Looking around the development tools industry, it's not exactly a hot bed for investors. Startups around the valley rarely focus on development tools, choosing instead to broaden their appeal to businesses or consumers. One exception to this trend, however, is Atlassian, the company behind Confluence and JIRA. The company has parleyed its successes into multi-million dollar venture capital investments. We sat down with co-founder and CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes to discuss just how Atlassian will evolve is ALM and agile tools over the next few years.
You recently announced that Atlassian will support the SCM Mercurial. What made you choose Mercurial over Bazaar or Git?
We just use it internally and believe in it. We support, SCM-wise, whatever customers are using.
We are moving ourselves from Subversion to Mercurial. It's going to be an interesting tech war. For our customers, if they come from the more Webby startup space, they tend to see Git through the JavaScript and Ruby communities: it's more of the flavor of the day there, especially where there are smaller teams. You see a lot of enterprise moving to Mercurial from Subversion because it has more of the benefits of distributed with the same mindset as Subversion. It's easier to make that transition. The person who wins out of all this competition is the developer.
What trends are you seeing in enterprise development needs?
Mobile is really big in the public space, and I think enterprises watch that and think about that. They're wary of new technology: it's easier to lose a phone than a laptop. Obviously Android and Apple developers think about this, so they have added remote wiping and Microsoft Exchange support. I think the problem with mobile from enterprise perspectives is that's an insidious development task.
Scrum is becoming ever more popular, too. Agile has gone from being a fringe movement to more of a default. It's more unusual to find a waterfall team than an agile team, now. Distributed agile is becoming a more talked about topic because strict agile requires having all of the guys in the same room, but as you have distributed development teams they have to make it work.
Maybe that means videoconferencing. Kanban is getting more popular, as it is more suited to flow-based tasks. In maintenance, development, bug fixing, IT and ops; we're seeing huge uptake of Kanban in those groups.
Are any of your customers using your agile tools in non-development parts of their organisations?
Some, on iterative projects. Instead of a giant project, they'll break it down and have deliverables. The move to more SaaS or continuous deployment puts a lot of pressure on subsidiary functions. It's not as hard on developers as it is on, say, technical and documentation writers.
If you're a tech writer, you'd typically get the software 3/4 of the way through and have the documentation done in time for the finish. Now, if they write it Monday and deploy if Friday it becomes much harder for the writers. We're trying to help promote agile technical writing, and to help make agile tools that are easy to understand. Our design team is Scrum-aware and uses the tools to help them in their design philosophies.
What new tools are you working on at Atlassian?
We're focusing on the early concept-end of the launch cycle in terms of helping people in an easy and lightweight way communicate what they wish to build before they start breaking it down into stories, requirements and such. That's an area where we see there's a lot of improvement to do. Teams are growing. Because of that, management of engineering problems is tougher. As teams get more agile, the size of iteration picks up and it's harder to understand where everybody is at. We're looking at understanding the streams that run between the tools so, as a manager, you can see what people are doing.