How Jira and Confluence drive scientific discovery and foster collaboration across teams at CERN

Challenge: CERN needed accessible, centralized tools to help their worldwide community of experts and scientists collaborate more easily on groundbreaking physics research.

Solution: CERN consolidated their Jira and Confluence instances and migrated to Data Center. They now use Jira for project management, together with Confluence for discussion and ideation.

Impact: Thousands of experts across CERN use Jira and Confluence to facilitate collaborative research, and maintaining the Data Center instances requires a fraction of the previous effort.

At CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, thousands of physicists, engineers, and other experts collaborate to study the fundamental structure of matter. With CERN’s complex of particle accelerators and decelerators — including the largest accelerator ever created, the famous Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — researchers observe what our world is made of and how these particles work.

With the world’s most sophisticated scientific instruments like the LHC, CERN is advancing groundbreaking research. Behind the scenes, teams are advancing their work with help from Atlassian tools.

Across CERN, Jira and Confluence are are among the key tools enabling collaboration among scientists and engineers. Beyond the Organization’s 2,500+ staff members, CERN brings together a community of about 13,000 scientists worldwide to partner remotely and in-person.

For example, when a particle accelerator needs maintenance, it might require approval from a separate department to purchase new specialized equipment. “These are the kind of cross-boundary interactions that are extremely complicated without the right system,” says Project Engineer Brice Copy.

Accelerating collaboration with Jira and Confluence

CERN's culture prioritizes autonomy, experimentation, and academic freedom. Teams need tools that are intuitive and accessible for everyone in their community, while ensuring data privacy. CERN has used Jira and Confluence for more than 20 years, now with free Data Center licenses provided for non-profits through the Atlassian Foundation.

As the Organization has strived to increase collaboration with digital tools, Atlassian products have helped everyone at CERN work better together. "Because of how we are organized and the high number and frequency of interactions, we need something quite informal," explains Brice, who was responsible for first implementing Jira for the Organization.

Today, many departments across CERN use Jira and Confluence to plan and track their work, share knowledge, and collaborate in support of the Organization's mission. "Most departments at CERN use Jira and Confluence in some way," says Brice. "People have the flexibility to choose their own tools so there's no obligation, but many opt for Jira and Confluence."

The community's diverse experts particularly enjoy the tools' flexibility and customizability. "Because these are easy-to-use tools, people can customize them to their needs," says Brice. "Using Jira for project management is a different user experience from using it for software development or hardware commissioning."

Flexibility and ease of use are also important because CERN brings together people from diverse professional backgrounds, fostering collaboration across a wide range of disciplines and expertise.

Organization-wide planning and tracking in Jira, all connected with the "human side" of Confluence

While CERN may be more than 70 years old, development teams have complemented the Organization's long history with modern development practices. For example, CERN's developers use Kanban and agile-style management, supported by Jira, to build the custom software that powers the Organization's accelerators. "Controlling the accelerator requires a lot of configuration," says Brice. "There are millions of parameters to make it do what it's expected to do. To produce high-quality software, we use Jira to track bugs, issues, and quality."

Jira is also used for many other types of work, usually in conjunction with Confluence. "Rather than explaining how we use Jira and Confluence, it would be easier to try and come up with anything we don't use it for," says Brice. "Everything from coordinating the analysis of experimental physics data, to orchestrating the design of new accelerator parts happens in these tools. Outside academic and technical work, teams like Administration, Operations, HR, and Finance use Jira and Confluence every day."

"We use Jira for planning, but Confluence is the glue that holds the planning together," says Brice. "Confluence gives our work in Jira a human side. Beyond issues, tasks, and cutoff dates, it's our place to document, have discussions, and ideate. For example, people may want to plan, iterate, and exchange ideas informally before jumping into Jira for a project. That happens in Confluence."

For example, CERN uses Confluence to prepare for scientific conferences, aggregating all proposed research topics to assess their relevancy and ensure multiple scientists won't be presenting similar work. Confluence is also integrated into teams' day-to-day work in many other ways, like documenting technical processes and onboarding.

Migrating and consolidating to better meet CERN's research needs

In 2023, CERN decided to migrate their multiple on-premise Jira and Confluence Server instances into one central instance, hosted on Atlassian Data Center. Computing Engineer Michal Kolodziejski planned and executed the migration with his team.

Before the migration, teams were using several legacy instances of Jira and Confluence that were set up across the Organization. There are many different software engineering teams in different departments, so some had signed up for these tools independently before they were offered centrally by IT.

Michal knew that if CERN's teams could consolidate their work into centralized Jira and Confluence instances, they could unleash the potential of all teams. "We saw an opportunity to increase communication and collaboration across users by unifying into a fully supported instance offered to every single person," he says.

This project also presented the perfect opportunity to migrate away from server deployments to Atlassian Data Center. The migration would be a win-win, leveling up the collaborative power CERN relied on, while building a unified Atlassian ecosystem that would be much more efficient to maintain.

Preparation and partnership pave the way for a smooth, one-day migration

CERN knew they would need expert support for such a large-scale consolidation and migration. They chose Solution Partner Itransition for their expertise in the Atlassian ecosystem and enterprise collaboration.

Itransition analyzed multiple possible software vendors, concluding that Atlassian tools would be the best and most cost-effective option. They also made recommendations to optimize Atlassian licensing and billing, including applying for a free Atlassian Community license.

Michal spearheaded CERN's Data Center migration, with plenty of support from Itransition and from Atlassian. "We appreciated that Atlassian provided all the tools we needed," he shares. "Their support was also quite helpful in a few cases where we had really complex problems I couldn't debug on my own."

Michal spent a few weeks preparing for the migration and brainstorming solutions to obstacles, like switching from many authentication systems to single sign-on (SSO). Once everything was ready, the migration went smoothly. "Migrating all users and data to the new infrastructure took one full day," he explains.

More collaboration, less administration and interruption

Since the migration, CERN teams are using Jira and Confluence Data Center to the fullest potential — with much better performance and less maintenance required from CERN's IT Team.

"We're seeing 5x fewer service incidents, down from ~10 to ~2 per year," Michal says. "The effort needed to maintain the instances represents a fraction of what it was before. Recently, we needed to upgrade Jira. Before, it would have taken about three hours over the course of several days to prepare the new versions and deploy them into production. Now, it only takes about ten minutes."

Even more importantly, these updates don't interrupt users' critical work in Jira. "Before, we'd be looking at weeks of prep, followed by about two hours of downtime twice a year for each of our three IT teams," Michal explains. "The migration resulted in significantly less downtime for both Jira and Confluence."

Working together to "bring a human face to highly technical research"

Today, thousands of people across CERN's community use Jira and Confluence to engage in social, collaborative discussion, development and experimentation that drive scientific progress forward. "There's a social aspect to Jira and Confluence. You can really pull someone into a conversation when you need to," says Brice. "That gives users a lot of freedom. They mention someone when they need input, and they're added to the conversation."

Jira and Confluence support another part of CERN's mission: training the next generation of physicists, engineers, and technicians. "Having these central, easy-to-use tools has proven to be very useful," says Aleksandra Wardzinska, the head of platforms and workflows for CERN's IT Team. "We're preparing the students we work with for their futures. They'll be able to use Jira and Confluence in their future careers."

"Jira and Confluence give us structure and freedom at the same time," adds Brice. "By facilitating collaboration, they bring a human face to highly technical research."