This is a guest blog post by Nick Foster, Co-Founder and COO of Creately, an online diagramming plugin for Confluence which lets you create and add all kinds of diagrams like flowcharts, wireframes, UML diagrams and mindmaps for your wiki pages and blogs. Creately is a sponsor at Atlassian Summit 2012.

Good tools and process is a key part to building good software fast. Being a company that makes a diagram tool for a living, we are biased towards diagrams. Below, I explain how they are crucial to helping keep a great product development process going.

To provide a quick overview, our software product cycle consists of roadmap planning sessions about every three months, feature/update brainstorming, detailed specs on what to do, wireframes and design docs, coding, testing and deployment. A release cycle is about one month long.

We use Confluence and JIRA internally for this purpose along with our own Creately Diagram Add On for Confluence and JIRA. Dogfooding FTW!

Brainstorming

We usually kick things off with a few quick objectives listed out then go into brainstorming mode on the plan. A wiki page with the objectives and it’s followed after with a mind map that we create during the brainstorming session itself. Having the mind map here is really important as it captures the little things that usually don’t make it to the written list that goes into the body of the wiki page. Thus things we might have missed otherwise are captured in context helping us avoid pitfalls and retain future ideas down the line.

We occasionally come back to the mind map and new opportunities present themselves, along with gaps and alternate priorities due to its free-flow, visual form.

Putting down a plan

Having remote teams working on a project is a challenge and a clear plan is crucial. We prioritize by color coding a further detailed version of the mind map, and then create a Gantt chart to figure out timelines at a very high level.

You’d be surprised how much having a free form Gantt chart and a rough idea of timelines has helped us prioritize and ship effectively!

The details!

A wiki page structure is created, mapping key feature/implementation areas. Then the team goes into the details of the plan by describing expected functionality in text along with mockups and flowcharts. Usually these things get revised quite a bit–we keep iterating on them on the wiki itself. Usually this includes referencing and linking to previous docs and diagrams so that when development starts everyone knows where to look.

It’s sometimes easy to just keep expanding in text and typing on what we think about; however, having the UI mockups in there and the user flowcharts defined helps us really optimize the user experience and work through scenarios before we go in and start writing a lot of code.

Dev spec

As the team starts to implement the plan, new artifacts are created including DB schema changes (usually we use the existing schema and highlight the key changes in a different color) using our Database Diagram templates. UML diagrams are created for situations that require it, usually a class structure and some sequence diagrams. Although for complex changes use cases are also created.

We don’t overdo the dev specs, but we do document things so it’s easy to keep everyone on the same page and help newcomers to the team quickly learn about key pieces in the framework.

When needed, especially when dealing with current issues, we attach mockups, UML, DB diagrams, flowcharts or site maps to JIRA issues as well.

Little touches that increase collaboration

One thing that’s important in using the diagrams in our process is that the content must flow really well inside the pages. The site structure is diligently curated to ensure good navigability. Diagram content is embedded onto the page using our Creately Viewer. It helps keep the large diagrams automatically resized to match page width and enables users to zoom/pan and navigate via contextual links from inside the diagram image itself.

Coming full circle, we usually link key pages in the project to a mind map on the homepage so there is a really flexible non-linear navigation method available for everyone on the project. Links can be viewed and navigated on page with the Creately Diagram Viewer.

That’s how we run our projects internally at Creately. We are diagram intense, but it really has helped cut down on miscommunication and get things done faster. Everyone is always looking at the same picture! We are thrilled to be amping up Confluence collaboration at Creately.

Come to Atlassian Summit 2012 to visit Creately and 34 other sponsors. It’s going to be our largest user conference yet!

This is a guest blog post from Clearvision, a sponsor at Atlassian Summit 2012.

We can’t clone sheep but we are pretty damn good at cloning issues!

Clearvision are the leading Atlassian Platinum Experts in Europe, on a mission to help companies across the globe build better software.

At Clearvision we have an arsenal of trigger-happy developers ready and raring to battle your software development demons.

Bugs Bugs Bugs

Do you find that bugs often need fixing in multiple versions of the same product? Annoying isn’t it?…but you’re not alone, as this was precisely the challenge for Aircom International, who specialise in cellular network planning, optimisation and configuration.

After Clearvision successfully migrated Aircom International from IBM Rational ClearQuest to Atlassian JIRA, they approached us with a requirement to enhance their JIRA instance with a customised plugin. We put on the safety goggles and cranked up the power on the Sonic Oscillator…JIRAClones was born.

JIRAClones has the cunning ability to seamlessly clone an issue in JIRA and automatically apply it to all later versions of the product. The result? Significant time and cost savings for Aircom and reassurance that product quality remains consistent against all releases.

The Clearvision JIRAClones plugin allows you to have complete control over what fields to clone per JIRA ticket and which releases to target.

Nobody wants a nasty last minute surprise that threatens the release/launch of a product. This is why JIRAClones is an essential addition to your JIRA configuration and a crucial time saver. Development teams maintaining multiple releases of a product in parallel need JIRAClones from Clearvision.

Get JIRAClones Today

Get consistent quality and get organised, download JIRAClones from the Atlassian Plugin Exchange now.

Come to Atlassian Summit 2012 to visit Clearquest and 34 other sponsors. It’s going to be our largest user conference yet!

One of the founding principles of Agile development (from www.agilemanifesto.org) is that “The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.” But we all know that development teams are increasingly distributed—often across the globe.

At Sococo we use JIRA, GreenHopper and Confluence to structure and track work and capture content relevant to our product development process. In the end, nothing replaces real-time, face-to-face conversation. Sometimes it’s a scheduled meeting (e.g., daily stand-ups) or an impromptu meeting to work through complex tasks—from sprint planning and backlog prioritization to a pair of programmers working on a card together.

Our challenge is that only 5 of our 25 developers are colocated on a good day. It’s not uncommon for us to have our several scrum teams made up of people scattered across dozens of physical locations. Our product is designed to address this fundamental challenge of modern work: getting and keeping teams unified and in sync, even when they’re physically apart.

During a typical standup, one of our Program Managers will be sharing both the Rapid Board and Confluence on screen. As we go around the room discussing status and blockers, we all refer to the same source materials: the Rapid Board showing current work and Confluence with notes from yesterday and today providing continuity and accountability day to day. Following along is stone simple—it should be, standups are supposed to be short and to the point.

Naturally, we need a place to do breakout conversations. Sococo Team Space has the ability to mirror a typical physical development space—a larger room to hold standups, several breakout rooms, and private offices each equipped with audio, video, chat, and application sharing. This lets us continue to resolve blockers or questions raised in standup without holding up the rest of the team.

Team Space is always on, but because heads down time is so important to developer productivity, it’s easy to signal that to team mates—using over a dozen states of ‘presence’ (e.g., listening, talking, muted, viewing screen shares, etc.). With that said, spontaneity is baked into the architecture of the product. I can find our Server Platform Lead on the office ‘map’ and click on his location to be instantly connected, so that we can resolve problems much faster than firing off email.

 The office map is designed to fit our needs as a development team. We have the ability to put a feature or platform team in one place. Our developers can also sit together in war rooms hammering out a particular feature that might require our server and client team to work together interactively to debug quickly and make progress, rather than trading emails. Some teams have taken it a step farther, actually designing agile workflows into their maps: starting with a planning space, moving to a feature space, and ending in a demo/retrospective room—with dedicated spaces for the product owners and a scrum master.

By combining a persistent place to put to put content (JIRA, GreenHopper, and Confluence) with the ability to bring our people together for real-time communication on a daily basis, our distributed team feels like a collocated team—and that’s priceless.

Please stop by our table at the Summit for a quick look and to see if and how Team Space can help your team to get—and feel—connected throughout the day and every day.

Come to Atlassian Summit 2012 to visit Sococo and 34 other sponsors. It’s going to be our largest user conference yet!

This is a guest blog post from Tempo by TM Software, a Sponsor at Atlassian Summit 2012.

Have you ever considered using JIRA with Tempo’s plugin from TM Software as a help desk? We sat down with Þorsteinn Hallgrímsson, Service Manager at Nýherji’s headquarters in Reykjavík, Iceland, to talk about what Nýherji was looking for and why they chose JIRA with Tempo’s time tracking plugin when looking for a system that would support its technical services department.

Tell us a little about Nýherji.

Nýherji is one of Iceland’s leading service providers in the field of information technology. We offer complete solutions in the fields of information technology, including consultancy and the provision of hardware and software, office equipment, and technical services.

Nýherji has approximately 550 employees worldwide, and Nýherji Iceland has around 270 employees working in five different departments. Technical Services is the largest department here, specializing in providing services for a number of companies, with a help desk that is accessible 24/7, year-round. Technical Services is our main JIRA user group within Nýherji.

What does Nýherji’s Technical Services do?

Nýherji Technical Services supports approximately 1000 companies, half of which have service contracts with us. We receive more than 1200 service requests each month, so we needed a good service system that would help us manage all of these requests, as well as a time tracking system that would enable employees to easily log their work.

When did you start using JIRA?

Our Technical Services team has been using JIRA since June 2010. Our work on needs analysis for a new service system started in the fall of 2009, and in December of the same year, we chose JIRA. The implementation of the system took around six months. After implementing JIRA for Nýherji, we worked as consultants for another company here in Iceland that needed a similar implementation of JIRA. That implementation took around three months. We are still adjusting and implementing new specialized features in JIRA, enhancing it even further.

Why JIRA?

When we began searching for a service system that would fulfill our needs, we looked at six different systems. JIRA was the one that came closest to what we needed. One of the biggest advantages was how flexible and affordable the system is. The JIRA users we spoke with about the system also highly recommended it.

One of the prerequisites we had was to have a simple and efficient time tracking system that also easily connects to our SAP billing system, which is exactly what the Tempo plugin from TM Software provides.

We also wanted our service system to support ITIL best practices, which it does by adjusting Issue types and workflows in JIRA to ITIL processes. We also use custom fields for further adjustments. Other systems that we looked at did not offer the same flexibility that we required.

How does Nýherji use JIRA as a help desk?

We are using JIRA as our ITIL style support ticketing tool (Incident/Request Fulfillment, Problem and Change Management). Information on Contacts is stored in LDAP, and for each Contact, we assign a JIRA user name. However, as these users cannot log into JIRA, they do not count against the JIRA licence.

When we create a ticket, we store the user ID of the Contact in a Custom field called ‘Contact’. We store detailed information about the Contact in a separate custom field called ‘Contact Info’, which includes information like their full name, telephone number, mobile number, department, email address, etc., and is accessible from the View Issue screen. We can search for Issues pertaining to the Contact by selecting the Contact name from the Issue View Screen.

Our JIRA installation holds approximately 9,000 Contacts, 110,000 Issues, and 1,000 Projects. Projects in JIRA are used for customers. The first three letters in the project key are unique for each company, which is used to connect projects to other systems, such as SAP for billing and Confluence for knowledge.

We do not want all of our Contacts to be able to log into JIRA. Users can create tickets by using a specific web page, sending an email to our help desk, or calling the help desk directly. The notification scheme informs the Contact when the ticket is created and resolved. We use a workflow action ‘Send to Customer’ to send emails to customers requesting further information, and ‘Send to 3rd Party’ if we need parts or services from an outside vendor. When a reply is received, it is posted as a comment in the ticket and the status is changed.

Each customer is assigned an ‘Administrative Contact’ that is allowed to log into JIRA and view all issues related to that Customer/Project. Typically, we have one Administrative Contact for every 50 to 100 Contacts.

How many requests do you create each week?

Approximately 1200 per week.

What plugins are you using with JIRA?

We are using the VertygoSLA plugin from Valiantys, Tempo plugin from TM Software, and some custom made plugins, that have the following functionality:

• Connection to equipment database in SAP
• Connection to contract database in SAP
• Quick create issue
• Quick move issue
• Create contact / Edit contact
• Create customer / Edit customer
• Withdrawal and return of spare parts (Connection to SAP service orders)

Quick Move is a crucial function for the help desk, since we receive a substantial number of requests through email. Quick Move is used to move these requests to the appropriate customer (JIRA Project). Quick Create is also an important feature for the help desk in order to simplify the creation of requests. Quick Create selects the appropriate customer depending on the contact’s email.

Above is an example of Nýherji’s Quick Create feature and our custom functionality we created. We add our customer information into the ‘Contact’ field, the ‘Specialty’ field allows us to classify an Issue into a designated category. The ‘Group’ field allows us to designate the group that is to work on a particular Issue. And the ‘Select Equipment’ field enables us to connect to our SAP inventory, if needed.

We also use the Tempo plugin to help streamline the issue tracking process.

How do employees like to use JIRA?

Our JIRA users are very happy with the system, especially because of its efficiency and how easy it is to navigate and learn how to use it. Based on the feedback we received from surveys that we ask our team to complete every year, employee satisfaction regarding our help desk system increased once we implemented JIRA. Employees have a better overview of the issues by using the JIRA dashboard and filters. Our employees have reported that the dashboards are one of the best features of JIRA because they are so manageable.

Are you using other products from Atlassian?

Yes, we are using Confluence and Crowd.

What’s next for Nýherji’s Technical Services?

We are constantly improving and enhancing our features so that we can obtain better reports and information regarding our clients. We plan to implement a customer feedback survey using JIRA, which will further enable us to assess our services, and are planning future enhancements that will allow our customers to gain better access to reports.

Come to Atlassian Summit 2012 to visit Tempo and 34 other sponsors. It’s going to be our largest user conference yet!

Background

RWE Supply & Trading (RWE) is an energy trading company headquartered in Essen, Germany, boasting Europe’s largest and most sophisticated energy trading floor with subsidiaries and affiliates in Den Bosch, Geneva, Singapore and New York.

RWE uses Quality Center from HP (HPQC) for both test and change management. With RWE’s high-volume change requests, HPQC provides the ability to raise requests for change, and ensuring testing capacity is not exceeded thereby introducing untested changes to the business.

The challenge RWE faced was that different teams were using different systems with an increasing need to collaborate on the same project; the Back Office business used HPQC and the Trading IT team used JIRA from Atlassian.

“As teams and processes continue to grow, RWE continues to look for better ways to communicate.”
Matthew Cobby | RWE Supply & Trading GmbH

Solution

The solution was to heavily customize the requirements in HPQC enabling the business to see the testing workload of all the scheduled changes. If the capacity needed for a particular month is not available, changes can be pushed back to the next month.

Within HPQC, each request for change (RFC) / requirement has a lifecycle where the business would approve or reject changes. If the change is approved then it goes to the IT team to be implemented in Atlassian JIRA via the Go2Group JaM Plugin.

The Go2Group JaM Plugin keeps the RFC updated in JIRA. A separate, self-authored plugin keeps the IT implementation tasks (sub-tasks in JIRA) in sync with the changing requirements. IT testing is then carried out in JIRA. When it’s ready for UAT, HPQC takes over again to run the business regression tests.

This provides a complete chain from business users updating their requirements in HPQC to multiple teams implementing tasks in JIRA.

Go2Group Jam Plugin

Looking Ahead

Test teams using HPQC look to have their test defects appear in JIRA. Since there is minimal communication between test and development teams, displaying test defects in JIRA allows developers to see the defects very quickly and in detail.

The process—connecting HPQC with JIRA—has helped manage RWE’s growth, reduced the firm’s time-to-release by getting defects to developers faster, and has allowed RWE to better understand the cultural differences between teams.

To read the full customer story, and for more information on the Go2Group JaM Plugin, please visit the Go2Group website. Better yet, you can meet Go2Group and hear about more of their work at Atlassian Summit. Hurry, the event is just about sold out!

Calling all GreenHopper Gurus in San Francisco!

Shaun Clowes of the GreenHopper team in Sydney is visiting San Francisco for Atlassian Summit. He’d love to buy you a pint. Or three.

Join Shaun, myself and other GreenHopper Gurus on Thursday May 24 from 6pm at Thirsty Bear. Find us in the Billar Room.

Shaun and I are keen to learn how you are using GreenHopper. We are happy to chat all things Agile/Kanban/Scrum/DevOps and we will also have time to answer any GreenHopper questions you have.

If you can join us please let us know.

Since 2005, we’ve been holding quarterly internal “innovation” days – our unique blend of a hack day and Google’s 20% time. Seven years later, we’ve done 19 of these events, featuring more than 500 projects from developers, IT ninjas, and even marketing folks. The name for the event was inspired by the one company that “ships” more than anyone – FedEx – and their commitment to ship something in 24 hours. We liked the idea of applying that “ship in a day” concept to these internal innovation hack-a-thons, so we began calling them “FedEx Days” informally.

As the FedEx Day concept grew, so did its popularity. Several publications – from Pando Daily to Fortune to an inspired TED talk by the inimitable Daniel Pink – took note of this clever way to inspire employees to experiment with a single, unadulterated day of innovation. And more than 50 different companies from dozens of industries were inspired enough by the concept to run FedEx Days of their own.

Another organization that become aware of FedEx Days is…well, FedEx. They’ve asked us nicely to discontinue using their brand in connection with this event. It’s not something we asked permission for originally, since it was just a cheeky way to spike innovation internally and we never anticipated the idea would take flight like it has. We’re grateful to FedEx for being the great company they are and, even though the name holds pretty deep meaning for us internally, we’re happy to comply. And we want your help!!

Onward and Upward – A new name!

Since these [insert name] Days have morphed into a phenomenon bigger than us, we want the broader community to help us rename it.

Sound off in the form below with your ideas about what we call this thing. We’ll be taking your submissions for the next week until May 23rd 2012 at midnight PDT, so share ‘em while they count. Stay tuned for a future post with the shiny new name. As an extra incentive, the provider of the winning name will get a special package of our finest Atlassian swag.

Now, start your creative engines!

Update: We’ve received hundreds of suggestions! Thanks to everyone who made a submission and keep an eye on the Atlassian News blog for an announcement with our new name.

Six awesome marquee speakers

Jeff Atwood (codinghorror.com), Michael Lopp (randsinrepose.com), Pamela Fox (indie dev), Eric Ries (Startup Lessons Learned), Dave Thomas (Bedarra Research) and Jeff Ma (MIT Blackjack Team and entrepreneur) will be sharing their secrets to software development on high producing teams.

In addition, the New York Stock Exchange’s Chief Digital Officer, Bob Kremer, will be joining Atlassian Co-Founders, Mike and Scott, on stage to talk about innovation at NYSE using Atlassian products.

AtlasBar and Guru Room

Meet our developers, support engineers, and product managers at Summit. The AtlasBar is our homage to Apple’s Genius bar – get your technical support, configuration, feature, and integration questions answered. Want to give us even more feedback or learn about upcoming products and features? Drop by the Guru Room to meet with our, well, gurus.

Industry Mixer

We’ve asked dozens of customers over the last few months what they want more of at Summit, and the answer we kept hearing was, “We want to meet more customers like ourselves.” If you’re in town on Wednesday, you can join the Industry Mixer at 5pm. You can keep networking at the big Summit welcome reception starting at 6pm and throughout the rest of the time at the conference.

Training galore

Training is huge at Summit, and this year even more so. We have three training partners teaching courses ranging from Confluence Fundamentals to Scrum and Kanban with GreenHopper.

Getting virtual

Attendees will be receiving an email soon with details on how to access virtual rooms and an online agenda at Summit. Stay tuned!

A special shout out to New Relic, the 2012 Atlas Sponsor, for their support of Atlassian Summit!

Sponsors

How can you extend Atlassian products for new use cases? How do other companies customize our products for their teams? How can you integrate Atlassian products into your unique enterprise technology stack? Those questions can best be answered by our 35 stellar sponsors who will be demoing all their newest integrations and add-ons.

 Marketplace Workshop

Want to get a head start on selling your plugin on the Atlassian Marketplace? Register for our free workshop to find out how!

There’s WAY more happening at Summit… Atlassian User Group meetups, sponsor birds-of-a-feather, a speaker Decompression Room, the Chillout Lounge, Bitbucket and HipChat booths… and if you can’t tell, we’re really excited about all of it. It’s gonna be a fun, educational, informal, and information-packed couple of days. See you at Summit!

Looking for a job you can bike to? Atlassian is hiring in San Francisco, Sydney and Amsterdam!

But for companies that want to host Git behind the firewall, there are challenges of administering a server for Git repositories. This can be especially complex for larger projects and Enterprise teams. Fortunately, as of today, there’s Atlassian Stash.

Atlassian Stash (as in a place to stash your code, not moustache  ) is our solution for helping teams manage their Git repositories behind the firewall. We’ve been using it for months now and we love it, and hope you will too. You’ll find Stash loaded with tons of goodies to help you manage your Git repositories:

• Repository management: Add users and groups, create and manage repositories, and use Stash’s Project Structure to logically group your repositories
• Works in your environment: Designed for reliability and performance to support your growing Git repositories within the safety of your firewall.
• Connect your code to your issue repository: Connect JIRA and Stash for traceability between issues and source.
• Source browsing: Browse repositories, drill into changesets, explore files & file history and view diffs

Read more about Stash on the Dev Tools blog.

For a limited time, we are offering a 25% discount on your new Stash license! Ready to dig in a little deeper? Learn more about Stash or download a 30-day free evaluation.