Back in 2009, when we started our software organization to tap in the B2B market, our issue management stack was extremely simple, a single installation of age-old open-source tool Mantis Bug Tracker.
There were many factors responsible for the choice,
- Free or open-source
As we were startup out budget was limited and no one was in favour of spending money on software - PHP (LAMP Stack)
Believe it or not, PHP was hit in 2009. Even we were building all our tools in PHP. This also helped us in customizing a tool as per our needs. - Hosting
Our shared hosting provider was only allowing PHP and Python at that time.
Apart from this, Mantis was easy to use, it had all the tit-bit of issue management tools. But the UI was horrible, it was just like 90's web, with a sprinkle of JQuery.
But, 2010 had something else in store for us. Our shared host was consistently failing us, and the simplest of configuration change in Mantis require us to write code. Unhappy with this, we decided to go for a dedicated machine, and reevaluate our issue tracker. At this time we decided to go with Atlassian Jira.
This was a turning point in our organization, apart from all other features and simplicity that Jira was offering, we discovered that Atlassian had a marketplace. After digging deep into Atlassian Marketplace, analysing all possibilities, we contemplated that, Atlassian Marketplace is a great opportunity for our budding B2B startup, it was offering us much-needed visibility and was making us discoverable.
Since 2010, after discovering marketplace, we are writing tools for Atlassian Ecosystem, and we have been able to transform our startup into a stable organization, and this is all because of one decision, switching to Jira. I would like to conclude by saying, great tools will always bring you a great opportunity, so never hesitate to invest in them.
I will cover detail account of interfacing your existing tools with the Atlassian ecosystem and pushing them to Marketplace in my upcoming articles. Hopefully, that will guide you to build your organization.
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