I’m delighted to share with you about a zAgile customer success story. Market6, the technology leader in retail “last mile” supply chain software, has successfully deployed zAgile’s innovative software to integrate their teams, tools, and processes. The solution includes contextual integration of the Atlassian Jira issue & bug tracking system with the Confluence wiki to create a lightweight requirements management solution. To achieve this, one of the cool zAgile tricks involves turning Confluence into a semantic wiki, in order to capture requirements with semantic forms in the wiki. Those requirements are then instantiated into corresponding workflows in Jira by initiating appropriate Tasks and Subtasks associated with Feature Specification, Development and Testing. Try doing that with any other wiki out there! Not so easy, but with zAgile, it’s a snap to make a semantic wiki out of Confluence, Socialtext, Jive Clearspace Traction, MindSpring, MediaWiki, and other wikis. In addition Market6 wanted to have an easy front-end to applications such as Jira for their professional services and other non-engineering teams so that they could store and track issues in Jira without having to take time to ramp up to learn all the Jira terminology, workflows, and bells & whistles. With a zAgile portal, everyone now has an easy front-end to create and track issues and tasks pertaining to their projects, as well as a composite application to act as the single point of entry to all their applications. The next phase of the deployment involves integration of Subversion version control, GreenHopper (project planning for Jira), and ThoughtWorks CruiseControl (continuous build) together with Confluence and Jira, for an integrated environment. It was quite rewarding to see Market6’s reaction:
the zAgile infrastructure automatically “recognizes” the applications, their functions, and how they are related to one another, for a deep, contextual integration.
I invite you to read zAgile’s case study of Market6 to learn more. And hats off to Market6 for staying ahead of the curve on technology to reduce their costs and improve efficiencies, especially important in today’s challenging economic climate.