Building an ecosystem for hackers

Session previously called "DVCS for agile teams" has been cancelled and changed to "Building an ecosystem for hackers" given by a speaker from Atlassian

Presentation slides here.

The software life-cycle

It goes from ideas, to prototype, to code, to shipping the product and rinse and repeat until your product is bloated and the code begins to stink!

Conventional wisdom

• Users are stupid
• Software is hard
• Supporting software sucks
• We want simple

How can we empower users

1. Build opinionated software (if you do not like it, don't buy it - but you are thus building a fence around your product)
2. Build a platform they can hack on (you allow you customers to get involved)

Two schools of thoughts

1. Product #1: customers are sand-boxed in the environment
2. Product #2: customers build against APIs (REST)

Who does #1 well

• Apple
• Android
• Atlassian
• Chrome/Firefox
• WordPress
• Many others - you know it is well done when companies can start living within the ecosystem

How do they do this at Atlassian

• you start with a plugin framework (they adopted an OSGi based plugin system)
• Speakeasy is a framework allowing to create javascripts/CSS and attach them to Atlassian elements (ex: JIRA, etc.) - it runs a little GIT server within permitting to see extensions sources, fork from them, publish updates, etc.

Demo

• Using JIRA - he used a little "kick ass" extension permitting to kill bugs in the agile view.

Pimp it with REST

• Many REST APIs built in Atlassian
• They are built as extensions using the extensions framework using Jersey (Java REST library), which gives a WADL (Web Application Description Language) file.
• The provided SDK tools offers among other things a command line interface to automate all that is needed.

I have built my plugin, now what

The provide the Plugin Exchange platform to exchange plugins (soon, that will support selling plugins like the AppStore)

Hey, we have got a community!

• Atlassian uses contests to have developers start to use developed extensions mechanisms
• They also host code contests, once a year, to encourage people developing new plugins (ex: JIRA Hero)
• They host conferences for developers (ex: AtlasCamp) - online community of good, but face-to-face events are better!
• The fun elements is required for the ecosystem to actually live.

In the end

People want to contribute to your product, but you need to give the ways to do it!