Case Study: NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory streamlines team communication and consolidates developer tools with Slack

Space-Age Software Development All In One Place

Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Caltech), NASA’s primary center for robotic exploration, faced a growing collaboration problem: engineers across 110 buildings and multiple organizations spent hours each day switching between disconnected tools and searching scattered message archives while developing mission‑critical software for the Mars rover ahead of the 2020 launch. They needed a single, searchable hub to keep their agile developer community and toolset aligned.

By adopting Slack, teams consolidated conversations, shift handovers, and file sharing in one place and integrated GitHub Enterprise, Jira, Google Hangouts and other tools to feed status, bugs and updates directly into channels. The change reduced context switching, made past discussions easy to resume, increased transparency across teams, and saved daily coordination time so engineers could focus on building reliable software for space missions.

NASA