Codegeist 2021 - Organizations Manager

Victor Lee | Tue, November 02, 2021 | News & Events | New Verve Products | 0 comments

Atlassian hosts a hackathon on Devpost annually called Codegeist, it helps teams unleash their potential by building Atlassian apps. This year was focused around using Atlassian’s Forge platform to build apps for DevOps, IT and Business teams.

Ideation

The first step of creating the app was a group session to generate the ideas of what we could build. For this, we used Trello. Trello facilitated the submission of ideas and created cards for each one. After all the ideas were in the pot, we voted on what would be developed.

Our entry - Organizations Manager - was initially pitched as Crumbs lite, a twist on our existing marketplace app called Crumbs.

One advantage of building a similar app is that user stories were transferable, and due to it being the most refined idea we decided to proceed with Organizations Manager.

Submission and Challenges

We continued to use Trello and Confluence to facilitate our submission to the hackathon. The app was developed in an Agile method, a proof of concept was delivered first and subsequently refined.

Most things do not go according to plan, and our app was no exception. We faced a number of challenges:

• Technical - The Forge platform is the next shiny tool from Atlassian, but this also means the platform is not as mature. We faced a number of technical challenges including buggy extension points and incomplete APIs.
• Skill - For most members of the team, this was the first Forge app they had worked on and, with the time constraints, were unable to contribute to the code development.
• Time - Given that we still had our usual day to day responsibilities for other projects, not all features could be completed.

In the end, despite these challenges, technical and non technical members of the team pulled through to submit Organizations Manager.

The Result

Organizations Manager, extends the native Jira Service Management organizations, provides a central place to manage, edit, and administer JSM organizations, and enables agents to quickly address service requests. It provides a high level view of the organizations and the current level of engagement in the landing page, while in the organization view, new custom fields are added to capture client specific data.

We are proud to say that our app went on to win the Honorable Mentions award! You can read more about the Codegeist 2021 winners on Atlassian’s blog.