April 15, 2020
Atlassian impressed by student app
A student project from the CSIT321 group has caught the attention of tech giant Atlassian
Are we all binging Westworld during this lock down? For those unacquainted, Westworld is an American science fiction dystopian television series and at its heart are artificial intelligent life forms – AI taking over.
While Westworld is fiction, students from the School of Computing and IT are investigating real world AI solutions and gaining notice from global tech leaders for their work.
Associate Professor Hoa Khanh Dam from SCIT supervised a student group to develop an app integrated into JIRA to provide AI-enabled support for project managers and software engineers.
“I showed a demo of the app to the Head of Engineering at Atlassian, as JIRA is Atlassian’s flagship product,” said Associate Professor Dam.
“They were really impressed with the app and invited the team to write about the app and their experience in the project for their website.”
The app, Artificial Intelligence for Issue Analytics (AIIA), provides features that use machine learning (ML) and visualisation techniques that allow team members and managers to more effectively manage projects.
The aim of the app is to help teams properly scope projects by providing accurate issue data and identifying conflicts and blocking tasks.
The initial concept for the project came from the research of Associate Professor Dam. One of his focus areas, artificial intelligence for project management and software engineering, offered valuable learnings and insights for the team.
The project shows the possibilities of implementing machine learning models on cloud based systems.
Team leader Macleay Stephenson said while the team agree there is plenty of room for improvement with the model, “overall we’re quite pleased that Atlassian’s comprehensive libraries and frameworks allowed us to develop a novel, artificial intelligence-powered solution in Jira Cloud in 6 months from ideation to a viable product”.
The team were encouraged to operate as if they were a company with Professor Dam as their manager, resulting in a strong learning environment for project management, technical skills, and ideation.
Macleay said the team benefited extensively from this development experience.
“The variety of topics, technologies, and methods brought together for this project provided a somewhat realistic experience in developing a product idea from start to MVP, which will be invaluable experience in our careers.”