Somehow, during the Confluence team's Friday night Quake tournament1, I missed the release of JIRA 3.0. (See also: The ServerSide and Javalobby.) I rarely go into shameless promotional mode on my blog, but I think this is a big enough occasion for me to make an exception.
Mad props to the JIRA team. They've been working their arses off getting this release together, and they've come up with some great stuff. I've become accustomed to going out in the evening, coming back to the office late at night to pick up my stuff on the way home, and finding someone still there, working to put the finishing touches on 3.0.
In my previous job we evaluated JIRA for one project (but despite a strong push from the development team couldn't get approval to buy it), used it intensively on another, and when Atlassian started advertising available positions it was pretty easy for me to say "I want to work at the sort of place that writes software like that."
Or, as John Davies said on the ServerSide thread:
If you don't know what Jira is, take a look, if you have a bug/issue tracking system and it's not Jira then take a look. If you just like looking at really cool well written software then take a look.
1 Noteable, mostly, for the way it transforms meek, polite programmer Dave into trash-talking "I'm going to kick all your asses at once" Quake-God Dave.
