As the COVID-19 crisis continues, many businesses are working remotely, some for the first time. That doesn’t mean your recruitment efforts need to stop. In fact, it is now more important than ever to ensure your business continuity – and the contractor market is the perfect place to find temporary staff, including a Jira expert.

A contractor is a more flexible recruitment solution during such uncertain times – helping you fill your short-term staffing needs and bringing many other benefits to your business.

However, given the current circumstances, you may not know where to start your search for the right candidate.

At ClearHub, we’re here to help. We have hundreds of specialist contractors ready to meet your business needs. Every contractor we place is technically tested by an industry expert in the skills that are important to you, so you can be sure they can get the job done.

We’ve also placed remote workers for years. 40% of all our contracts are already remote (prior to recent events) and we can place both offshore and remote experts in your business.

There’s never been a better (but more pressing) time for Atlassian contractors. So, whether you’re a contractor looking for work or a company looking for a contractor, how can you still make the right connections when you can’t physically meet up?

The good is news, the Atlassian community is highly active and one where there is much support and advice. Under normal circumstances, there would be plenty of networking opportunities and other events to help you make connections within this specialist space where highly skilled candidates are in high demand.

But, given the current situation with COVID-19, this is no easy task as many events have been cancelled and the world’s workers are now working from home.

This hasn’t stopped the Atlassian community from connecting in the virtual realm. Here are some of the top ways for both contractors and organizations to carry on making connections in the Jira world.

#1 Atlassian User Groups

The Atlassian User Groups network provides users with a central online location to network, share ideas, solve problems and get expert tips on different Atlassian products. You can explore by region and easily reach out to this online community.

This is an excellent resource for both Atlassian experts who need help with their day-to-day work and for organizations to reach out and get help with their projects.

However, if you need a more long-term solution and regular help with your Atlassian products, you may want to consider hiring a specialist contractor, such as a Jira expert.

#2  Atlassian Remote Summit 2020

Atlassian has moved its annual event into the virtual world, but there are still plenty of ways to connect with the Atlassian community.

At the time of writing, the full details of the event have not yet been released but this is the global event where the Atlassian community comes together.

However, Atlassian has said it plans to offer “some Atlassian Summit 2020 content online” with more details to follow. We’ll have to wait and see how it handles the networking side of the event, which has always been a great resource for attendees. The company plans to be back in 2021 for its summit.

#3 Atlassian Partner network

The Atlassian partner network allows you to filter prospective partners by keyword, location and country. This allows you to find partners, who are ranked as silver, gold and platinum, depending on their level of expertise.

Clearvision has been a platinum solution partner for more than 10 years, meeting Atlassian’s top training criteria and with proven practices in place to meet the requirements of customers both large and small.

#4 Atlassian community

The Atlassian community is a global hub where you can find answers, support, and inspiration from other Atlassian users. There are currently more than 3.7 million members and 2,500 events within the community, making this a great online resource to network and host events, if possible.

#5 Stay online

There are plenty of other ways to keep connected during the COVID-19 crisis. Now could be a good time to reach out to contacts and colleagues over email and other online platforms as you struggle to meet up in the real world.

For managers, work sharing, and communication tools are critical to help you remotely manage your staff and projects.

For contractors, you may want to check out our job boards to see if an opportunity matches your skill set.

What’s more, working from home is now easier than ever before for contractors – check out our top 5 tips for contractors who want to work remotely.

ClearHub: Here to help

At ClearHub, we can help you connect with the right people in the Atlassian space. For organizations, all our contractors are screened and technically tested by Clearvision’s expert team. For contractors, we can help you find the right position by joining the world’s only dedicated technical contractor network of proven software experts.

We have been placing remote workers for years, including both offshore and remote experts with contractors in 110 countries around the world. We can help your business with:

• Temporary worker relief: helping you fill your short-term staffing needs.
• Flexible working: Remote, onsite or hybrid. Offshore or nearshore. Regional or international. Office hours or 24/7. We can tailor our services to your business requirements.
• Our Atlassian and agile job boards: Just list a job and we can match it to one of our specialist contractors.
• Speed of delivery: We can help you find the right candidate in hours and days, not days and weeks.
• No job too small: We are here to help, no matter how small you think your challenge may be.
• Support when you need it: From project management to dedicated account managers, we are here whenever you need us.

Wherever you are, ClearHub can help you bring your teams together and work remotely until the doors of the world open again. For more information, please click here.

Confluence is a highly flexible tool, which can streamline a vast range of your organizational processes across both your software teams and your wider business departments.

The choice Confluence provides is extensive and, the good news is, you don’t need to start from scratch – Confluence comes with a range of blueprints and out-of-the-box solutions to help you seamlessly get started. In this post, we will highlight some of the top uses of Confluence.

#1 Write product requirements

Writing requirements in an agile environment can be difficult – but it’s an important undertaking to ensure everyone is on the same page across your different teams. To achieve this, Atlassian recommends creating a collaborative product requirement to hash out the details for your large and complex epics.

When your requirement document is created and its details are all in one place, your development and design teams now have one source of knowledge where they can provide immediate feedback and their input into your product. As a result, you can iterate quickly and start the required work right away. 

To set this up, start with the Product requirements blueprint; add your key details; and outline your goals, business objectives and strategic fit. Then, you can drill down and create your user stories, and drag-and-drop your UX and design files. You can find out more about setting this up here.

#2 Build a release planning page

Using Confluence, you can collect and organize all of your work and information for each release and communicate it to the rest of the business by building a release planning page.

This helps you identify your business objectives, stakeholders and roadmap; collect all the relevant information and background work; and direct your colleagues to additional info in Jira or other tools. You can find out more about this here.

#3 Create customer interview pages

You can use Confluence to document and share customer interviews, helping you gather feedback in a standardized and streamlined manner. You just need to set up a page template for your interviews, which is much simpler than putting your customer interview data in a static document. You can find out more about this here.

#4 Create sprint retrospective and demo pages

Confluence also comes with a Retrospective blueprint for your development teams. What’s more, using its page templates, you can standardize your demo pages for your Sprint demos. There’s more information on this here.

#5 Make better development decisions

Your development teams have to make tough decisions every day. Confluence comes with a Decision blueprint to help your dev teams use the same repeatable process to make decisions across your team.

Plus, as they’re recorded, you can review your decisions to learn from what went well – preventing you from repeating the same mistakes in the future. There’s more information on how to do this here.

#6 Document releases and share release notes

Documenting your software releases is an integral part of a dev team’s job to increase visibility and boost communication both inside your team and across the wider business. 

Confluence streamlines this process and comes with a range of options. For example, you can use the Jira Reports Blueprint to create a Change log report or you can create public-facing release notes by creating your own template. Find out more here.

#7 Use blogs to share progress

It can be difficult to keep everyone in your team and organization up to date. A Confluence blog post can help you achieve this, helping you share important news and updates across your dev team and the wider business. There are lots of different approaches that you could take. This post from Atlassian highlights three of the most popular options.

#8 Create technical and onboarding documentation

Onboarding team members can be difficult for dev teams, who need to keep pace with customer demands and maintain code quality, even with staffing changes.

To help you streamline your onboarding process, you can use Confluence to create onboarding documents and, also, technical help specific to your dev team. This saves time, providing new hires with a resource to answer all of their common questions. You can find out more here.

#9 Create a knowledge base

Of course, you can extend this work to create a company-wide knowledge base and/or technical documentation hub using Confluence. This allows your organization to centralize its documentation in one place, and you can grant access to what specific users need.

You can find out more about setting up a knowledge base of how-to and troubleshooting information here. This post from Atlassian also guides you through the process of developing technical documentation in Confluence.

#10 Use Confluence as your intranet

Your intranet is an important organizational asset – but it needs to be simple enough for non-technical users, allowing the flow of information across your company.

Confluence is a good option for your intranet, with many out-of-the-box features to boost collaboration and information sharing across your organization, whilst keeping sensitive data secure. You can find out more about the setup process here. 

#11 Create live project reports

You can also build live Jira project reports on Confluence, where Confluence macros are one of the most common methods to share live information from Jira. 

For example, the Jira Issues macro can post a subset of issues, a single issue or a total count of issues in Confluence or the Jira Chart macro can post a gadget from a Jira dashboard. These are both updated to show the most current information about issues. You can find out more about reporting in Jira here.

In conclusion

Confluence is a feature-rich tool, which can be used for a vast range of use cases. When used in the right way, it can give your dev teams the agility they need to keep pace with your organizational requirements, and a means to boost their communication and visibility within the team and across your wider business.

But setting up Confluence for these use cases is no small task, and you may not have the time or in-house expertise to take these steps. If you’d like to get a Confluence expert onboard to help you boost your usage of this tool, click here to find out more.

The Atlassian product family helps teams of all types manage their work. But what happens when those tools aren’t helping you in your day-to-day job?

In this post, we are going to focus on one of Atlassian’s leading tools – Jira – and learn which features and functionalities you can repurpose to help your project management and development teams create a working solution. 

Traditional project management

Jira is one of Atlassian’s top tools, which was originally designed as a bug and issue tracker. Now, Jira has evolved into a powerful work management tool and extended its reach across organizations, where it is not only used for software development, but to monitor and manage a broad range of use cases, requirements and teams. 

While Jira is a hugely popular tool for software developers, when it comes to repurposing Jira for project management – business leaders can run into problems. 

This is because Jira’s popularity within the software development community is a direct result of its disregard for traditional project management ideas. Instead, Jira favors the agile methodology and the continuous flow of collaboration, but this can cause problems when it comes to traditional project management methodologies.

For example, these project management discrepancies may include a lack of clarity for the budget and project deadlines, no project-level reporting, a lack of dependencies between tasks, no clear team hierarchy and no prioritization between projects. 

So, what can you do when Jira is hindering your project management processes instead of helping them? What’s the solution? You could buy a big PPM tool and integrate it with Jira – but that’s an expensive option and one that could cause further disruption for your business.

Thankfully, Atlassian addressed these some of these issues a couple of years ago and the company now claims its Jira Software Cloud ‘can be configured to fit any type of project’. 

Starting with a project template, a team can create a custom workflow and monitor its progress using a series of Jira issues. These issues (aka tasks in the Jira system) track each project deliverable in the workflow as the project edges closer to completion. 

Your permissions can also be customized, enabling administrators to grant specific access rights and assign actions within your project. With all of this project information available, you can generate reports to track and monitor your progress and productivity.

What’s more, the Jira marketplace provides add-ons to convert Jira projects into actual management entities that help you and your managers meet your budgets and deadlines.

CI/CD 

Agile is now an established methodology for many development teams, but there’s a new kid on the block: continuous integration and delivery, or CI/CD.

CI/CD is a growing trend where developers maintain and own their software development pipeline and are also responsible for shipping their code to your customers. But this way of working also introduces new challenges into the software development lifecycle. 

This is where Jira can help in a number of ways. When used correctly, it can help your developers manage and streamline their work across their pipeline. Let’s look at three common CI/CD scenarios and how you can reconfigure Jira to support this way of working:

Use case 1: Use Jira to increase your DevOps collaboration 

Using Jira, your developers can easily review an issue and see what environment this code is running on. During a sprint, this allows your operations and QA teams to collaborate and work on the same piece of functionality. This also creates a rapid feedback loop for your testers, allowing tests to be carried out at any point in your development process. This not only boosts the robustness of your code base, but also fosters a culture of collaboration across your DevOps environment.

Use case 2: Build workflows to reduce your change failure rates

If your teams run their own services during the CI/CD process, you must maintain a healthy pipeline to reduce the number of failures. With Jira, you can build workflows to monitor your failure rates and bring your development and operations teams closer together, allowing them to fix these issues as quickly as possible.

Use case 3: Deploy frequently and with confidence 

The Jira Release Hub is a powerful tool, which you can use to display a team’s progress towards the next product increment or version. This hub not only provides visibility for your development lifecycle, providing teams with a clear indication of the status of the current version, but it also provides traceability, including a clear summary and breakdown of the development lifecycle at any point in time, allowing your team to find any potential issues ahead of a planned release.

In conclusion

Jira is a feature-rich solution, but it is also a highly complex offering. To make sure you’re using Jira in the right way for your business, you may need specialist help. This is where ClearHub can help. We can match your project with high-quality Atlassian contractors, all available under our 100% guarantee, to get your Jira installation working for you and your business. If you’d like to find out more about hiring a specialist Atlassian contractor, click here.