At Contegix, the NOC engineers spend a lot of time working with Atlassian’s products. We are in a constant cycle of installing, maintaining, and upgrading Confuence, JIRA, etc. for customers. We install their plugins, help work out the kinks, and make sure the applications stay running as close to 100% of the time as possible. Oddly, up until lately we’ve mainly only used one application of Atlassian’s internally – Confluence. Of course, we use Crowd here and there as well, but it’s transparent and I never need to worry that it even exists in our infrastructure. JIRA is used for projects with our development consultants and special projects. Everything we document ends up in Confluence, and that allows us to be more productive as we have this incredible encyclopedia of knowledge constantly at our disposal. The need for JIRA by the engineers didn’t every really seem excessively relevant in the past, nor did Bamboo, Fisheye and Crucible. We’re a hosting company with system administrators, not a software development company. In our minds, it didn’t make as much sense. At least, it wasn’t overtly clear that we needed JIRA.

We have Subversion running to handle the code for most of our internal projects, emails to and fro between engineers worked as bug reports for the internal scripts we use, and email was used to announce new versions of various scripts. We’d also use Confluence in a backwards way to help manage some of our internal projects as well, which wasn’t the best solution. It worked, yes, but it wasn’t optimal. We didn’t know any better though. We’re administrators, not users! How were we supposed to know that JIRA was so slick?

Well, the advent of JIRA Studio has taught us a solid lesson, the NOC engineers needed JIRA a looooong time

ago. We often ran into problems in the past where one person would write a script or an application, but it wouldn’t gain widespread use amongst our engineers. The simple fact was that either not everyone knew about it or the script would need updates; however, it wasn’t being properly maintained. This would lead to a wide variety of editions of the script floating around – the absolute death of the script in the first place. Then, we’d revert back to everyone doing everything by hand again. It was an endless cycle that would start everytime someone wrote a mediocre or decent script. We wouldn’t give the script the proper care and love it deserved, it’d gain moderate use for a bit, and later find itself in the script graveyard. The other alternative reality was the individual engineers wrote their own scripts, but never really found the means to openly share their scripts. All of that soon changed, as our illustrious leaders bestowed upon us a great and magical gift… JIRA Studio (add your own fantasy based sound effects here, I prefer trumpets personally).

All of a sudden, we went from having no way to manage our many scripts that have been tossed around the office like dirty laundry, to having so far five projects managed in JIRA Studio. We haven’t had the instance up for more than a couple weeks, and I’m sure the number of projects we maintain internally with JIRA Studio will only increase. It’s amazing how much easier it has made life for us already though. We have subversion repositories for our individual projects, issue tracking, code reviews, great tools to analyze our repositories with, plus a solid documentation backbone. Each project is sectioned off to what feels like its own little world, yet it’s still a part of the big picture that is our developmental operations here at Contegix. We have scripts for customers, programs that make our internal life less chaotic, along with our very website just in case anyone feels the need to make improvements to it.

I think the best part of the whole experience is that we’re all finally starting to share code, discuss new ides for automation, and expanding our thinking quite a bit. Gone are the days of not enough time, not enough resources, or too much effort. We don’t have to worry about those issues now. Now I can whip up a script that has a solid base to help out our company, create a JIRA Studio project, and as a team we can nurture the script to a fruitful life.

It’s odd how just having a launching pad for our internal development projects has opened our eyes quite a bit. Before we were quite content doing a lot of our work by hand, because our development process wasn’t exactly the best. The big problem with automating what we do is we’re dealing with your (our customers) production systems. If we’re going to develop automation tasks for your systems, they absolutely must be 100%. We won’t mess around with your systems by testing half baked scripts on what for many of our customers is their livelihood. That was the past though, because now we have solid testing sandboxes setup for our automation tests, along with JIRA Studio to help us manage the process of developing our applications. We’re already starting to see the benefits as bug reports roll in, fixes roll out, and new projects are being started. I’d say this is the beginning of a new era for Contegix, as we’re now more capable of streamlining of our efforts thanks to JIRA Studio

I guess my overall point is that if you think JIRA Studio isn’t right for your company, because you’re not a development team, you may want to reconsider. I don’t believe we ever though we needed JIRA, and we don’t need it, but I sure don’t want to go back to life without it!