We've been working together informally for many years now. We share an overlap in our customer base, and we've always been recommending Cenqua's products to our customers and, likewise, they've also been recommending our products to their customers... Both of our companies make software development tools that help groups of people collaborate. We don't make IDEs, or products that just one person uses—all our products are about collaboration... We're a good fit with each other, and there are a lot of integration points already.
For customers that already have all our products, they'll see tighter integration, and for customers that only have a subset of our products, the tighter integration likely will mean that they'll be purchasing more of our products down the line.
JIRA, our project management and issue tracking system, has over 5,500 customers around the world. It allows people to track tasks and issues that need to get done in projects, most often in software development projects. We have anywhere from five people using it in a small company to thousands of people using it in large banks.
We have Bamboo, which is a continuous integration server. It works at a team level in larger organizations. We see that over the next couple of years, more and more companies will be doing continuous integration and automated testing, and Bamboo is the only product now in the market that allows you to view project metrics across multiple builds. By looking at that data, you can see if you're doing better or worse in terms of project velocity, for example. Those metrics can then give you feedback on whether you're getting better or worse as a team. And then it allows you to drill down, for example, to see what tests are running slow.
FishEye, another of our tools, runs across source control systems that allows you to search and sort and produce metrics around your source control system. It runs on Perforce, Subversion, and CVS. It integrates very well—if you have ViewCVS, or Subversion, or any Web-based tool, you could use FishEye to search your code, and slice and dice it, and it integrates with Bamboo also.
Crucible is a code-review tool. There are not many code-review tools in the market at the moment. We anticipate that as people work in distributed software development teams, code reviews will become an increasingly important part of the tools they use to achieve high code quality... We certainly do that over there. You may have a situation when you have a new person on the team, and you want to be sure to review everything that he does, and Crucible makes that very easy to do.
Some of the integration points in the future will make this even more interesting. If you have a bug that's flagged [in JIRA], you may want to then review that entire commit to see how the bug came about. You can think of all the permutations of something like that. That kind of review can be done asynchronously and remotely, it's Web-based. So it's especially useful for distributed development teams.
Clover instruments your Java files, and allows you to see that when you run tests, what tests got exercised. It's important to write tests, but you also have to know what part of your code those tests actually exercise, and what percentage they exercise. And if you want to write some more tests, then you need to know what packages and what part of the source base you should focus on. Clover 2 also allows you to see what tests exercised what part of your code.
Here's another example of the kind of integration points that we can now provide between these tools: You may identify a bug in the code, and you can then go back and see what tests ran on that code, and why that test may not have caught that bug initially.
Farquhar told Artima that the post-merger Atlassian would continue both companies' previous policy of providing open-source projects with free licenses to all those tools.
What do you think of the combined companies, and what kind of integration would you like to see between these products?
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