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Atlassian buys agile tools for JIRA


By Alex Handy
June 1, 2009 — 
If you're averse to paper cuts, Atlassian has an agile solution for you. The company acquired GreenPepper Software's GreenHopper project management plug-in for Atlassian’s JIRA issue-tracking software. GreenHopper is essentially a set of index cards virtualized and pasted into the Web interface of JIRA Studio. Those cards help manage tasks and to-do lists, and feature sets for agile software development projects.

Daniel Freeman, director of product marketing at Atlassian, said that these cards can be organized, annotated and modified in the same ways normal index cards can.

“It turns your issues, tasks and story points in JIRA into cards," he said. "You have a planning board that allows you to have multiple different versions and get a view of where your cards are for each version. You'll start with a backlog view, then you'll drag and drop which cards you want to go into which iteration."

Freeman said that GreenHopper is included with JIRA Studio's US$25 per-user per-month price tag. As a hosted service, it requires no installation on site. For users of existing Atlassian software, however, GreenHopper can be added for $350. With the acquisition of this intellectual property, and the two developers behind it, Atlassian brings billing and support for the plug-in under its own roof.

For distributed agile teams, said Freeman, GreenHopper includes many ways to differentiate one card from another.

“Each card is color-coded, and there is a task board," he said. "It's about managing these cards once you've selected them for a different iteration. There are to-do lists and in-progress stuff, and one of our teams has created a separate custom field called in-review, for items that are in code review. What's really nice here about agile teams is that you're able to drag and drop the cards from different status points, and let's say you're in progress but haven't completed it. You can say, 'I've done five hours on this and it's not complete,' and leave it."

Of course, it wouldn't be agile without charting. Freeman said that GreenHopper “enables you to have burn-down charts and burn-up charts. You can do the charts based on milestones. It has good agile reporting. In a nutshell, GreenHopper is in the cards, planning board, task board and chart board.”

Atlassian provides integrations for GreenHopper though JIRA Studio with the company’s Bamboo continuous integration software, the Fisheye code repository manager, the Crucible code review tool and the company’s Confluence enterprise wiki. JIRA Studio also sports a Facebook-style activity screen, which allows developers to post screenshots of projects and for others to comment on them to foster a more collaborative environment, Freeman said.


Related Search Term(s): Atlassian, GreenPepper, JIRA


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