by Matt Doar (@mdoar)

Yahoo's Chef de Cuisine Jordan Dea-Mattson spoke to a packed room at this year's Atlassian Summit. His presentation Governing JIRA at Scale covered the top-level view of how Yahoo is using JIRA. (Disclaimer: he and I co-authored the presentation and ServiceRocket has been helping Yahoo increase JIRA adoption). Much of what he said is good advice for everyone who administers any complex application at a large company. His conclusion was KICS instead of KISS, where the "C" stands for "Consistent". He pointed out that if you allow too much customization you will make the automation harder. And that automation will be vital in the long run. After all, we all have other things to do than administer complex applications every day.

He also noted that "just because you can configure JIRA every which way doesn't mean you should." Flexibility has long-term costs associated with it, so he recommended not providing or even offering some configurations for JIRA. Then he noted that not everyone will be completely happy, but that's the balance to be found.

Dea-Mattson's presentation contrasted interestingly with another later on. In "Scaling Confluence to Support Global Teams" Matthew Gorton from GapTech described how their use of Confluence was grown organically, driven by the needs of different teams. Two different approaches for two different companies.

Take a look at Jordan's presentation slides, provided by Atlassian, below: