By Dick Stark

Last Monday, RightStar sponsored and exhibited at the Atlassian Federal Team Tour. This is one of a series of eleven worldwide stops to promote Atlassian products, services and customer networking. For a spring break Monday morning, Atlassian had an outstanding turnout with more than 325 attendees, almost triple from two years ago, and a strong statement that Atlassian is starting to take hold in Washington DC. Here is a short summary.

Atlassian opened by announcing that they now have more than 112,000 unique users worldwide with more than 5300 .gov domain user accounts. This explosion of Atlassian, both federal and commercial is a testament to the value of teams, sharing, communication, and getting things done. Product updates mentioned included:

Atlassian Home is critical for those that need to stay on top of what matters most. Lots of apps help users feel busy, but not productive. Atlassian Home provides a quick snapshot of the day, what to prioritize and how to do it.

Stride is Atlassian’s new HipChat replacement that has been out for six months in beta, but just released. Stride’s premise is that chat is more distracting than enabling. Stride includes, “beautiful messaging, coordination of action and notification volume with lots of bots to interact between other Atlassian and non-Atlassian apps such as incident management.” Best of all, Stride provides a multi-media real-time meeting capability.

The Atlassian Team Playbook is made up of tools and templates offered to customers for no charge and available on its website. It consists of a simple light weight monitoring system for key Atlassian metrics. Included is Health Monitor, a quick way to get a pulse on progress made over time. It uses an Objectives and Key results (OKR) Google framework for setting goals and tracking progress towards those goals. Right people plus the right products plus the right practices equals great teamwork.

Next up, a technology consulting firm made four points about using agile development:

1. Use the tool, but don’t “throw it out into the wild.” Process is critical.
2. The tool offers both a standardized approach, and the freedom to customize.
3. Dashboarding can provide a lot of power, especially when onboarding new groups.
4. Train with the tool so that everyone understands how to use the portfolio available.

Atlassian normally starts out with a small footprint in a company or agency and then grows organically until products such as Jira and Confluence, spring up in several places. The next step may be a consolidation or migration to the data center or cloud versions. This is an excellent opportunity for RightStar, a DevOps consultancy to begin with an assessment that shows the benefits of Jira across the entire organization along with a map of what needs to be done to achieve true business value.