Atlassian is an enterprise software company that develops products for software development, project management and team collaboration. According to Human-In-the-Loop Software Development Agents, a paper written in collaboration with Atlassian researchers, its products serve over 300,000 customers globally across industries such as technology, finance, healthcare and government, and in 2024 the company had over 12,000 engineers who submitted over 950,000 pull requests.
Activities & Products
The paper names three Atlassian tools: JIRA Software for task management, Confluence for collaboration and knowledge management, and Bitbucket for source code management, which it describes as enhancing software teams’ productivity and facilitating Agile methodologies. Within Atlassian, practitioners use JIRA as the central tool for managing development work: they create JIRA issues to define features, tasks or bug fixes, assign them to individuals or teams, create a coding plan, write the code, and raise a pull request for code review and automated testing.
Because these steps were largely manual, the paper reports that teams faced productivity challenges such as a backlog of JIRA issues and context switching between tools, which prompted them to seek automated solutions. One result was HULA, a human-in-the-loop coding agent framework built into JIRA and deployed internally, which the paper says was made available to 2,600 practitioners by mid-September 2024. The paper’s disclaimer states that its conclusions are the authors’ own and are not an assessment of the quality of Atlassian’s products.