Atlassian Offers Great Deal on Agile Tools

By R.M. Yates

Monday, October 12, 2009 at 05:58 PM

One of the most important facets of business software development is for programmers and users to collaborate on the creation of an object model that encapsulates the work being performed, the people who perform it, and the information that's produced. Agile software development is a popular methodology to reach this lofty goal.

The Australian software company Atlassian offers practical advice in agile software development. All of the company's teams use story cards to visualise the work remaining. Once a developer takes a story card, she can't move on to another card until the task that it represents has been completed.

Atlassian's story cards are grouped together and organized on corkboards, which can be either the paper and cork variety or a virtual corkboard implemented with JIRA Studio, one of its agile tools. The virtual corkboard requires the company's Greenhopper plugin, which supports custom workflows and permissions, OpenSocial gadgets and JIRA Query Language (JQL). All development tasks -- features, requirements, user stories and bugs -- are color-coded cards. "Filing everything in JIRA makes it easy for the developers to keep track of what status everything has and if someone is working on it," author Ola Bini writes in his book Practical JRuby on Rails Web 2.0 Projects.

With the company's integrated development environment (IDE) connectors, developers can practice agile software development without leaving Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA.

The company is currently offering a terrific deal: one-year licenses to its most popular business products for only $10 a year for up to 10 users.