Atlassian taps Code Barrel to help users blot out manual Jira drudgery

Atlassian taps Code Barrel to help users blot out manual Jira drudgery

Atlassian has promised to relieve its Jira users or the mind-numbing drudgery of using the product manually by snapping up automation specialist Code Barrel, in its third acquisition of the year.

Code Barrel’s main product is Automation for Jira, which promises to automate routine Jira operations without the need for writing code or scripts. Atlassian cites typical uses like automated onboarding and permissioning, or time-based rules to kill off out of data tickets or bug reports.

You can be forgiven for not hearing about the company to date, as Automation for Jira is sold exclusively via the Atlassian Marketplace. Not that Atlassian would have had to rummage around too much – the Aussie company was started by two former Atlassian staffers, Andreas Knecht and Nick Menere – just three years ago.

The Code Barrel buy is the Aussie firm’s third this year. In April it bought analytics specialist Good Software, hard on the heels of its AgileCraft buy. Last year saw it buy OpsGenie, while it snapped up Trello in 2017.

All these buys have bolstered different areas of Atlassian’s product set enabling it to push further into ops and incident management in the case of OpsGenie, while AgileCraft – redubbed Jira Align – arguably brought it a different target market and more traditional software channel to market.

The latest buy came as Atlassian unwrapped its Q1 financials, which showed total revenues of $363.4m compared to $267.3m a year ago. The firm showed an operating loss of $4.6m, compared to a $192,000 operating loss last year, while net income came out to $69.3m compared to last year’s net loss of $242.4m. The difference between operating and net income was largely down to a “net unrealized (gain) loss on exchange derivative and capped call transactions.”