Shine Technologies

Shine Technologies is a boutique IT consultancy that brings together deep technology skills, industry experience and a focus on delivering business benefit. Formed in 1997 in Melbourne, Australia, the company has grown rapidly to meet the needs of medium to large enterprises. Shine Technologies specialises in the areas of IT strategy, Java and J2EE based solutions, systems integration, Web enablement of legacy systems, and development of intuitive, high performance systems which address complex problems.

Shine was looking for a streamlined and professional system to manage the software development process. The company didn't consider its issue tracking system comprehensive enough to share with clients, due to its poor user interface and limited functionality.

The consultancy wanted to increase client involvement in the development process, aiming to achieve a two-fold effect of strengthening relationships and speeding up project delivery.

Why JIRA?

The development team at Shine looked at several issue tracking products, including an open source product Bugzilla. They discovered Atlassian's JIRA during their research and evaluation period.

Adam Kierce, co-Founder and project manager at Shine Technologies explains, "JIRA seemed like fantastic value for money, and once we'd installed the trial version, we were amazed at the full range of features. The installation was incredibly easy and fast, and the product comes with so much more than simply the basics.

"Another definite reason for choosing JIRA (once we'd all had a good look at the product) was the interface. It was just sensational and one of the best of its kind I've ever seen."

Using JIRA has helped save us approximately $100,000 a year by improving speed and efficiency across projects. We love software developers that do great work — and Atlassian does great work.

— Adam Kierce, Co-Founder and Project Manager

The Solution

All 30 employees of Shine Technologies use JIRA, including sales and administration. 27 projects are currently active and there are approximately 100 users, including clients. The developers and project managers find that JIRA improves their efficiency, while changing requirements have become easier to manage in terms of accuracy, efficiency and certainty.

Shine Technologies' developers are using JIRA to record issues and track any related bugs or defects. Customers are sharing information willingly, now privy to advances that are made on a project in real time.

"We have become a lot more collaborative with our customers who now have direct access to work flow procedures. Our customers are actually recording issues or bugs directly into JIRA themselves, which just speeds up the whole process dramatically. JIRA is turning into as much a communications tool for Shine Technologies as it is a technical one," adds Kierce.

The Results

The benefits which Shine Technologies has enjoyed since deploying JIRA include the minimisation of unproductive time, business process improvement and vastly improved internal and external teamwork. As Kierce explains, "using JIRA has helped save us approximately $100,000 a year by improving speed and efficiency across projects . . . we've sped up our communications and planning processes and we've definitely noticed an increase in general and project specific productivity."

Shine began using JIRA exclusively on software development projects but its ease of use and flexibility has led to other business uses such as project management and administration tasks. Kierce provides a simple example, "we use JIRA for all company administration tasks. For example, instead of dealing with lengthy email trails to organise a customer seminar, the office manager and executive PA now use JIRA as a task management tool. It's far easier than looking for lost emails, as all necessary details remain in one place."

"There are plenty of non-software development related tasks like this where JIRA has become a project management or workflow tool. It's certainly made our lives easier," said Kierce. "We're fussy and extremely passionate about first-class software development here at Shine — it's what we do. And there's no software in the world that I rave about, other than our own, as much as Atlassian's JIRA and Confluence."