Happy Reading

Welcome to the March Mania issue! This month... our hosted development environment released, we started our 20% time ($1,000,000) experiment, the plugin contest began, discounts for JavaOne and lots more.

Happy reading! Oh, and if you like the bug, there are many more to see.

Launching JIRA Studio

After a couple of months in Beta, JIRA Studio is now publicly available!

JIRA Studio integrates JIRA, Confluence, Fisheye, Crucible and Crowd. It then adds in Subversion, Streams, the JIRA Studio toolbar, and makes them all available as a hosted, on-demand service available for just US$50 per user, per month. There is nothing to install and nothing to maintain.

Using JIRA Studio you can track your issues and tasks, control and view your code repository, collaborate with your team, and manage your code reviews all from a single URL.

Read on

Atlassian's 20% Time Experiment

I'm happy to announce that we are undertaking a thorough, public "20% time" trial at Atlassian.

If you've ever wondered how Google's famed 20% time works in reality, we'll be your guinea pigs and will be blogging the results for everyone to see.

Why do 20% time?
Atlassian has a proud tradition of innovation. We've always strived to have market leading products. Our internal Fedex days keep improving, we've won awards for entrepreneurial innovation and we try to never stop pushing the boundaries in our business.

So why are we unhappy?
In any startup company, innovation slows as the company grows. Our growing customer base (we just welcomed Customer 10,000!) is forcing us to rethink how we innovate our products, whilst maintaining stability for customers.

Wait... so you're just... copying Google?
Well no. We'd love to (we hate re-inventing the wheel!) but it's a little harder than that. We'd love to start from Google's model and evolve it but that has proven difficult.

You see, while everyone knows about Google's 20% time and we've heard about all the neat products born from it (Google News, GMail etc) — we've found it extremely difficult to get any hard facts about how it actually works in practice.

Read on

Announcing Codegeist III: Be The Code You Seek

Coders, start your development engines! It's time for Codegeist III, the 2008 edition of the Atlassian plugin competition. Once again, the contest is bigger and badder than last year: we're offering $30,000 in cash prizes, gobs of software from some of our favourite Java tool-smiths, and tickets to a few of the best developer conferences in the business.

The contest closes Friday, May 9th so start coding! You'll find all the details on the Codegeist space on confluence.atlassian.com. And stay tuned to the Atlassian Developer Blog for updates.

Crowd 1.3 Solves Your Identity Crisis

The Atlassian Crowd team is delighted to present Crowd 1.3. This release includes innovative solutions for LDAP group administration, cross-directory user imports and a streamlined management interface.

Crowd 1.3 features delegated authentication, giving users greater control of LDAP group administration, while allowing users to be managed in Crowd. This means local systems administrators can bypass the bureaucracy and easily configure user permissions, group configurations and passwords from Crowd without having to make changes in a central directory.

Read on
Download Crowd now
View the Release Notes

Maven in Our Development Process: Remaining Issues

So far we have covered all the work we have done setting up Maven:

• The requirements for our Maven process.
• The infrastructure we have set up.
• The project configuration details.

Now, I'll outline some of the most frequent and some of the most sore issues we have to deal with from time to time:

Maven users need training.
We believe this is the most important and most overlooked issue of all.

One problem is if you are migrating projects from Ant or Maven 1 to Maven 2. Your developers used to know their build system very well and all of a sudden they lose control.

Read on

Four New Capabilities For The Atlassian Plugin Repository

We've recently added four new features to the Atlassian Plugin Repository that plugin developers should want to know about.

First, there's Download Tracking
For the last few months, we've been tracking the number of individual plugin downloads through the Plugin Repository. You can now display a table or graph of a plugin's downloads.

Read on

Communicating Across Products and Oceans

Dipping into the Stream

You may already know about the Activity Stream feature that is a part of JIRA Studio. The idea is that all of the activity on a project, across its issues, wiki content, source commits and code reviews, can be viewed in a continuous, integrated timeline.

We were able to implement Activity Streams entirely as a plugin — actually, a suite of three plugins, for JIRA, Confluence and FishEye/Crucible. This has been an exciting and challenging project that has given me a chance to work with all of Atlassian's products and development teams around the world.

Read on

Wikis at the White House

With the wiki, federal agencies compiled a database of 13,496 earmarks in 10 weeks. In the old days, it would have taken six months to get the information to the OMB.

In a recent Washington Post article, Stephen Barr explores how the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is using a wiki to track earmarks in the federal budget. Earmarking is a process by which members of Congress designate money for specific projects, often in their home states or congressional districts.

Our Reading List

Here are some sites and blogs we have been tagging around the office:

• Get $100 discounts on Web 2.0 and JavaOne!
  
• Looking for a reason to use Groovy? Ken Kousen has a great one.
• Learn about Dushan's trials in getting the pop-up window in Opera to stay put.
  
• Deploying Grails in a production environment? Might want to read this Feedlr entry.
• Thinking of writing a book on code? Check out Mark Ramm's tips.
• Some crazy Flash here.  Move your mouse and you'll see.

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