The product name is a truncation of Gojira, the Japanese word for Godzilla. The name originated from a nickname Atlassian developers used to refer toBugzilla, which was previously used internally for bug-tracking.
Description
According to Atlassian, Jira is used for issue tracking and project management by over 75,000 customers in 122 countries. Some of the organizations that have used Jira at some point in time for bug-tracking and project management include Fedora Commons, Hibernate, and the Apache Software Foundation, which uses both Jira and Bugzilla. Jira includes tools allowing migration from competitor Bugzilla. Jira contains four packages:
Jira Core is intended as generic project management
Jira Software includes the base software, including agile project management features
Jira Service Desk is intended for use by IT or business service desks.
Jira is a commercial software product that can be licensed for running on-premises or available as a hosted application. Atlassian provides Jira for free to open source projects meeting certain criteria, and to organizations that are non-academic, non-commercial, non-governmental, non-political, non-profit, and secular. For academic and commercial customers, the full source code is available under a developer source license.
Security
In April 2010, a cross-site scriptingvulnerability in Jira led to the compromise of two Apache Software Foundation servers. The Jira password database was compromised. The database contained unsaltedpassword hashes, which are vulnerable to dictionary lookups and cracking tools. Apache advised users to change their passwords. Atlassian themselves were also targeted as part of the same attack and admitted that a legacy database with passwords stored in plain text had been compromised.
Evolution
When launched in 2002, Jira was purely issue tracking software, targeted at software developers. The app was later adopted by non-IT organizations as a project management tool. The process sped up after the launch of Atlassian Marketplace in 2012, which allowed third-party developers to offer project management plugins for Jira. BigPicture, Portfolio for Jira, Structure, and Tempo Planner are major project management plugins for Jira.