Your Look at How Atlassian Does DevOps

by | Dec 20, 2017

Every company has something that they do better than anyone else. For Atlassian, it’s all about designing team-oriented software and tools that encourage more efficient and effective collaboration to drive productivity and results.

We recently got a glimpse at Atlassian’s process through a blog about how they build their products, DevOps style. This piece is part of a larger e-book, DevOps 101, which we encourage you to download.

In the meantime, continue reading to find out a few of the actions Atlassian takes to make DevOps a success within its organization:

1. It All Starts with Feedback

As Atlassian has learned with tools like Hipchat, the best insights come from the people using the product day in and day out.

Some of the ways Atlassian gathers comments include:

  • Asking for in-product reactions.
  • Collecting responses through a help desk.
  • Actively monitoring social media channels.
  • Monitoring Apdex scores.
  • Harvesting data through third-party solutions.

After acquiring your feedback, make sure you respond appropriately to turn your users’ observations into actionable results.

2. Plan Together in Sprint Sessions

Although Atlassian’s small development teams each meet for only one hour per week, the company has figured out precisely how to maximize that time:

  • Showcase everything that was built the week before to make sure everyone is up to speed.
  • Review goals from last week’s sprint and decide whether or not you achieved them.
  • Define objectives for upcoming sprints.

What’s the point of these weekly regroups? In short, it’s all about team-wide buy in and accountability. Everyone knows what the goals are and how Atlassian wants to achieve them. If team members are encountering roadblocks or a project isn’t working as well as anticipated, the team can discuss that together and decide how to proceed, whether that means re-prioritizing, re-approaching, or cancelling an initiative all together.

3. Spike Early, Spike Often

Spiking gives Atlassian real-time understandings into how long a project will take, what types of obstacles its teams might encounter, and more. This means that when its teams go to make a shippable product they are ready.

4. No Matter How Big the Change Is, Keep It Small

Instead of shipping big changes infrequently, Atlassian ships small ones very often. This makes it easier to scale things back, fix and roll forward, and iterate quickly. Atlassian extends this approach to big changes as well by dividing large projects into step-by-step goals, objectives, and tasks.

5. Make the Team Accountable

Atlassian’s philosophy is “you build it, you ship it, you run it.” In other words, the team that builds it is the one that deploys it and the one that provides maintenance and support when it’s live.

Some people might raise their eyebrows at this statement. Would that approach not cause production and support issues?

Atlassian’s experience is quite to the contrary. By giving developers ownership over their work and a vested interest in its future, they are encouraged to build only their best versions of whatever they are working on. The right tools and processes makes this method possible, and enables Atlassian’s teams to focus on doing what they do best—working collectively to make software and tools that help teams do more, work faster, and be better.

Get Expert Support to Unlock the Potential of Your DevOps Tools

To make your DevOps transition a successful one, work with Elasity’s experts to:

  • Optimize and customize your Atlassian applications, configuring them to suit your requirements.
  • Integrate applications and add-ons securely and seamlessly.
  • Take advantage of administrative, functional, and consulting support to help users stay on top of best practices and get the most out of their tools.

We will help you onboard your teams and accelerate the process—enabling you to exploit the full value of Atlassian’s suite of tools.

Before you start, reach out to Elasity for assistance in configuring the Atlassian Suite. As an Atlassian Solutions Partner, we offer Atlassian Atlassian Administration & Functional Support (AFS), to help best configure and implement the Atlassian suite with best-practices.  Contact us to get started today!

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Andy Mao
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