On Tuesday, I was invited to observe the inaugural Jira process meeting, in which the Jira development team discussed various ways they could improve the way they produce software.
One thing we do in the Confluence team, and that helps us a great deal, is that we keep the internal Atlassian wiki running on the newest development code that we can. This is good because most of the company relies on this wiki in order to do their jobs, so we get a lot of quick feedback over new features, and cries of agony if we’ve broken anything.
The Jira team were considering something similar, but it’s a little more tricky for them. Because we do all our issue tracking in public, there’s no real internal-use-only Jira instance for them to upgrade.
Mike suggested we use jira.atlassian.com as our guinea-pig anyway. Various members of the team objected, worried that it might be bad PR for us to put alpha code on such a highly public and well-trafficked server.
Mike’s reply delved possibly a little too deep into metaphor:
bq. The way I see it; if you’re hanging your balls over the fence you’re going to make sure they’re clean.
Hence:
clean-balls.jpg

Keep 'em clean, boys.