I just returned from my first Atlassian User Group meeting which was held in Helsinki. Rene Jansen from Atlassian said that this was the first user group meeting in Northern Europe and it was pretty popular as there were over sixty people attending.

Rene showed a few slides on what Atlassian have done during the last year and what they are going to release in the near future. There were very exiting news to JIRA and Confluence users as they are putting out new releases of both. New JIRA will have nice features like JQL (JIRA Query Language) and maybe some UI changes. Next Confluence version will include more “people” features and therefore improve the social aspect of the Wiki.

Best part of the meeting were the round table / birds of feather discussions. We divided into smaller groups of around 8-10 people. Our group had great discussion around the “Agile Development, SCRUM” topic. There were many companies that are using SCRUM with JIRA and other dev tools. Everyone agreed that GrassHopper plugin highly recommended for daily duties like daily standup meetings (task board) and keeping the backlogs in order (planning board).

There were good tips how backlogs, epics, user stories and tasks can be entered to JIRA. One good solution is to use one (or several) project versions as a backlog. Then user stories and epics as normal issues. Epics could be broken down to smaller user stories by linking them together. When sprint is planned then dev team can take user stories and add detailed tasks to user stories as subtasks. Version concept can be used as sprints. With GrassHopper you can also group several ‘sprint’ versions to one ‘release’ version.

All in all excellent meeting. Thanks to Ambientia for sponsoring the event in nice environment. Looking forward on next meeting! :)