Adding new Atlassian products to our toolkit

I’ve been Using Atlassian software development and collaboration tools for many years and recently contributed to a Oneserve news story about the release of Jira 5.1, one of Atlassian’s tools designed to support every step of the software development process. 

At Oneserve, we’ve been adding new Atlassian products to our toolkit over time. We originally used JIRA to simply track issues but Crucible, Fisheye and Greenhopper have since been added to the mix.

Across the Oneserve technical team we find Atlassian products benefit how we work in a number of ways:

• Issue tracking – to track issues which have been raised with the helpdesk and to communicate with customers using Jira. Customers can log in to our Jira application and view their support ticket, which helps to keep people informed and ensure we’re meeting each customer’s service level agreement (SLA).

• Managing our development queue – Kanban is an agile development project management method which reduces work in progress and provides a visual means of seeing where an item is in the development process. We also use the Greenhopper rapid board in JIRA and the entire team is able to view this on our big screen in the office, so everyone can view progress. We’re also able to have stand-up discussions around the board.

• Code reviews – we use Crucible to perform peer code reviews. Everything can be done through Crucible and we get the benefits of team ownership of the code base, peer feedback and cross-learning and, of course, the resultant improvements in code quality.

• Our source code is stored in SVN hosted by Atlassian so it’s integrated with Fisheye (the source code viewer) and the Eclipse development environment. We also use this to generate release notes for our clients.

• JIRA dashboards and filters also give us great views on the data and allow us to report on things such as SLAs, time tracking and target dates.

Although the majority of our software development cycle is now covered by Atlassian we still have more to do. Our automated build and test environment is currently hosted outside but we want to look into using Bamboo at some point in the future. We’re also interested in looking into how we can use Bonfire (the user testing feedback tool).

I’m confident that as we grow Atlassian will be there to support us on our journey, innovating and coming up with great development and collaboration tools which, in turn, enable us to produce great field service management software.

by Rob Lucas

Rob leads the technical effort within Oneserve and has been involved in designing and developing the product from its inception. With years of experience developing web-based business applications and leading teams, we're confident we have the best technical guy there is to provide what our customers need. And when he's not busy at work, Rob can be found spending time with his young family.