There are plenty of interviews and articles praising the added value of using Atlassian tools. To check those perspectives, as an experiment, we turned it around … They say we only really appreciate the value of things after they’re gone. Imagine the following situation: We are a medium-sized software development company, with branches in a few European countries. Together we have around 150 employees, most of them developers, project managers, line managers and administration. All employees use Atlassian tools like JIRA, Confluence, etc., in their daily work. Looking at the daily work log of tasks and project backlogs, all boards, the quality system, processes, meeting pro-tocols, blogs, knowledge base and statistics: absolutely all are managed with Atlassian tools, which are combined for optimal use. And because the company has been using these tools for years, each employee is used to working with them and turns to them as a matter of course. Not possible? Yes, it is! The company is called mimacom – an open source integrator founded in Switzerland – and we asked mimacom to help us with our experiment. To avoid having to paralyze the company for a day, we ask the Scrum Master, Project Manager, Scrum team member and Management Board Member of mimacom just to imagine one day without Atlassian and share with us what it would be like. The findings are eye-opening. This perspective made us realize how useful und helpful Atlassian tools are in our daily jobs. Here are the results…

Reliable, efficient and integrated tools and technology stack focused on innovation are key to my high performance

Software Architect, Developer – Scrum team member

I could work without Atlassian tools, but what kind of life it would be? Atlassian tools are designed to complement each other and make a developer’s job more efficient, letting us focus on what is most important – implementing the right solution. At the same time they support us in dreaming big, working smart and delivering fast. This makes Atlassian the right choice during the whole software development lifecycle, from requirements engineering to final deployment and maintenance. I would not like to go back to the time when the development process was not integrated with Atlassian. JIRA lets me follow the team’s activities in a transparent and intuitive way. It supports us in organizing team work efficiently. Confluence is the right place for us to share, find, and collaborate on information our team needs to get work done. Bamboo not only runs builds and tests for us, it also connects issues, commits, test results, and deployments so the whole picture is available to the entire Scrum team. Stash enables to create and manage repositories, set up fine-grained permissions, and collaborate on code. Other tools let us keep a pulse on everything about code: visualize and report on activity, integrate source with JIRA issues and search for commits, files, and revisions. Code reviews, identification of defects, discussion of changes, and knowledge sharing are optimized thanks to Atlassian tools. Without those tools my team would not perform so well. For one day we would manage, but more… we don’t even want to imagine.

One day without Atlassian…, no way!

Scrum Master, Product Owner, Requirements Engineer

Agile team and Release Planning would be weak, wild, wrong and wretched. To lead successful (agile) teams we need a transparent and integrated toolchain that covers many different aspects of our work. For software development those are Requirements Management/Engineering, issue tracking, knowledge sharing, coding, build, release and testing. How would we integrate those disciplines if not with the Atlassian Toolchain?!

Atlassian – it was a good decision

Member of BoD

Atlassian development tools like JIRA, Confluence, Bamboo etc. help our teams efficiently deliver high quality products for our customers and complement “mimacom path” where our methods, tools and technology stack are defined. But with the right configuration and plugins, Atlassian makes a difference not only in software development but in all other processes in our company. From the service desk to administration, resource management, recruiting, management meetings and decision-making, all use Atlassian tools to do their daily jobs. From the high-level management point of view, the most important thing is the transparent overview of all activities in the company, which we trace in JIRA and Confluence. Additionally, the possibility to track progress and to create dashboards with the company’s most important KPIs, gives us a solid basis for taking the most appropriate management decision. Furthermore, by optimizing our processes with Atlassian and combining agile solutions with our processes, we were the first company in the world to achieve CMMI Level 5 with the agile approach. And last but not least, Atlassian tools let us jump borders and not think about the distances that keep mimacom companies apart. One day without this optimal integrated solution would be not a disaster, because adapting to any situation is a value shared by all at mimacom. Strong organization agility, lean processes and self-organizing teams would allow us to survive this day. However, a day without Atlassian would make us realize how much we have achieved and improved with those tools.