Zen and the art of Hack Day innovation
How the Adaptavist product team took a break to hack on some passion projects and create business value.
Life in the Adaptavist products department is constantly moving, as teams work hard to provide the best and most innovative Atlassian add-ons. Hack days provide a little quiet in the storm, carving out time for teams to go beyond their usual out of the box thinking and solve some new challenges in new ways.
A total of 25 participants dispersed into 11 teams, addressed a number of customer pain points, prototyped new products, and attempted to streamline internal efficiency. Not only did it provide an opportunity for team members to work creatively, it enabled them to get out of their comfort zones and work with new people. Teams worked across five Atlassian products including Jira, Bamboo, Trello, Bamboo, and Hipchat.
After two days of white-boarding, coding, powerpoint building and searching for the perfect gif, the team had some incredible projects to share. The results:
- A better on-boarding system for one of our more complex products
- Three brand-new products, including two Codegeist entries
- Better analytics for our cloud products
- A smoother workflow for helping our Sales team's product proposals and reports
Our developers got knuckled down and worked with some of the some Atlassian products we don't usually develop for. That's how CardLink for Trello and Build Results Viewer for Hipchat, our two Codegeist entries, were born!
CardLink for Trello
CardLink for Trello gives you the power to create bilateral links between your Trello cards, allowing users to easily group and identify relationships to optimise your planning process. This means no more wasting time searching for a card that's located somewhere else on your board again!
With CardLink for Trello users can:
- Create parent and child relationships
- Identify relationships between cards
- Search and link cards within seconds
- Toggle between two linked cards
Build Results Viewer for Hipchat
Build Results Viewer for Hipchat gives teams better visibility and control of their Bamboo projects using Hipchat. This add-on lets users view Bamboo build information from within Hipchat rather than having to switch back to their browsers.
With Build Results Viewer for Hipchat users can:
- Display build results from Bamboo Server in a Hipchat sidebar
- Start and stop builds from the sidebar in Hipchat
- Configure which Bamboo plans to view in each Hipchat Room individually
We're really excited about these products and we'd love to hear what you think, so take a look at their entries linked above!
New ScriptRunner for Jira feature
Other projects from Hack Day include a new feature for ScriptRunner for Jira: Inline Edit for Behaviours. This project was spearheaded by our engineering interns. Previously, when you defined a behaviour on a field in Jira, it would disable the ability to edit that field on the view screen. This new feature allows users to launch the edit screen whenever someone clicks the icon to edit a field, instead of disabling inline edit entirely. This feature should be live in the next few weeks.
And even more
Another team worked on integrating our public support backlogs and service desks to our internal tracking system so we can optimise for maximum efficiency. With this integration, teams can log time against individual bugs in our product support and synchronise those time logs to our tracking system so they don't have to duplicate their timesheets, but can still get burn down reports and such.
Creating actual new products was an unexpected bonus. The main objective of Adaptavist Hack Days is to get engineers, product managers, and the marketing team thinking about the needs of customers and internal stakeholders in new ways. That said, one of our company values is pragmatism, so we aren't upset about achieving both. We plan to launch many of the projects that came out of Hack Days. Stay tuned to find out which ones make the cut!
Interested in joining the innovation? Go to joinadaptavist.com
