Category Archives: Trends

Hackathon at //SEIBERT/MEDIA – Field report on developing the EasyEvents plugin for Confluence

The goal of a hackathon is to buckle down and create a product and/or complete a small project under time pressure (at //SEIBERT/MEDIA within 24 hours). The hackathon team alone plans and decides what kind of product or project to work on. We explained the reasons for regularly conducting hackathons in our agile organization in more detailed articles. On the one hand, we strive to create concrete and truly innovative solutions. On the other hand, we try to attain “soft” effects, such as promoting training, teamwork and personal responsibility and motivating our employees. Our latest hackathon took place in early July 2013. In the following chronological field report, we offer insight into the work of the team that designed and developed the EasyEvents Confluence plugin.

Diagrams in Confluence: Comparison between Creately and draw.io

There are several solutions to implement diagramming functions in Confluence. Creately is one of them – compared to the matured draw.io, Creately is at a disadvantage. We have compared Creately and draw.io regarding central requirements. Here is a comparison of both diagramming tools, let’s take at a look at the five most important aspects. Flash vs. native Browser technologies: Creately is based on Flash. This has been problematic, since Flash is well known for it’s security weaknesses and it’s vulnerability. Many enterprises (especially in Enterprise environments) do not allow Flash for standard computer installations and don’t allow users to install Flash at a later point. draw.io, on the other hand, is based on the market leading diagramming technology mxGraph – the only library that works in any browser without plugins and completely client based.

Easy Events for Confluence: Save time organizing events in the company wiki

Events, team events and office parties take place in every company. Meetings and discussions are part of daily life at the office. Creating and operationalizing Confluence documents to organize acceptances and rejections is repetitive and time-consuming work. The EasyEvents Confluence plugin developed by //SEIBERT/MEDIA does a lot of this work for you.

Budget planning in Scrum projects and possible reactions to cost explosions

Complex IT projects are always subject to uncertainty. You must often deal with unclear conditions and changing priorities, are dependent on third-party systems and/or service providers, are using new technology and must face new requirements. That’s why it’s difficult to make professional, reliable estimates on company expenditures regardless of which project management method you use. Risks, however, are significantly lower in Scrum projects, because you always remain in complete control of the budget.

Atlassian is a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Development Life Cycle Management 2013

The Gartner Magic Quadrants are among the most frequently discussed and cited market analyses. In each of their analyses, Gartner looks at a complex market and positions the main providers in a diagram based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute. The Gartner report also offers a brief market analysis and quantitative analyses of individual market players.

The Atlassian Foundation and Atlassian’s Crowdsourcing Project makeadiff.org

Atlassian invests part of their success into the Atlassian Foundation, supporting non-profit organizations: One percent of the enterprises turnover is invested in charity projects. Atlassian employees are encouraged to dedicate one percent of their work time to volunteer work. Furthermore, all revenues of the ten dollar starter licenses goes straight to the Atlassian Foundation.

//SEIBERT/MEDIA is an Atlassian Enterprise Expert

In the last few months, the Australian software manufacturer Atlassian has established new enterprise concepts for several products, including Confluence, JIRA and Stash, and will continue improving these systems both functionally and to meet the requirements of large companies and groups. The focus of our efforts is on simple scalability and improving the performance of instances in large enterprise environments.

Why we transfer requirements lists into a backlog with user stories

We are often contacted by customers with very rough, technical requirements lists for software projects. In cases like this, the first project step for //SEIBERT/MEDIA is to turn the customer’s requirements list into a product backlog that highlights how the customer benefits from the requirements. This is not a trivial task and requires time and resources. But why should the customer pay for this preparation work that has nothing to do with actually completing the project?