Communication

Constant, effective communication is vital to the success of any process. Atlassian's first core value is all about being an open company, with no bullshit. So, whether it is through face-to-face interactions, super-accessible content on our wiki, or system generated IM notifications, we ensure our processes and tools help everyone stays aware of what's going on in the most efficient way we know.

Anton on stand-ups

While our teams flexibly opt in and out of various agile & scrum related practices, standups are sacred at Atlassian.

To keep stand-ups on track and high-energy, the JIRA team turned to iTunes. They created a playlist to automatically pump new music at 9:45AM each day as a cue that it's time to meet. The playlist creator rotates weekly.

Watch Anton talk about stand-ups (0:43)

Don on lightning feedback

The bullet that get's you is the one you never see. Getting constant feedback from multiple stakeholders while finding new risks and problems faster gives us better insight into our true progress within an iteration.

We run an open bug tracker jira.atlassian.com, where customers can view and file open bugs regarding any of our products. It's scary to open your kimono, but the benefits of accelerating customer feedback are worth it.

Watch Don talk about incorporating feedback (0:43)

Using "The Disturbed" to avoid context switching

To reduce context switching invoked through regular interruptions, we introduced a role called "The Disturbed." On a weekly rotation, a team member is given a blow-up Scream doll (from Edward Munch's painting "The Scream") to put on their desk. When a non-developer needs to engage someone on the dev team, non-developers look for the person with the "Scream" doll to direct their interactions.

Sometimes good ideas don't come from Kent Beck or Martin Fowler. For us, the quarterly process meeting is a great place to work out kinks and introduce new things.

Watch us talk about managing interruptions (2:33)