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back to article Atlassian bats eyelashes at the enterprise with AgileCraft acquisition

Atlassian has acquired AgileCraft - the Texas-based outfit intent on inflicting agile practices on enterprises - for $166m. The deal, which is expected to close in April, consists of $154m in cash and the rest in Atlassian restricted shares. AgileCraft is all about the Agile Methodology, a development practice that, depending …

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  1. Quatroux
    Meh

    This should work fine

    Like all of those other tools that have claimed to do this in the past only to become huge time sucks as everyone scrambles to keep the tool up to date instead of doing real work. Promise this tool is different and this is a totally different business strategy than what Computer Associates tried in the 90's and 2000's.

    6 1 Reply
  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It drives me nuts

    I managed IT teams for 15 years (before deciding to jump on the Security Gravy Train), often working on a mix of Projects, BAU and fire-fights - the thing I always brought into the teams was bi-weekly planning, consisting of

    1) What the business needs

    2) Research, Testing, Individual pet projects (this is really important, it lets people build their interest and expertise, which benefits the company)

    3) An allowance for firefighting

    Look Ma, I was doing Agile, more effectively that than the "experts" and years before it became cool!

    The basic theory of Agile is good - Its all the rest of the shit that comes with it, and don't even get me started on its bastard child - Scrum. I was a member of a Security Team that originally "adopted", along with all the bureaucratic shite that comes with it, I swear the productivity on the team dropped by double-digit percentage points.

    Then along comes this new methodology, called Agile.. We must use "Sprints" such a new way of thinking (2 weekly/other period of planning), it requires "Spikes" for when things are unknown (oh look, research)

    2 0 Reply
    1. Valerion
      Reply Icon

      Re: It drives me nuts

      I recently left a nice job I'd held for several years due to the introduction of Disciplined Agile into the dev team by a new director of engineering.

      My god it was awful. Hours and hours spent every week in utterly, utterly pointless meetings. Each task had about 10 individual Jiras allocated to it. Everything had to have "estimates" (in quotes because if you overran due to it being more complex then there was hell to pay). The only thing that mattered was the burndown chart. Not whether it was valulable to the business. Not whether it was done to acceptable quality. Not whether it would scale or was done in appropriate technology. Not even if it actually worked.

      As long as the burndown chart looked good, all was well in the world. Just fix it in a future iteration.

      And don't get me started on the non-jobs people. A good business analyst I can accept. But we had more project managers, delivery managers and programme managers than developers in the end. And I have no idea what they actually did, and what value they added. They existed purely to put stuff into Jira and badger people as to why something wasn't done yet. Before we had these people we just did it, were productive and delivered loads and loads of stuff. Nobody complained. We just talked to end-users and figured out what needed to be done. Now nothing gets done really because it can't get through "the process" to even get started.

      I wasn't the only one to go. About 50% of the dev department have now left within about 6 months - taking years of tacit knowledge with them.

      Now I'm in a small team in a small startup (with some of the same people who also left...) and all is good again.

      2 0 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: It drives me nuts

        I'm happy for you dude! I miss working in small companies, life is much simpler and more productive - It only becomes a bitch when the company owner(s) starts thinking you're a bitch and employed at their pleasure! But fortunately there don't seem to be as many of these cave-men around at the moment.

        Have a beer (original A/C above)

        2 0 Reply
  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Good call, from that other country that wants backdoors..

    I'm guessing integrating legally mandating backdoors will not take that much work.

    0 0 Reply

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