Atlassian Helps Manage Large Software Projects

In-house software development was once the sole responsibility of companies' IT departments. Today, the process is also of concern to business managers and executives. Business leaders are now involved in discussions about how well software projects are delivering. These discussions increasingly need to be open and global, as the work of development, implementation, bug fi xes, and upgrades is increasingly scattered across different areas of expertise around the world. This process of cross-company discussion relating to software project development is called collaborative software development. One example of a company that has successfully employed collaborative software development is Lancôme, a division of L'Oréal that owns brands such as YSL Beauty. In 2010, Lancôme decided to revamp its Web sites, electronic commerce, and online marketing efforts.

To execute this task, the company had to devise a strategy to use software to manage its product development and production process. This task was rather daunting because it involved coordinating the work of in-house employees, freelance Web developers, and creative staff headquartered in such diverse locations as Chicago and India. Rather than assign this task to its overworked IT staff, Lancôme turned to the software development company Atlassian (www .atlassian.com). Atlassian sells an online application called Jira, which can track and manage large software projects. Jira helped speed up Lancôme's projects, and it made each step of the development process visible to everyone on the team. It also decreased the number of meetings and back-and-forth e-mails required for each project. These benefits translated into more sales on Lancôme's Web sites. After this successful experience, L'Oréal is considering implementing Jira in other divisions. Another company that effectively utilized Jira is NYSE Euronext. NYSE Euronext wanted to speed up the development process of its software projects.

The firm also wanted to revamp its Web site and its mobile and e-commerce data products. When NYSE Euronext deployed Atlassian, some employees who used to jealously guard their code did not like the openness and collaboration provided by the new tools. Significantly, these employees no longer work at NYSE Euronext. The company's CIO notes that the fi rm experienced a great deal of attrition among its developers, but he characterizes it as "good attrition." Productivity in software development improved from 30 to 50 percent in just the fi rst 6 months after the company implemented Jira. Research reveals that when a company uses one Atlassian product, it will often also end up using another one because Atlassian products work so well together. For example, a data management firm called Cloudera uses Jira to track bugs. Additionally, all 150 of Cloudera's employees use Atlassian's Confl uence collaboration software to share information on sales, personnel issues, business development, and bug reports from Jira. Atlassian devotes a great deal of attention to collaboration and transparency in how people work and how companies are run. It posts an unusually large amount of company information on an internal Web site for employees to view, including fi nancials, sales performance, and pretty much everything except employee salaries. Atlassian applies different community collaboration rules for different kinds of content. For example, it manages developer documentation in a wiki where anyone with an account can post or edit content. This process works well for generating code samples and usage examples. For the core product documentation, Atlassian gives editing abilities to some members of the community, but it requires those editors to first undergo a vetting process.

Furthermore, the editors are required to sign an agreement that details their rights and responsibilities. Users who do not have editor rights can also post comments on the formal documentation. The editors are responsible for monitoring those comments to determine whether there are items that they need to add or change. Once per quarter, Atlassian hosts its "FedEx Days," which are competitions in which employees compete to produce a product in 24 hours (typically fueled by pizza and beer). Atlassian uses a social event, rather than any promise of monetary reward, to spur innovation and creativity. FedEx the company has nothing to do with this competition, other than to be a source of inspiration. The name of the competition references FedEx's tradition of being the delivery company to choose "when it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight." Atlassian adopted a policy of pricing Web software so inexpensively that small firms can afford to purchase their products. The company then grows virally through firms that adopt its software. Atlassian posts all of its prices on its Web site-typically $10 per month for up to 10 users for each product and up to $1,000 per month for up to 2,000 users per product. The firm invites customers to sign up with no negotiation necessary. This business model has proved its worth to Atlassian-the company now has 24,000 customers across 138 countries, including Microsoft, Oracle, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, L'Oréal, and NYSE Euronext. This number continues to expand despite competition from IBM, Microsoft, MindTouch, and Jive. Sources: Compiled from T. Geron, "We're All Coders," Forbes, March 12, 2012; D. Carr, "Atlassian Boosts JIRA Social Features, Social Integration," InformationWeek, February 22, 2012; D. Carr, "How Social Media Changes Technical Communication," InformationWeek, January 4, 2012; D. Carr, "How to Create a New Product in 24 Hours," InformationWeek, December 2, 2011; T. Taulli, "Atlassian: $100M Business With No Sales People?" Forbes, June 14, 2011; www.atlassian.com, accessed March 5, 2013.

Questions

1. Why are collaboration and transparency so important in the software development process?

2. What are potential problems that could arise when using Atlassian to manage software development? Provide specifi c examples to support your answer.

3. Provide an example of a software development project for which it would not be advisable to use Atlassian.