It is difficult to imagine the development of large-scale and even the lightest software products without management systems and high-quality team communication. Bug tracking, kanban & scram boards, hosting systems, and tracking and reviewing work results are important components of the development process. For this reason, the products of the giant company Atlassian are considered indispensable for software developers.
This well-known company offers a turnkey solution for companies following DevOps and Agile that includes Jira Software, Bitbucket, and Confluence. Atlassian tools make life easier for software development teams by offering proven methodologies and guidelines that significantly increase workflow efficiency. However, what is the key features of each of these applications? Why should you choose Atlassian products for more efficient software development? In today’s article, we will talk about Atlassian’s most famous teamwork products in more detail.
Why Use Atlassian’s Products?
The way to achieving business goals and creating full-fledged software, regardless of its complexity, may be winding and have many pitfalls, so IT companies often break large-scale tasks into many small ones and divide them between development teams. This way allows developers to work more efficiently and qualitatively, as well as speed up the development process.
If you strive to follow Agile Development Methodology, It is essential to make the interaction between software development teams smoother and more efficient. After all, if all important information is stored in a single place accessible to all developers, the work becomes clearer and easier. By organizing the workflow, teams can be able to achieve their goals much faster. Atlassian company offers exactly the tools that will help IT specialists create an efficient management system.
Jira Software, Bitbucket, and Confluence are widely used together to cover all the needs of development teams. Let’s take a closer look at each of these Atlassian products and explore the benefits of using such software.
Jira Software
Jira Software is the ideal tool for planning, managing, tracking and reviewing the results of your team’s work throughout the entire software development process. This solution has gained popularity thanks to the bug-tracking system. Jira is often used in IT companies to create to-do lists, track the overall progress, and solve problems that arise during product development. Jira Software is a fundamental tool for developers, which every IT specialist should be familiar with.
Jira Software is completely based on the scrum & kanban board system. These boards are complemented by various supplementary mechanisms that were added to the app solely to make it easier to create something new, add features, fix bugs, etc.
What is Kanban or Scrum Board?
Kanban is the concept of supporting ongoing workflow and efficient execution of tasks through the highest team efficiency. The traditional Kanban board is based on the creation of three columns:
- To-do list;
- In-progress tasks;
- Completed tasks for tracking performance and progress.
Depending on the team’s needs, you can create different columns that will help track team performance and results. The unlimited flexibility of practice and its opportunities for self-organization allows software development teams to achieve incredible efficiency.
Kanban board is easy to use, as well as provides visual control and effective interaction between team members. This method of organizing the workflow has some significant advantages:
- Flexibility. Thanks to the kanban board, the development team focuses on the current work, and the manager sets the priority of tasks;
- High involvement of the team in the development process. Thanks to regular meetings, transparency of processes, and opportunities for self-organization, employees are united and show sincere interest;
- Time-saving. To optimize the development cycle, IT specialists can share valuable knowledge and skills. This helps to restore a smooth development process and improve the overall efficiency of the team.
Scrum is a management strategy that helps development teams that follow the Agile Development Methodology efficiently manage their tasks. Scrum board is an add-on that allows developers to make the process of developing new software even faster. A development team can achieve the highest efficiency thanks to the clear formation, distribution, and delegation of tasks in the team.
Since the Scrum Board is closely related to the Agile development methodology, an important part is breaking large tasks into smaller ones, which are called sprints. When using the Scrum methodology, each development sprint lasts from one to four weeks. In general, a Scrum Board has 6 key features such as User Request Analysis, Sprint, Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, Scrum Team, and Sprint Retrospective. The structure of a scrum board is usually like this:
- Stories. The information about the new product that a large number of users want to see. New design, new setting, new function. It could be anything;
- To-do list;
- In-progress tasks;
- Completed tasks;
- Tasks that are currently being tested;
- Deferred tasks.
Scrum can be used in any field of activity and for developing software of any complexity. The versatility of the technique allows it to be applied to any joint list of tasks. Let’s see the most important advantages of using Scrum boards:
- Improving team productivity. You can easily check and evaluate the performance of team members;
- Speeding up the development process. This methodology often helps boost projects that are stuck in progress;
- Tracking results. Throughout the software development cycle, it is important to monitor the progress and efficiency of the workflow.
What is Jira used for?
Jira Software is developed for creating tasks, assigning executors, setting priorities and tracking the completion of these tasks. Most IT companies use Jira for management, monitoring results and improving the team’s efficiency. The entire software development process is controlled using Jira. Using such software guarantees that all information is saved and team interaction is smooth, thanks to which the workflow becomes more efficient overall.
Confluence
One of the most important factors for fast and efficient agile development of modern software is considered to be a convenient and multifunctional space for teamwork. Development teams actively use cloud wiki systems developed for communication and information exchange between employees to boost team performance. One of the most popular wiki software for IT companies is Confluence from Atlassian.
However, there are numerous similar wikis from various companies that also allow developers to streamline their workflow. But why should you choose Confluence for effective project management? Let’s discover what Confluence is and explore its features, target audience, and application areas.
What is Confluence: Short and Clear
Confluence is a wiki system for companies, organizations and projects that provides internal knowledge base creation and teamwork tools. Here you can create a help and information portal for the team and document business processes. Atlassian Confluence has tight integration with Jira Software, Trello, Bitbucket, Microsoft Office, and other well-known products, which makes this tool effective in terms of workflow centralization.
Atlassian Confluence can be used for numerous purposes (most in demand in software development) and is suitable for teams with full-time and remote employees. The platform is protected by a proprietary license and offers multiple pricing plans, including a free plan for small teams (up to 10 people). It is available as a cloud service, a desktop version and a mobile app in multiple languages.
Features & Possibilities of Confluence
In fact, more than half of the teams using Jira Software use Confluence as an addition to their Agile software development toolkit. Confluence has extensive functionality, which includes such essential features as:
- Efficient teamwork. Confluence makes it easy to create, fill, and edit pages with other team members in real time. There is an option for commenting, sending notifications to team members, and history of changes;
- Security and data protection. Information security comes first. Confluence offers a range of enterprise-grade security features such as two-factor authentication (2FA), SSO, data encryption, anonymous access, and more;
- Structured interface. Confluence consists of a section that organizes pages of different projects and pages where you can create, edit and discuss any work materials.
Why Choose Confluence for IT Company?
Atlassian Confluence is an easy-to-use yet powerful wiki-style web and document publishing system that allows sharing of content between team members and organizing discussions. Let’s discover key reasons to select Confluence for streamlining your workflow.
- Versatility and ease of use. The platform is suitable for creating literally any content: documents, reports, advertising or marketing materials, knowledge bases, technical documentation, etc. What’s more, it is intuitive and easy to understand for beginners;
- Scalability. The capabilities of Confluence can be extended not only through integrations with Jira and third-party services, but also through many built-in plugins;
- Accessibility. Confluence provides an extensive range of plans that will help you choose the best service package for any company or team. Among them, there is a free plan for small teams (up to 10 participants), as well as Standard, Premium and Enterprise.
Bitbucket
It is difficult to imagine the development of serious software products without a code version control system (VCS). To increase the effectiveness of the team, it is necessary to control the work of developers and track the results of the team, define goals and maintain project documentation.
Bitbucket is one of the most popular Atlassian products, which can be easily integrated with Jira Software and Confluence to streamline workflow. Bitbucket is a powerful Git repository management platform for software developers. A code version control system (VCS) allows developers to maintain a history of changes to code and files. Through it, you can control and see who made changes to the code and when the changes were made. GitHub is Bitbucket’s main competitor. However, Bitbucket provides the ability to create an unlimited number of private code repositories for free, if the number of users does not exceed 5.
Why Do Millions of Developers Choose Bitbucket?
Bitbucket is one of the best alternatives to GitHub that allows a team to plan projects, collaborate on code, test and deploy. Let’s discover key reasons to choose Bitbucket to organize your teamwork.
- Jira integration. The integration of Jira Software and Bitbucket will keep the development team up to date with code changes through efficient communication. According to statistics, development teams that use a combination of Jira Software and Bitbucket have a 14% increase in efficiency;
- Flexibility. Bitbucket is a flexible tool because of its wide range of VCS;
- High team performance. Choosing Bitbucket enables development teams to work together on open-source software projects. Thus, the IT team can learn about changes in the code faster and communicate more effectively with other developers, thanks to which the highest team performance is achieved.
To Sum Up
Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket create an amazing workspace for the development team, where experts can work together on a project. Your team can collaborate on code from idea to release, control code quality, and deploy with confidence. These Atlassian products are widely used by software development companies to make team communication smooth and streamline workflow. You can plan, edit, track results and work as a team more effectively. Atlassian provides successful solutions for development teams to track the software development lifecycle and effectively manage various processes.
