up-to-date automatically based on events coming from the whole variety of tools."
Looking ahead, Ryall told me that the team will focus on deeper integration with the core Jira experience, but maybe more importantly, it is also looking at how it can bring automation to more of Atlassian's DevOps and collaboration tools.
Atlassian acquires Code Barrel, makers of Automation for Jira