Summit 2012 - How Atlassian Uses Confluence
- 2. Connecting Cross-functional Teams During Product Development with Confluence Javascript Developer, Atlassian Wesley Walser
- 4. Our Version of The Story Dream It Plan It Build It Launch It
- 5. • Dream • Get It Down • Hash It Out • Mock It Up • Plan It • Build It • Launch • Align Where We Use Confluence (And what I’ll cover in this talk) (And what I’ll cover in this talk)
- 6. Designer, NASA Lunar Module If a major project is truly innovative, you cannot possibly know its exact cost and its exact schedule at the beginning. Joseph G. Gavin, Jr.
- 8. • What product development really looks like at Atlassian • 4.2 Case Study • Q&A Approach
- 9. What Product Development Really Looks Like
- 10. Get It Down
- 11. #atlassiansummit New is a constant.
- 12. • Customers • Blogs • Product Managers • Founders • Other products Get It Down ‘New’ is a constant ‘New’ is a constant
- 13. Get It Down Confluence - No Stress Confluence - No Stress • People push good ideas forward (given the right culture) • Confluence Helps • Shares • Popular Content • Very few lists
- 15. • Code Talks • Prototypes • Previously known as FedEx Day • 20% Get It Down Engineering lead organization Engineering lead organization
- 17. Hash It Out
- 18. • Immediate • Comments • Likes • Shares • Mentions • HipChat integration Hash It Out Overlap with get it down Overlap with get it down
- 20. • Collaborative! • Constructive? • Important stuff bubbles • Balance is cultural • Not software • Not enforced through process or authority Hash It Out You say kä ment, I say flame warˈ
- 21. • Shipped! • You what? • Where? • Speakeasy • Find ways to safely prototype • Comment over meeting Hash It Out That engineering culture thing again
- 23. Mock It Up
- 24. • Beginning of Design • Nope • Visual but not too real • Tool of the trade Mock It Up Brief to wireframe - Into the light
- 29. • Style Guides • Discussion artifacts • Tools of the trade • Fisheye • Stash Mock It Up Wireframe to design
- 30. Plan It
- 31. • Atlassian • Polyglot Agile • Confluence team • Kanban Plan It In whatever way you like
- 32. • Tools of the trade • JIRA • GreenHopper • Confluence • Team Calendars • Atlassian.com/resources/bette r-together Plan It Tools
- 34. Build It
- 35. • Doneness • Micro - JIRA • Macro - Confluence • FedEx & 20% Build It Work work
- 37. • Inline Tasks • Sprint goals • Action items from a meeting • Non-technical users Build It Extra-sprint work
- 38. • Confluence Notifications • No inbox clutter • Things that need doing • Things that need reading • Personal Notes Build It Notifications - All in a days work
- 39. Add personal todos Mark notifications for followup Track Confluence tasks Add in-line tasks in pages @mention to assign tasks
- 40. Align
- 41. • Confluence Boxes • What’s being messaged • Forces us to come around simple ideas and messages Align Get on Message
- 44. Recap! Dream It Plan It Build It Launch It
Editor's Notes
- #4: Blame me for the editor.
- #7: Shared Story. Cast vision to audience that while I’m talking about how Atlassian does things, the thing that we’re actually doing (product dev) is something we all do. Next slide is burger, lead in.
- #8: Overview of the structure of the talk. Use as opportunity to rehash the shared vision. We’re very good at this, but we’re not perfect.
- #9: Overview of the structure of the talk. Use as opportunity to rehash the shared vision. We’re very good at this, but we’re not perfect.
- #11: Lead into ‘new is a constant’ tweet.
- #13: This is the same across all organizations, no one has to look far to find something that someone wants them to add to a product. * marketing * tech writing * product managers * support
- #14: We don’t stress over capturing every good idea into stories or in a roadmap. One thing that good agile practices help you to understand is how quickly things change for you as an organization. At Atlassian we’ve found that we change fairly quickly. Better ideas come along all the time so we don’t make concrete road maps until late in the game. Confluence helps us here because it doesn’t forget things that happened 6 months ago, we can find them if we need too, but they also don’t bother you by lingering on a backlog. If it didn’t get into a sprint within 6 months of someone coming up with the idea, is it important to formally define it (stories/tasks/estimation)?
- #15: popular content, shares, mentions and likes These are built in lurker to participant converters. They push conversation and participation.
- #16: This is a way in which we are probably different than other organizations. Product ideas and feature approaches are constantly happening and being spiked inside a dynamic, agile development organization. These pages crop up all over the place in our internal wiki. Sometimes they are blogs, sometimes they are FedEx shipment orders and sometimes they are pages inside of any number of spaces. We don't demand that everyone write everything down all the time (we don't take meeting minutes for example) so we're not worried about these things getting `lost`. If someone is writing it down it's because they care about it and they will bring it up later, link too it and advocate for it. There is little to no overlap between "Get it down" and prioritization or true planning. Developers shine here, they love writing about stuff they care about and we want our developers to be innovative.
- #19: Getting feedback on new ideas is no difficult task at Atlassian. HipChat integration allows us to track spaces in Confluence for newly created pages. Shares and mentions allow us to pull others into conversations when we create new blog posts. Combine these features with the popular content panel on the dashboard and you have a perfect storm for getting lots of great feedback on your ideas and feature plans.
- #20: Posts in Confluence get sent to HipChat and of course inside of confluence you can see who is currently available inside chat.
- #21: In a company full of engineers you’re sure to get feedback of all types. This is an important facet of our culture and it’s never led us into ruin. It’s just important to understand that you aren’t your ideas and that you work with some of the smartest people in the world. Feedback ranges from simple Likes to full page comments detailing the trials and tribulations that lie ahead for the feature a page is advocating for. We try and keep it brief and focused and at some point the truly valuable feedback bubbles to the top through likes, child comments and popular content. This collaboration leads to great product. Balance is neither software driven nor enforced by process. Balance is cultural.
- #22: In a company full of engineers you’re sure to get feedback of all types. This is an important facet of our culture and it’s never led us into ruin. It’s just important to understand that you aren’t your ideas and that you work with people who are really good at their thing. Feedback ranges from simple Likes to full page comments detailing the trials and tribulations that lie ahead for the feature a page is advocating for. We try and keep it brief and focused and at some point the truly valuable feedback bubbles to the top through likes, child comments and popular content. This collaboration leads to great product. Balance is neither software driven nor enforced by process. Balance is cultural.
- #23: 35 comments over a very simple feature. Zero meetings. MCB: no edit mode sorting MR: return to non-sorted order MR2: sort indicators only on hover
- #25: 1. Braindump to Brief 2. Brief to wireframe 3. Wireframe to design 4. Design to implementation 5. Validate and iterate
- #30: Most of this happens outside of Atlassian tooling. We use Adobe software for our visual designs. Some related to visual design do end up in Confluence. Our internal style guide and design language is in Confluence so that designers and developers alike can reference it to see if there are patterns for the types of components that they are working on.
- #32: Atlassian has a great reputation as an Agile shop and that’s absolutely well deserved. It’s always important for us to say though, that we have no illusions of having ‘solved the problem’. If we believed this, we would have a one true way and we don’t. Atlassian practices polyglot agile. We have teams doing prototypical Scrum, several doing Kanban, sprints range from single weeks to a month. Process, even very light process requires consistent iteration. Don’t iterate toward additional process, iterate toward less process or at the very least less burdensome process.
- #33: In JIRA, we often scope the phrase ‘Plan it’ here to mean plan the sprint. We plan longer term vision in Confluence so that we can Collaborate more easily with remote teams and less technical members of the team. We’ve found the sandbox nature of Confluence to be more conducive to long term vision and JRIA/GreenHopper to be great for giving teams vision into their own cadence and progress. Confluence has 4 x-functional teams each with several developers, one to two QA members and a team lead. Each of these teams also has a PM and technical writer assigned to the team which while being on their own respective teams are for the sake of agile considered a part of the team. They negotiate and commit to plans with us. Each of the four teams rotates through feature work and bug fixing. Plug better together.
- #38: I’m assuming this will have already been announced since I’m on the last day.
- #39: I’m assuming this will have already been announced since I’m on the last day.
- #40: As you can see creating and tracking tasks for business users is really easy. We've got: A really simple and easy way to create tasks on a page @mentioning a user assigns them a task In addition, everyone's got their own personal task list. Here they can add their personal todo's, see all the tasks they've created from notifications or all the tasks assigned to them from content in one place They can prioritise their tasks or mark them off as complete from here and the respective notifications will go out...
- #42: The initial plan may not be what ends up happening. Commitments and priorities shift over a three month period for all agile teams and of course slippage occurs from time to time. We leverage the strengths a wiki and treat all documents related to any given release as live documents where anyone can edit to keep them consistent with reality. As agile strives to help us be transparent about success, slip and outright failure, Confluence helps us communicate that transparency to everyone involved whether they are sitting next or us or across the ocean.
- #43: photoshop, game, operating system 2x
- #45: 1. For Dream It, we’re talking about getting ideas down, hashing them out. Recognising that high engagement in conversation is driven by culture. Change is constant, don’t make lots of lists (Confluence doesn’t forget) and leverage lurker to participant tools. 2. For Plan It, we capture micro level tasks in JIRA and track macro doneness in Confluence. 3. Build it happens mostly in code. Tracking is enabled by JIRA/Confluence integration and discussion artifacts from earlier phases are critical to the builders. 4. At launch we’re interested in communicating to the team what’s gotten done, getting everyone on message and celebrating our success.