Case Study: Qunar Project Management Platform for Reducing Development Costs and Boosting R&D Efficiency

Qunar, a leading online travel platform in China, faced rapidly growing business and R&D team size, leading to high project management costs, inefficient communication, inconsistent information, and cumbersome tools.

To address these challenges, the team designed and implemented a custom project management platform based on Jira, integrating the entire "requirement‑development‑release" chain with automated processes and data flow.

Stage 1 – End‑to‑End Information Integration introduced project pools per department, centralized all task types (business requirements, technical optimizations, bugs, etc.), and streamlined fields and workflows to reduce redundant data entry and ensure consistent information across roles.

Features such as adaptive user‑specific views (boards, calendars, panels) and an online Excel‑like editor further improved usability and reduced manual effort.

Stage 2 – Toolchain Integration linked the project management system with Git, CI, testing, and release platforms, providing a single interface for creating requirements, tracking code branches, viewing CI results, and managing releases, thereby eliminating repetitive data copying and multiple browser windows.

The implementation relied on standardized branch naming (including Jira IDs), a monitoring service to map branches to requirements, a message‑center for event broadcasting, and a data‑center for unified queries, all exposed via APIs.

Results showed significant reductions in communication overhead, eliminated information inconsistency, and enabled one‑stop management of both project and engineering data, laying a solid foundation for accurate metrics and further automation.

Overall, the platform emphasized simplicity, automation, and alignment with Qunar's organizational structure, gaining strong adoption from developers and supporting scalable R&D management.