• About
• Products
• Hosted

415.701.1110

JIRA AND CONFLUENCE CASE STUDY – Wrycan, Inc.

A conversation with Daniel Reed, Managing Director at Wrycan

Wrycan provides end-to-end XML-based content technology with expertise for customers in education, healthcare, oil services and other industries. The company is small, but growing fast, and prides itself on quality products and speedy resolution of issues. Atlassian JIRA and Atlassian Confluence help Wrycan achieve both by helping a small number of people manage a large amount of work.

Let's dig right in. When and why did you start using JIRA, Atlassian's issue tracker?

It really came out of necessity. As much as people say the advantage of small companies is that they're agile, it still takes effort to be agile. We try to address the needs of many different customers at the same time without incurring high overhead. If we have five different projects and each one takes half of someone's time, we don't want to hire five different people. To make it work, we need to be able to move people around between projects.

About four years ago, I brought in a director of technology and asked him to create a manageable and replicable process that we could use not only for internal development, but for client-facing projects as well. He chose JIRA and Confluence. Before that, we did things in more of an ad-hoc way, which just wasn't working as our business grew.

"We've coined the phrase, 'If you don't want to forget it, put it into JIRA.'"

Daniel Reed, Wrycan

Wrycan has 10 employees, 5 consulting projects and a software product to develop and support... that's a lot for a small company. How did JIRA work its way across different facets of your business?

We started out using JIRA to track releases, bugs, tasks, patches and custom development for our content management software product. Later, we started using it as a consulting task management system where we track task improvements, customer service queries, and so on. Now, it's just second nature to use JIRA for everything we do. We've coined the phrase, "If you don't want to forget it, put it into JIRA." We've closed more than 1,000 consulting issues in JIRA, and for our main product we have about 800 issues with 570 closed.

We also use JIRA for roadmapping and for suggesting things that aren't even on the product roadmap yet. For example, when we have ideas for new features, we put them into JIRA where people can comment on feasibility and development considerations.

How does JIRA affect the ramp-up time for new Wrycan employees?

The first day for a new employee at Wrycan includes getting a laptop, an email address, and JIRA and Confluence accounts. We've tailored JIRA for our particular processes and methodology. Some things are left very flexible on purpose, so we need to explain a few things up front. For example, we have specific ways to classify issues to ensure that they get fixed in the next development iteration.

In terms of ramp-up time, new employees are up and running the day they start. The first thing we ask them to do is to scroll through the issues in JIRA to get a sense of what we're working on, and then dig in and fix a simple issue within a product or consulting project.

JIRA and Confluence are pretty good recruiting tools, too. Candidates have commented that they rarely see the same type of tools in place at other small companies, and they feel that having all that knowledge at their fingertips is a huge positive for us.

Do you use Atlassian's granular permissions controls?

Yes. JIRA and Confluence are hosted externally in a secure environment, and we segment permissions for different groups of users. For instance, we have consultants that rarely work in the office, so they need complete access from anywhere. We also allow certain clients and partners to view issues in JIRA, but not to log them or close them.

"The first day for a new employee at Wrycan includes getting a laptop, an email address, and JIRA and Confluence accounts."

Daniel Reed, Wrycan

CMS systems, like yours, have to have great workflow features. Do you use JIRA's workflow features at all?

Yes, and as a matter of fact, we've done a lot of customizations to JIRA's workflow engine and incorporated them in our product. Our XML content management system has a built-in XML Document Type for Workflows. We can build Open Symphony-based workflows for our customers and deliver those workflows as XML files. Our customers upload the workflows and viola, they have new workflow options available in their system. We have built various extensions to the OS Workflow system to support things like user balloting where various users will vote to approve or reject a content revision.

How do you see your use of JIRA evolving as Wrycan grows?

Right now we're still a small company with a development team that plays many roles. But we're definitely in a transition phase where our products are being adopted by very large companies, which in turn will allow us to staff a dedicated consulting group to support those customers. I don't want to put up a wall between development and consulting, but we will want to keep them separate. We've already started to divide things in JIRA into core product development projects and custom development issues for specific customers. Another area that I see evolving is the customer service side of things. The more customers we have, the more customer inquiries we need to respond to. JIRA will help us ramp up there as well.

What advice would you give another small company about when or why they should use a tool like JIRA?

We've found that the most important use of JIRA is to organize information and get it out there. At the same time, it's important to take the time to go back and prune everything once in a while. If you don't make that effort you can get yourself into a bit of a black hole where there are too many issues and duplicates in the system.

Let's switch gears and talk about Confluence. How have your processes developed to include the wiki?

We have Confluence spaces for every product we develop, every consulting engagement and every partner. We use it internally as a knowledge base and as an extranet for collaborative requirements gathering with our partners and customers. The integration between JIRA and Confluence allows us to link a set of issues so people can go to JIRA for a basic list, and then look at the Confluence space for more context and commentary. Some things, like technical specifications, are only in Confluence. We try not to use Microsoft Word attachments at all; we put everything in the wiki.

"We store everything we can think of in Confluence, from development environment specs to this year's holiday schedule."

Daniel Reed, Wrycan

How does Confluence help you with consulting engagements once they begin?

Each client has a Confluence space where we create their specifications, and where they can track the status and progress of their projects. We break down each part of the project and document it for them, and then we print it and have them sign it for each version. As we all know, nothing ever stays static, so we track a lot of changes, too.

At any time, the client can export their Confluence space and walk away with it. A lot of development houses don't document consulting engagements for clients and if they do, it's just a bunch of Word documents that don't give you a clear picture of the work or the process unless you print them all out and look at them on the table. Not very practical to do.

Are you using Confluence in ways you hadn't expected?

We've been surprised by how much we use it. The first order of business when you can't find something or figure something out is to look in Confluence. We have hundreds and hundreds of pages just for our own knowledge management. We store everything we can think of in Confluence, from development environment specs to this year's holiday schedule. We also have fun with it. We have a page with random quotes from the Red Sox during their winning 2004 season. My favorite is from Johnny Damon. When asked how he kept warm during the game, he replied, "Two pairs of long johns top and bottom, and beer. With this team, beer."

Return to Confluence case studies or read more JIRA ones: