Attivio | Unified Information Access Blog

The folks at Atlassian pulled off an amazing first customer summit last week. Kudos go out to their team for a fun and informative event.

The Summit took place over two days and was packed with sessions broken into three tracks: Collaboration, Developer Tools and Plug-in & APIs.

Day 1

The first day opened with the keynote by Mike Cannon-Brookes (Atlassian's co-founder and CEO) and customer awards. Watch the full video for all of the big Atlassian product announcements that were made. In terms of the awards, I'm happy (and very amused) to report that we took the trophy for the best and most innovative use of three or more Atlassian tools, aka, the coveted Ménage a Trois Award (other award winners were Cisco and Sun).

The morning session after the keynote featured five 15-minute "Charlie" talks across four different tracks. This was a bit chaotic as they had one large ballroom split into four sections, but well worth it because we heard from a number of customers and got previews of upcoming Atlassian product features. The Bamboo upcoming features talk given by Edwin Wong, product manager for Bamboo, introduced Test Optimization - additional build modes that support selective test execution based on code changes and prioritization of high failure probability tests.

The rest of the day, I focused on the Developer Tools track as I was interested in hearing how other teams are using the Atlassian product suite in their Agile development environments. The two talks I attended on day 1 were "How Atlassian Does Software Development", a panel discussion and "Atlassian Developer Tools State of the Union".

I got to know quite of few of the Atlassian folks during my 2-day stint in San Francisco and was really impressed by what a down-to-earth, smart group of people they are. During the session "How Atlassian Does Software Development" (moderator: Brendan Humphreys, the Clover guru; panelists: Charles Miller, Dylan Etkin and Matt Quail), I picked up some practical Agile process management techniques:

• All of the Atlassian product teams have different versions of agile in place as works for them.

• Some of the teams designate a weekly rotating role as a business liaison. (Basically, anyone outside the team who needs to interact with the dev team goes to this person. They have a mascot for this. I can't recall exactly what it is, but it's hilarious...trust me)

• They do not try to really share functionality across products as the requirements process often ends up pulling the function in different directions and if there are issues with a given function, the fix would have to be made on all platforms. There are some notable exceptions to this, such as their Plugins 2.0 framework.

Day 2

On day two, I stayed on the Developer Tools track and attended the "JIRA: State of the Union" and "Peer Code Review" talks. Suffice it to say, JIRA 4.0 is very interesting. The key items to watch will be how JQL is used for very flexible access to JIRA issues and how OpenSocial is used to embed JIRA gadgets across Atlassian and non-Atlassian Tools. We're actually working on some custom JIRA plug-ins and are now looking into OpenSocial as an alternative to more complicated plug-in development.

The other big JIRA announcement was Atlassian's acquisition of GreenHopper, the Agile-specific project management plug-in for JIRA. I've never been a big fan of the "index card on the wall" very literal version of use case tracking in Agile, but with the acquisition, I'll definitely be giving it a second look. One of the coolest Greenhopper features is the ability to edit and prioritize issues using virtual index card/post-it notes. I like the fact that I can have the persistence and detailed issue fields tracking of JIRA while being able to prioritize issues visually. My big concern is "how does this method of arranging and viewing issues scale?", as we typically deal with 200-300 tickets per sprint. I'll be experimenting over the coming weeks and will post my observations.

The Code Review talk focused on keys to a successful code review process. Tips ranged from keeping egos out of the review process to iterative reviews (an upcoming Crucible feature). The next version of Crucible also seems to have much richer integration with the other Atlassian tools. This is another tool that we haven't used up to this point, but will be experimenting with over the next few sprints.

Attivio Talks

During the 2-day summit I gave two talks on Agile development as part of the Development Tools track (run by Ken Olofsen, who did an amazing job btw):

• Day 1: Agile Quality: High-Octane Style

• Day 2: Automated Builds: How to do Bamboo

I'll be posting links to the video for these hopefully in a week or so (once Atlassian posts them).

Summary

All in all, the summit was a great chance to learn how to better use Atlassian tools, as well as learn from the real-world experiences of other Agile teams.

Also, as part of the event, I met with several potential partners about bringing some Attivio-powered offerings to the Atlassian tools. Keep an eye on our blog for a number of open-source items for the Atlassian community as well as unified information access driven plug-ins.

Can't wait until next year!

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