Case Study: NASA achieves agile, daily Mars rover operations with Atlassian Confluence

NASA - Customer Case Study

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), part of NASA, working with Ames Research Center and Johnson Space Center, needed to develop and operate complex software for unmanned spacecraft like the Mars rover Curiosity. Their challenges included distributed teams across multiple locations, mission planning, parsing large volumes of daily telemetry, and creating visual maps to guide rover operations — all requiring fast, reliable coordination and software delivery.

JPL’s Ensemble project adopted Atlassian tools — Jira and Confluence for planning and requirements, and Fisheye, Clover and Bamboo for code quality and CI/CD — to streamline development and deployment to a private cloud. Daily data from Curiosity is processed in hours, builds from multiple branches are automatically tested across environments, and Bamboo enables rapid, continuous deployment so that code written on Monday can be driving rovers on Mars by Tuesday, improving collaboration, speed, and reliability.

NASA

Dave Mittman

Lead Software Developer