Atlassian Summit Day 3

Boy am I tired.

The day got off to a really good start. I made my rounds through the vendor booths again, and spent five minutes with each of the testing vendors asking them a few specific questions:

  1. Where do requirements live with your tool?
  2. Where do test cases live with your tool?
  3. How do these artifacts manifest themselves in JIRA?
  4. What does a Traceability Matrix look like in your tool?

I gathered some good data and will follow-up with a few after talking to our QA Manager when I get back to work.

I spoke with a few vendors I couldn't get to yesterday and ended up two more shirts heavier including a sweet hoodie from the fine folks at RefinedWiki. (Thanks!)

Sessions From Day 3

My plan had been to hit several presentations, and that sort of worked...

Seven Ways to Make Good Teams Great

This was actually a really fantastic presentation that gave me some good ideas to kick around at the office. I'm seeing some of my newer engineers start to want to flex their muscles a little more, and ideas like a quarterly hacking day, or some way to promote innovation time outside of a given sprint lead me to think this might be a smart use of our time. One other stellar suggestion was to do brown bags, which we've done before, but when you start to burn out, use the time to watch presentations from relevant conferences. This was one of those DUH! moments -- I can see myself showing at least half a dozen from this conference to my dev ops folks and project managers.

I Work in Pajamas: Winning at Remote Distributed Teams

I was not expecting much from this session, but I was also pretty pleased.

Git Workflows a la Carte

This was identical to the webinar I watched on the plane flight to San Francisco, which you can find here. I tuned out and did some release documentation. Good use of time, actually.

Large Scale JIRA Administration

This session was so full I couldn't find a chair and had to leave. I tried to extend this into a cat nap, but couldn't turn my brain off. Instead I found a table, put City on a Hill on repeat, and banged out some more documentation.

I'll have to get the recording and watch it later. There are several others I want to see as well.

Inside JIRA Bug Processes: JIRA Best Practices

Presentation was hard to follow, and actually I got bored really quickly. No biggie. Folks were getting tired. Instead I worked on some new JIRA filters and daily report subscriptions, and played around with some of my mac defaults.

And updated this blog post

Ship-It Live!

This was awesome. Seriously awesome. Six engineers presented their most recent Ship-It! projects, and we got to vote on which was the best. They were:

  1. Notification Power Pack: This does clustering of notifications on edits/changes in Confluence. OMG. DO WANT NOW. Looks like this comes in various 5.3, 5.4 and 5.5 releases. Awesome sauce.1
  2. Bitbucket In-App Payment: Removes confusion and shortens process for going from the free 5-user license to the first paid tier 10-user license. Cool for BB folks, but didn't get many votes.
  3. Three.JS Wallboard: Incredible 3-D wallboard for JIRA/JIRA Agile data. Can't wait to use this, though it didn't get many votes.
  4. Atlassian Content Curation Utility: I didn't get this. Something about collating content into a single place. Clever acronym, but overall not so great.
  5. Shipit Shipit: Lets Atlassian save some money by having employees doing normal business travel bring inter-office shipments with them. Very cool idea for Atlassian. For the rest of us, uhh...
  6. Confluence whiteboards: Lets you take a photo on IOS7/Android from Mobile confluence and add to the page or as a comment. CLUTCH.2

The process was very cool. I'm interested to see what pieces of these things are portable to my org.


  1. This won by about a 5% margin.

  2. Second place.

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