Atlassian is growing, and a big focus in Jira development has been our continued work on performance and scale. We gave a preview of some of the exciting Jira 5.1 stats at Summit, but let’s take a closer look.
Atlassian’s Commitment
Taking performance to a new level is one of the key goals of Atlassian, and to support this we now have dedicated developers to focus on the enterprise, build tools, and provide performance and scale expertise throughout the company.
This has lead to some exciting releases during Jira 5.1 development work!
Jira Data Generator
You need to know where you’re starting from to set goals and measure progress. We started with stats from some of our largest customers, and to mimic their real-world data we needed a way to generate custom Jira instances with large numbers of issues, projects, custom fields, workflows and more.
To enable testing and development work around real setups, we developed the Jira Data Generator plugin (JDG) I wrote about back in April. We released JDG as a plugin to enable you to create a large Jira test instance to use for performance and scalability testing in your own environment.
Grinder Scripts
Having a tool that allows us to generate large Jira instances quickly is great, but we also needed a way to test the performance of those instances to identify performance bottlenecks. We chose The Grinder for this, an agent based load testing and measurement tool.
The team defined “personas” based on metadata from several public and private Jira instances to drive the load for these tests. Once again, they’ve published those scripts and instructions so you can use them too!
Soke
Continuing on their performance work thus far, the team wanted to take real-world testing to the next level. To do this, they developed a new tool called Soke.
Soke is a framework for generating load using browsers, via Selenium WebDriver, that stresses applications with accurate traffic and allows for collection of client-side profiling data, network traffic timings and server-side data.
- Soke generates accurate load, with real-world timing, because traffic (CSS, JavaScript, Ajax) is generated by browsers.
- Soke measures real user perceived speed, measuring the times for each event in the browser, including all network transfer, JavaScript execution time and rendering time.
- Soke is distributed, so you can run as many agents as you like, you can really scale things up to generate a lot of load.
Just a few weeks ago the team released a 1.0 version of Soke. Check out their video to learn more:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oo8EhSALMh8&feature=player_embedded
Jira Improvements
Using these three new tools, the Jira development team focused on improving the performance of four main areas in Jira: creating, editing, searching and viewing issues. The result of this dedicated performance work is that Jira 5.1 performs better than Jira 4.4, even with more than double than number of issues!
Hence, from Jira 5.1, we’re removing the previously recommended limit of 200,000 issues per Jira instance! In place of these we are dedicated to giving you more guidance on how you can successfully scale Jira in your organization.
Atlassian as a Leader
Gartner Magic Quadrant
We’re very excited to announce that Atlassian is positioned as a leader in the Magic Quadrant in Gartner’s new 2012 Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) report, and we’re making the report available to our customers.
Though ALM has traditionally been sold much like other enterprise software, we’ve taken a different approach to the same problem, one that we call “concept to launch.” For us, everything starts with Jira, our issue tracker and project management system. Jira is at the heart of helping teams communicate, develop plans, assign tasks, and track their progress.
Jira Enterprise Webinar
The team has also turned their focus to the Jira Enterprise offering. At Summit we announced that we’ve expanded Jira Enterprise to include:
- Dedicated global Enterprise Support team
- Enterprise User Groups
- New Enterprise Configuration Guides and Resources
- Enterprise Webinar
If you’re interested in the Jira Enterprise offering, you’re invited to the first Enterprise webinar on August 15th, focused entirely on Jira. Hear about:
- New updates to the Enterprise program
- Scaling and performance, including performance results from Jira 5.1
- Federating Jira instances
- Improvements in Jira user management
- And much more!
There will be limited space, so sign up now to guarantee your spot!
