At first sight, Atlassian’s software lineup doesn’t seem too remarkable. A bug-tracker, a wiki, and a few other developer tools. Most of this stuff isn’t revolutionary, and there’s plenty of competition in the space. But when you dig a little deeper, it’s really changing how companies are interacting with their developer communities.
If you use the Adobe bug-tracking and development forums for Flash/Flex product lines, you’ll hardly notice that it’s running Atlassian. But when you submit a bug to their tracker, you can immediately see the benefits. Most of the time, within a day or two of submitting the bug, an Adobe test manager will triage the report and assign it to an engineer. Sometimes these bugs are punted or deferred - but they’re always processed, and everything is public. It’s a similar process in the forums - when you post a question, chances are that it’ll be answered by real Adobe engineers.
I’d guess having everything visible to the public makes Adobe engineers and testers feel more accountable. If you’re ignoring some important issues the product community will notice. There’s just lots more transparency.
Of course, this process isn’t perfect, but it’s much better than other large companies. Microsoft, for instance, still relies primarily on Usenet for collaboration with their customers (to their credit, they have also taken up blogging.
Adobe is one of the few companies that’s starting to embrace understand the open-source nature of product development. And it seems to be working for them. Flex is being embraced by developers, partly because there’s a lot more sense of involvement and transparency. Many of the features for Flex 4 (the next version) have already been implemented by the community – holy crap!
Software like Atlassian is changing the game - it’s giving companies many advantages of open source, and it’s doing this in a simple way - just by making some of the development process open to the public.