#jira software vs jira core

[softwarereviewforall]

Review of JIRA Software by Atlassian

JIRA Software by Atlassian: A Comprehensive Review

Overall

Rating: 4.5

JIRA Software by Atlassian is a powerful tool for project management and issue tracking. Users have found it to be an invaluable asset for their organizations. The overall rating of 4.5 reflects its effectiveness and utility in various scenarios.

Ease of Use

Rating: 4.1

While JIRA is praised for its user-friendly interface and ease of use in setting up different help desks or ticket requests, some users have encountered difficulties, resulting in a rating of 4.1. However, its versatility and user-friendly aspects still make it a solid choice.

Customer Service

Rating: 4.1

Users highly appreciate JIRA's customer service, rating it at 4.1. The support received from Atlassian has been described as amazing, enhancing the overall user experience.

Features

Pros:

Efficient Task Management: JIRA is excellent for creating tasks and logging issues.

Customization: Users can set up different help desks tailored to specific departments.

Integration: It seamlessly integrates with other tools like BitBucket and Zendesk, saving time and streamlining workflows.

Cons:

Task Cloning Issues: Cloning tasks when they are marked as "Done" can be problematic.

Learning Curve: Some users find it challenging to use, leading to misunderstandings and mistakes.

Costly Licensing: The licensing structure, particularly related to plugins, can be costly.

Productivity Impact: In some cases, JIRA has been noted to slow down productivity, requiring permissions for document access.

Value for Money

Rating: Varies

The value for money with JIRA largely depends on the specific needs and budget of the organization. While some find it to be a cost-effective solution, others mention concerns related to licensing costs and limitations.

Likelihood to Recommend

Rating: Varies

The likelihood to recommend JIRA varies, with users providing ratings between 7 and 10 out of 10. It is often recommended for agile teams and project management, but the learning curve and user experience may influence recommendations.

Alternatives Considered

Trello: Some users switched from Trello to JIRA due to JIRA's wider user base and additional features.

Microsoft Project: The transformation to agile practices led to a switch from Microsoft Project to JIRA for some organizations.

Azure DevOps Services: Azure DevOps was replaced by JIRA due to cost considerations and user management issues.

Reasons for Choosing JIRA

Users have chosen JIRA for its flexibility, scalability, and extensive user base. The ability to manage multiple projects seamlessly and the availability of a strong community for support were key reasons for selection.

In summary, JIRA Software by Atlassian offers a powerful solution for project management and issue tracking, with its user-friendly interface, integration capabilities, and exceptional customer service. However, potential users should be aware of the learning curve and potential cost considerations when choosing JIRA for their organization's needs.

[matthewzkrause]

Tired of Paying for Tools? These 40 Open-Source Alternatives Have You Covered?

Let’s be real for a second.

We’ve all been there—mid-project, mid-semester, or mid-burnout—when a paid tool throws up a paywall and asks for $19.99/month just to export your file. It stings, especially when you’re trying to keep your budget lean.

But here’s the good news: the open-source community has your back. 💪 There are dozens of completely free, insanely powerful tools that can do (almost) everything their paid counterparts can—without locking your best features behind a subscription.

Whether you're a freelancer, student, startup founder, or just someone who loves great software, this list is your new toolbox.

🚀 Why Open-Source Is the Underdog That Wins Before we dive in, let’s clarify something: Open-source ≠ low quality. In fact, some of the world’s biggest companies (Google, NASA, Netflix) use open-source tools every day. These aren’t sketchy knockoffs—they’re community-powered, security-tested, and constantly evolving.

Now, let’s talk about the 40 free tools that could save you hundreds—or even thousands—of dollars a year.

🧠 Smart Swaps for Everyday Tools

LibreOffice → Ditch Microsoft Office Docs, Sheets, Presentations—all offline, all free.

OnlyOffice → Google Docs Vibes, but Yours Looks and feels like MS Office, works online or self-hosted.

Joplin → Evernote for Nerds Markdown-based, syncs securely, and doesn’t sell your notes.

Zettlr → Perfect for Writers & Academics Citation support + distraction-free writing.

🌐 For Browsing, Email & Team Chat

Firefox → More Privacy, Less Google Extensible and fast—and they don’t track you.

Brave → Built-in Ad Blocker? Yes Please Faster browsing + rewards system.

Thunderbird → Outlook Without the Overkill Email, calendar, and to-do list in one clean interface.

Mattermost → Slack Without the Bill Your team chat, your server, your rules.

Jitsi Meet → Free Video Calls—No Sign-Up Needed Start a call with a link. Done.

🎨 Designers & Creators, Rejoice

GIMP → Photoshop for the People Yes, it’s that powerful. Yes, it’s free.

Inkscape → Vector Design Like a Boss Great for logos, icons, and print design.

Krita → Digital Painting Heaven Designed by artists, for artists.

Blender → Hollywood-Grade 3D Modeling Used in actual movies. Free forever.

Darktable → Lightroom Without the Monthly Bill RAW editing + professional workflow.

🎧 Audio & Video Editing

Audacity → Podcasting, Remixing, Editing, Easy Intuitive multi-track editor.

OBS Studio → Streaming & Screencasting Gold What Twitch streamers use. Seriously.

Shotcut → Video Editing That Just Works Cross-platform and powerful.

Olive → Modern Video Editor in the Making Sleek, promising, and growing fast.

👨‍💻 Developers, You’re Going to Love These

VSCodium → VS Code Without Microsoft Tracking Same editor, privacy-respecting build.

Atom → Hackable to the Core Loved by web devs and hobbyists.

Eclipse → Java Devs’ Old-School Favorite Still rock-solid.

NetBeans → Full IDE for Polyglot Coders Good for Java, PHP, and C++.

Hoppscotch → Postman Without the Bloat Runs in your browser, free forever.

MariaDB / MySQL → Free SQL Workhorses The backbone of many web apps.

SQLite → Tiny, Powerful, Portable Database No server required. Zero config.

✅ Organize Your Life (and Work)

Wekan → Trello Clone, But Open Kanban boards made simple.

Focalboard → Self-Hosted ClickUp Alternative Task management that respects your data.

Redmine → Jira's Open Twin Great for bug tracking & agile workflows.

Taskcafe → Asana-Style, Cleaner Interface New kid on the block, with potential.

🔐 Privacy Tools That Feel Like Superpowers

Bitwarden → Best Password Manager, Hands Down Cloud, browser, and mobile support.

KeePassXC → Local, Bulletproof Password Vault For privacy purists.

Tutanota → Private Email That Just Works End-to-end encrypted email, minimal design.

Pi-hole → Block Ads on Your Entire Network Install it on a Raspberry Pi and say goodbye to web ads.

☁️ Sync, Store, and Share Files Securely

Nextcloud → Your Own Google Drive Private cloud, full control.

Syncthing → Dropbox, But Peer-to-Peer No servers. Just your devices talking securely.

rclone → Cloud Storage on the Command Line Sync anything, anywhere.

📊 Data, Dashboards & Decisions

Metabase → BI Dashboards Without the Headache Plug in your data, get answers fast.

Grafana → DevOps’ Favorite Dashboard Tool Real-time, customizable graphs.

Apache Superset → Data Exploration for Pros Used by Airbnb, Netflix, and more.

🤖 Bonus: Automate All the Things

AutoHotKey → Make Your Computer Work For You Automate anything on Windows. Seriously.

🌍 Your Wallet and Your Future Will Thank You Switching to open-source isn’t just about saving money (though that’s nice). It’s about:

💻 Owning your tools

🔐 Protecting your privacy

🌱 Supporting innovation and community

🧰 Having control over your workflow

These tools are built by people like you, for people like you. Try just a few of them, and you’ll wonder why you ever paid in the first place.

[govind-singh]

Master the Fundamentals with a Manual Software Testing Training Program

In the fast-paced world of software development, quality assurance is no longer a luxury—it’s a necessity. Every line of code must be tested before it reaches the end-user, and that’s where manual software testers play a critical role. If you're aspiring to enter the tech world or enhance your QA career, enrolling in a Manual Software Testing Training course can be your stepping stone toward a bright future.

In this blog, we’ll explore everything you need to know about a Manual Software Testing Training program, including its benefits, curriculum, career scope, tools, skills required, and how to choose the right course.

What is Manual Software Testing?

Manual testing is the process of manually checking software applications for defects. Testers execute test cases without using any automation tools to ensure the software behaves as expected. It's a critical phase in the Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC) and is often the first step for beginners entering the QA field.

Manual testing ensures:

User-friendliness

Proper navigation

Accurate functionality

Bug detection

Quality user experience

Despite the rise of automation, manual software testing remains irreplaceable in many scenarios, especially in usability, exploratory, and ad-hoc testing.

Why Choose a Manual Software Testing Training Program?

A structured Manual Software Testing Training program helps learners understand core concepts, tools, and practices used by QA professionals. It provides step-by-step guidance, practical sessions, real-world case studies, and live projects to strengthen theoretical knowledge with hands-on experience.

Key Benefits:

No coding required: Perfect for non-tech backgrounds.

Foundational knowledge: Build a strong base in testing life cycles and methodologies.

Career-ready skills: Learn real-world testing scenarios and tools.

Job opportunities: High demand for manual testers in QA teams.

Smooth transition to automation testing: Once you master manual testing, moving to automation becomes easier.

What Will You Learn in a Manual Software Testing Training Course?

A comprehensive Manual Software Testing Training course covers both theoretical and practical aspects of software testing. Here's an overview of topics typically covered:

1. Introduction to Software Testing

What is Software Testing?

Importance of Testing in SDLC

Manual vs. Automation Testing

Testing Principles and Objectives

2. Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)

SDLC Phases

Waterfall Model

Agile and Scrum Methodologies

Role of Testers in SDLC

3. Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC)

STLC Phases

Test Planning, Design, Execution

Defect Life Cycle

Entry and Exit Criteria

4. Types of Testing

Functional Testing

Non-functional Testing

Regression Testing

Smoke & Sanity Testing

Exploratory Testing

User Acceptance Testing (UAT)

5. Test Case Design Techniques

Writing Test Cases

Test Scenarios

Test Data Preparation

Boundary Value Analysis (BVA)

Equivalence Partitioning

6. Defect Management

Logging Bugs

Defect Reporting Lifecycle

Severity vs. Priority

Bug Tracking Tools (e.g., Jira, Bugzilla)

7. Real-Time Project Exposure

Practical project-based learning

Live scenarios and client requirements

End-to-end STLC implementation

Who Can Enroll in a Manual Software Testing Course?

A Manual Software Testing Training course is suitable for:

Fresh graduates (BCA, B.Tech, MCA, etc.)

Professionals from non-IT backgrounds

Career switchers looking for IT roles

Individuals interested in quality assurance roles

Testers looking to build a strong foundation before learning automation

No prior coding experience or technical background is required.

Tools You’ll Learn

While manual testing is not tool-based like automation, some essential tools and platforms are introduced in training:

Jira – Bug and issue tracking

TestLink – Test case management

Excel/Google Sheets – For test case writing and tracking

Confluence – Documentation and collaboration

Postman (Basics) – API testing (optional)

Job Roles After Completing the Manual Testing Course

After successfully completing a Manual Software Testing Training program, learners become eligible for various roles in the software QA domain, such as:

Manual Tester

Quality Analyst (QA)

Software Tester

QA Engineer

Test Coordinator

QA Manual Test Analyst

As you gain experience, you can specialize in niche areas or move toward automation, performance, or security testing.

Salary and Career Growth

Manual testers are in high demand across industries like IT services, banking, healthcare, telecom, e-commerce, and more. Here’s a brief look at the salary outlook:

Experience Level

Average Salary (India)

0–1 years

₹2.5 – ₹4.5 LPA

1–3 years

₹4.5 – ₹6.5 LPA

3–5 years

₹6.5 – ₹9 LPA

Internationally, manual testers can earn:

USA: $55,000 to $80,000 annually

UK: £30,000 to £45,000 annually

With added certifications and skills like Agile, Jira, and basic automation, career growth becomes faster and more stable.

Choosing the Right Manual Software Testing Training Program

When selecting a course, make sure it offers:

✅ Instructor-led training with industry experts ✅ Live projects and case studies ✅ Placement assistance and resume-building help ✅ Certification after course completion ✅ Doubt-solving sessions and community access

Some top platforms and institutes also offer internship opportunities or real-time assignments to make your portfolio job-ready.

Certification and Internship

Upon completion of a Manual Software Testing Training course, most institutes provide a recognized certificate, which adds value to your resume. Some programs also offer internship opportunities, allowing students to work on real-time client projects under supervision.

This experience helps:

Build confidence

Understand project lifecycle

Gain teamwork and communication skills

Boost employability

Final Thoughts

Whether you are new to IT or want to start your journey as a QA professional, a Manual Software Testing Training program is an excellent gateway. It’s beginner-friendly, affordable, and provides a solid foundation for your testing career.

As software companies continue to emphasize quality and performance, the demand for skilled manual testers remains strong. Invest in a quality Manual Software Testing Training course today and take your first step toward a rewarding and stable career in software testing.

Ready to Learn Manual Testing? Start your journey today with a structured training program that combines theory, tools, and real-world practice. With the right training, your testing career will be off to a strong and confident start.

[syndelltech]

What Are the Common Mistakes to Avoid When Outsourcing Software Development in NYC?

Outsourcing a software development project seems to be common for businesses located in fast-paced cities like New York. There is always pressure in this city to be efficient, agile, and innovative. To keep up with this demand, it is common for companies to try and outsource to immediately scale, save on operational costs, or acquire specialized skill sets. New York software development companies do aid with this. However, keeping everything unchecked leads to financial and operational risks for the company.

Assuming you want to outsource to a software company in New York or anywhere else, it is crucial to understand the basic errors that other businesses tend to overlook. Correcting these problems can lead to winning opportunities in new markets.

1. Not Setting Specific Goals and Requirements

Outsourced projects that lack clarity often fail for various reasons. Most businesses approach outsourcing without defining a scope of work which can lead to vague ideas. This results in a lot of communication gaps, delays in development, and products that are subpar and do not meet expectations.

In Writing Requirements Then Briefing Vs. Engaging A Partner Outside New York:

Taking the time to prepare a detailed project brief before contacting a software development company in New York or any other remote partner is critical. It is best to outline your objectives, core functionalities, user journeys, technical specifications, and project deliverables. Clarity in business objectives can be achieved with wireframes, mockups, and user personas. Reaching a shared understanding about what success looks like at the onset can help save considerable time and resources in the future.

2. Choosing Based Solely On Cost

It is common to cut down on costs by outsourcing for that reason neglecting other important aspects that need attention. However, drawing the line at price can at best be an uneducated conjecture when quality, communication, and project integrity are imperative at stake. Circumventing spending is always tempting, but inexperience and lack of trust incur undue risk.

In What Way It Can Be Avoided:

The aim should be finding a partner who has the best price-value ratio as opposed to searching vendors offering markdown prices. A company’s portfolio, client feedback, industry expertise, and approach to solving issues should be thoroughly examined. Indeed, reputable software firms in New York may have steeper fees than offshore teams, but lower marketing costs are often offset by increased ease of communication, cultural alignment, and shortened deadlines.

3. Overlooking Time Zone and Communication Boundaries

Failure to plan around time zones can create complications when working over multiple locations. Delayed responses, poor communication, and forgotten meetings can greatly decelerate the progress of your work while making things more complex.

How to Work Around It:

If remote work badly suits your partner's company, try to modify their business hours or make local project managers available during your working hours. Keep updating state-of-the-art communication tools like Slack, Zoom, Asana, and Jira. Alternatively, partnering with a software development company in New York can eliminate these time-zone issues entirely, enabling real-time collaboration out of the Pacific time zone.

4. Neglecting Legal Agreements, Contracts, and IP Issues

Legal subtleties are often overlooked, and this is an alarming reality. Companies without appropriate contracts face the business risk of losing ownership over any lines of code, designed assets, or ideas they might own.

How to Work Around It:

A contract needs to exist which mentions everything concerning the agreement, deliverables, timelines, full payments, confidentiality, and admission of ownership. Have every document vetted by professionals. Employ NDAs prior to sharing sensitive info. Most reputable software companies in New York focus on legal aspects, ensuring your IP is protected.

5. Not Synced With Internal Stakeholders  

The fact that a part of the company is outsourced does not mean the in-house team has to remain idle. In the absence or non-communication of internal stakeholders, a project tends to deviate from business goals due to insufficient resources or input.

How to Avoid It:  

Take time to ensure that there’s a dedicated internal project manager or contact person from your side who needs to work hand-in-hand with the external service providers. Constant communication through check-ins, feedback meetings, and reporting will be productive. With the right attitude, the outsourced members will act as your internal team, completing your efforts.  

6. Not Placing Sufficient Focus on Technical Supervision  

There are companies that completely leave the outsourced partner to decide everything about the technology to be used, from infrastructure to hardware, without any form of validation. This approach risks the deployment of inadequate, incompatible, non-scalable or low-performing technologies.

How to Avoid It:  

Include someone from your side with the necessary skill of taking part in the review process that will consider the tech stack, code quality, as well as architecture of the project. If you do not have local personnel available, you might want to think of engaging a dispassionate, uninvolved contractor who specializes in hackerspaces and collaborative software firms from New York.

7. Not Having a Plan after the Launch

Software is often marketed as a ‘one and done’ deal with no after purchase support, but this logic does not apply to software products. Every software needs some form of maintenance, whether it’s updating, user support, or even scaling features, there is always something.

How to Avoid It: 

Be sure to have a clear conversation regarding technical support and maintenance with your software vendor. Make sure to manage expectations that the same team who executes the project will handle the support afterwards, and also outline the SLAs (Service Level Agreements) that are part of the contract. The best software development companies based in New York provide long-term support to help you develop your product even after the initial launch.

8. Lack of Quality Assurance and Final Testing

There are brands that make the unfortunate assumption that an outsourcing partner will handle the backend departments dealing with the necessary testing. But because there are no quality assurance processes, the end result is a product filled with bugs that affect usability.

How to Avoid It:

Look at the QA processes that your vendor has in house, ensuring they have unit and integration testing, as well as usability and performance testing. Because most software companies try to outsource these tasks, make sure these are included. A professional software company in New York will make sure that all QA engineers are brought on board in the earlier stages and will apply strict QA control through project execution.

9. Not confirming the history of the vendor  

It is a risky move to engage an outsourcing partner without confirming their history and track record. A sleek website combined with incredibly low quotes can mask lack of experience, poor service, or both.  

How to Avoid It:  

Diligence in research is critical. Request for client testimonials, references, and even detailed case studies. Their reviews on Clutch, Upwork, or even LinkedIn can tell a lot. A reputable software company in New York will be more than willing to discuss their previous work and successful clients they partnered with.  

10. Considering the Outsourced Team an Outsider  

Motivation is often tied to accountability, and when outsourced teams are treated as mere external entities, motivation tends to drop drastically, Hence, when the outsourced teams are treated as outsiders their motivation and accountability sharply declines. Lethargic, uninspired work becomes the norm due to lack of performance and innovation.  

How to Avoid It:  

Consider your outsourced vendor as part of your team. Encourage them attend relevant discussions and meetings, share with them your business goals, and be firm with what it means to cultivate a “culture of success”. These shifts are what helps build trust and improve relationships to a point that enables proactive contribution.

Conclusion  

There is great potential in outsourcing software development in NYC. However, this only holds under having clear vision, an effective partner, purposeful planning, and strategy in mind. From setting concrete decisions to fostering free flowing communication, each is key to achieving success in any project.

Collaborating with an established software company in New York affords the advantages of a cultural fit and collaboration ease. Equally, engaging a trusted New York software development firm guarantees your project will be done on time within required quality benchmarks and standards of creativity.

By following these best practices discussed in this article, you will be able to establish a strategic partnership for effective, secure, and successful outsourcing to bring your software project to fruition.

[nareshkumartech]

The Business Side of Game Development: Budgeting and Finance

While imagination and technical skills are key drivers in game development, the business side—particularly budgeting and financial planning—can make or break a project. From indie developers creating their first mobile game to AAA studios managing multi-million-dollar productions, financial strategy plays a crucial role in sustaining development and delivering a successful final product.

Why Budgeting Matters in Game Development

Creating a game is an intensive process that often takes years, multiple teams, and hundreds (if not thousands) of work hours. Without a strong financial foundation, even the most promising projects risk being delayed, underdelivered, or canceled entirely.

Key components of budgeting include:

Staffing (salaries, freelancers, outsourcing)

Software and tools (licenses, subscriptions)

Marketing and distribution

Testing and QA

Legal and administrative costs

Post-launch support and updates

A clear, realistic budget ensures your team doesn’t burn through funding too quickly or underestimate costs.

Understanding the Phases of a Game Budget

Pre-Production Costs

Concept art, game design documentation, and initial prototyping

Small core teams begin to shape the game's vision and technical direction

Production Costs

The most resource-intensive stage, involving artists, programmers, writers, sound engineers, and more

Includes purchase of engine licenses, motion capture tech, and AI tools

Marketing and Launch Expenses

Social media campaigns, influencer partnerships, ads, launch trailers

Platform fees (Steam, PlayStation Store, App Store, etc.)

Post-Launch Support

Bug fixes, patches, downloadable content (DLC), and customer service

Community management and content updates to retain engagement

Tools and Methods for Financial Planning

Many studios use production software integrated with financial tools like:

Excel or Google Sheets (for small teams or early planning)

Project management suites like Jira, Asana, or Monday.com

Dedicated budgeting software such as Float, Scoro, or Forecast

Game-specific analytics to project ROI based on player trends and purchase behaviors

Tracking your burn rate (monthly spending vs. income/funding) is vital throughout the process.

Budgeting for Sustainability

Modern game development is shifting toward sustainable practices—both in terms of finances and production health. Smart studios now prioritize:

Reasonable timelines to avoid crunch

Scalable revenue models (like battle passes or subscriptions)

Data-driven decisions for post-launch updates and expansions

Sustainable finance planning leads to better team morale, more consistent releases, and long-term studio growth.

No matter how compelling your game idea is, without strong financial planning, it may never reach players. A sound budget ensures that your creative vision is supported by structure, enabling your studio to deliver, iterate, and grow.

Game developers who understand the business side of their craft don’t just make great games—they build lasting brands. So whether you're crafting an indie title or heading up a massive production, make budgeting and finance an integral part of your development cycle.

[erpsoftwaredubaiuae]

Comparing Local vs. International Project Management Software Providers in the UAE

In the fast-paced and competitive business environment of the UAE, project management software plays a vital role in helping companies stay organized, meet deadlines, and achieve strategic goals. With the growing demand for efficient tools, businesses are often faced with a crucial decision: should they choose local project management software providers or opt for international solutions?

Both options come with distinct advantages and considerations. In this blog, we’ll explore the key differences between local and international project management software providers in the UAE and help you decide which might be the best fit for your organization.

1. Customization and Localization

Local Providers: Local software vendors in the UAE often tailor their solutions to meet the specific requirements of businesses operating in the region. This includes:

Arabic language support

VAT compliance according to UAE regulations

Integration with local HR, finance, and ERP systems

Cultural and business practice alignment

International Providers: While many global software solutions offer advanced features, localization can sometimes be limited. Businesses may need to invest extra effort in configuring the software to align with UAE standards.

Verdict: For companies seeking full localization and compliance, local providers have a clear edge.

2. Customer Support and Response Time

Local Providers: UAE-based vendors typically offer faster and more personalized customer support, often available in both English and Arabic. Face-to-face consultations and on-site training are often part of the package.

International Providers: Global companies offer 24/7 support, but it may be based in different time zones, leading to delays. Communication can also be less tailored to regional nuances.

Verdict: If responsive, on-ground support is a priority, local providers come out on top.

3. Features and Innovation

Local Providers: Local software often focuses on core project management functions suited for regional industries such as construction, real estate, or government projects. However, they may lack some advanced features found in international platforms.

International Providers: Global players like Asana, Monday.com, and Jira are known for constant innovation, offering features like AI-powered task suggestions, advanced integrations, and global collaboration tools.

Verdict: For cutting-edge features and scalability, international providers lead the way.

4. Cost and Pricing Models

Local Providers: Local solutions are usually priced in AED and are often more flexible in terms of licensing, with options for on-premise or cloud deployments. There are fewer hidden fees and better negotiation options for SMEs.

International Providers: Pricing is often subscription-based in USD, which can lead to higher costs over time due to exchange rates. Some international tools charge extra for add-ons, user access, or integrations.

Verdict: For cost efficiency, especially for small to mid-sized businesses, local vendors may offer better value.

5. Data Security and Compliance

Local Providers: With data residency laws becoming more important, UAE-based providers often ensure data is stored within the country, aligning with regional compliance standards.

International Providers: Some global vendors host data on servers outside the UAE, which might raise concerns for businesses in sectors like finance, healthcare, or government.

Verdict: For data sovereignty and regional compliance, local providers offer greater peace of mind.

Conclusion: Which One is Right for You?

The decision between local and international project management software ultimately depends on your business priorities:

Business Priority

Recommended Option

Advanced features & global collaboration

International Providers

Localization, compliance & Arabic support

Local Providers

Cost-effective & flexible pricing

Local Providers

Cutting-edge innovation

International Providers

Regional customer service & on-site support

Local Providers

UAE businesses should carefully evaluate their operational needs, team size, industry, and budget before making a choice. In some cases, a hybrid approach—using an international platform with regional plugins or services—can also work well.

Whichever you choose, the right Project Management Software UAE can be a game-changer for boosting efficiency, collaboration, and overall business success in the UAE.

[w2gsolution01]

Software Development Team – Build World-Class Solutions On the Go

In today’s fast-paced digital world, a strong software development team is the backbone of successful businesses. Whether you are building an innovative startup or scaling an enterprise, having the right team ensures efficiency, scalability, and high-quality solutions. Let’s explore how a well-structured software development team can help you create world-class solutions seamlessly.

The Role of a Software Development Team in Business Success

Software development is more than just writing code. It involves strategic planning, collaboration, and innovation to build solutions that drive business growth. A well-organized development team can transform ideas into robust software products, ensuring market competitiveness and customer satisfaction.

Why Having the Right Team Matters for Scalable Solutions

The success of software projects heavily relies on the expertise and synergy of the development team. A high-performing team not only delivers solutions faster but also ensures scalability, security, and seamless user experiences. The right mix of skills and methodologies can lead to products that grow with your business needs.

1. Understanding the Core of a Software Development Team

Key Roles and Responsibilities in a Software Team

Project Manager – Oversees project scope, deadlines, and resource allocation.

Software Developers – Write, test, and optimize code for efficiency.

UI/UX Designers – Focus on creating user-friendly and visually appealing designs.

Quality Assurance (QA) Engineers – Ensure software meets quality standards.

DevOps Engineers – Manage deployment, automation, and cloud infrastructure.

The Ideal Composition of a High-Performing Development Team

A balanced software development team consists of specialists in coding, testing, design, and management. Collaboration between these roles ensures a streamlined development process, minimizing errors and maximizing innovation.

2. The Software Development Lifecycle – From Idea to Deployment

Planning and Requirement Analysis

Gathering and defining requirements is the first step toward a successful software solution. Clear objectives ensure alignment between business needs and technical execution.

Design and Prototyping

Wireframes and prototypes help visualize the final product, allowing teams to refine user experience before development begins.

Development and Coding Best Practices

Following industry standards, writing clean code, and implementing version control systems (e.g., Git) enhance maintainability and scalability.

Testing and Quality Assurance

Continuous testing helps catch bugs early, ensuring software reliability before deployment.

Deployment and Maintenance

Launching the software is not the end. Regular updates and monitoring are crucial to keep the system secure and up to date.

3. Choosing the Right Development Methodology

Agile vs. Waterfall: Which One Works Best?

Agile – Offers flexibility and iterative development for evolving projects.

Waterfall – Best for projects with well-defined requirements and a linear progression.

DevOps – The Modern Approach to Software Development

DevOps integrates development and operations to streamline deployment and enhance collaboration.

Lean and Scrum – Boosting Efficiency and Collaboration

Lean principles minimize waste, while Scrum frameworks improve team efficiency through iterative sprints.

4. Building a Strong and Collaborative Development Team

Hiring the Right Talent – Skills to Look for

Technical proficiency, problem-solving abilities, and adaptability are key traits of an excellent development team.

Effective Communication and Team Coordination

Clear communication channels and collaboration tools (e.g., Slack, Jira) enhance productivity and teamwork.

The Importance of Continuous Learning and Skill Enhancement

Encouraging certifications, workshops, and coding challenges keeps the team updated with industry trends.

5. Tools and Technologies for an Efficient Software Development Team

Must-Have Project Management Tools

Jira, Trello, Asana – For tracking progress and managing tasks.

Best Coding and Development Platforms

GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket – For version control and collaboration.

Testing and Debugging Tools to Ensure Quality

Selenium, Jest, JUnit – For automated and manual testing.

6. Remote vs. In-House Software Development Teams

Pros and Cons of Remote Software Teams

Pros: Cost savings, access to global talent, and flexible work environments. Cons: Communication challenges, time zone differences, and potential security risks.

How to Manage and Scale a Distributed Development Team

Using project management tools, setting clear goals, and conducting regular stand-up meetings help in managing remote teams efficiently.

7. Best Practices for Creating World-Class Software Solutions

Focusing on User-Centric Development

Prioritizing user needs ensures software adoption and market success.

Ensuring Security and Compliance in Software Development

Implementing cybersecurity best practices safeguards against data breaches and compliance violations.

The Role of Automation and AI in Modern Software Development

AI-driven automation enhances coding efficiency, bug detection, and decision-making processes.

8. The Future of Software Development Teams

Emerging Trends in Software Development

Low-code/no-code development – Speeds up software creation.

Blockchain technology – Enhances security and transparency.

How AI and Machine Learning Are Reshaping Development Processes

AI-driven development tools optimize coding, automate testing, and predict software performance.

The Growing Importance of Cross-Functional Teams

Interdisciplinary teams improve innovation, efficiency, and product market fit.

Conclusion

Key Takeaways for Building a Successful Software Development Team

A well-structured team ensures high-quality, scalable, and efficient software development.

Adopting the right methodologies and tools optimizes workflow and collaboration.

Continuous learning and skill enhancement keep teams competitive in the tech industry.

How to Stay Ahead in the Competitive Tech Landscape

Embracing emerging technologies, fostering a culture of innovation, and prioritizing user needs will ensure long-term success in software development.

By assembling the right team and following best practices, businesses can build world-class software solutions that drive success and innovation in an ever-evolving digital landscape.

[sak-shi]

Unlocking the Potential of Business Analysis

Unlocking the potential of business analysis involves understanding its core principles, tools, and techniques, as well as recognizing how it can bring value to an organization. Here’s how you can approach it effectively:

1. Grasp the Foundations

Definition: Business analysis is the practice of enabling change within an organization by identifying needs and recommending solutions that deliver value to stakeholders.

Key Objectives:

Understand business goals.

Bridge the gap between business needs and technical solutions.

Deliver actionable insights.

2. Master the Core Skills

To excel in business analysis, focus on the following skill sets:

Analytical Thinking: Break down complex problems into manageable components.

Communication Skills: Engage stakeholders and articulate findings clearly.

Problem-Solving: Identify root causes and propose practical solutions.

Technical Proficiency: Understand tools and systems used for analysis, like SQL, Excel, or specialized business analysis software.

3. Learn the Key Techniques

Some common techniques include:

SWOT Analysis: Evaluate Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

Business Process Modeling: Visualize workflows to identify inefficiencies.

Requirement Gathering: Engage stakeholders through interviews, workshops, or surveys.

Gap Analysis: Compare current vs. desired performance or states.

4. Leverage Tools

Modeling Tools: Use tools like Visio, Lucidchart, or Bizagi for process mapping.

Data Analysis Tools: Familiarize yourself with Power BI, Tableau, or Excel for data-driven insights.

Project Management Tools: Collaborate using Jira, Trello, or Asana.

5. Align with Frameworks and Standards

Understanding industry-recognized frameworks ensures consistency and credibility:

BABOK® (Business Analysis Body of Knowledge): A guide by IIBA for best practices.

Agile Methodologies: Learn to adapt to iterative processes using Scrum or Kanban.

Lean Six Sigma: Focus on efficiency and quality in business processes.

6. Focus on Stakeholder Engagement

Build relationships with stakeholders at all levels.

Practice active listening to gather diverse perspectives.

Use storytelling and visualization to convey findings effectively.

7. Gain Certification

Certifications can boost credibility and demonstrate expertise:

Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP®): Advanced certification by IIBA.

PMI-PBA®: Focused on project management-oriented business analysis.

Agile Business Analyst Certification: Tailored for Agile environments.

8. Apply Business Analysis to Drive Value

Improve operational efficiency by optimizing processes.

Drive strategic initiatives by aligning solutions with organizational goals.

Enhance decision-making by providing actionable insights through data analysis.

By investing in these areas, you can unlock the full potential of business analysis, positioning yourself as a key player in driving organizational success. Let me know if you'd like resources or tailored guidance on any of these steps!

[desktrack-time-tracking]

Employee Computer Monitoring Software: Features Every Business Needs

In today’s dynamic work environment, employee computer monitoring software has become essential for businesses to ensure productivity, efficiency, and data security. With many companies shifting towards remote and hybrid models, monitoring software is a key tool that helps employers understand how work hours are spent, track tasks, and maintain accountability. This article will explore the crucial features every business should look for in computer monitoring software, how these align with workforce management trends, and the benefits of using this software with tools like a time card calculator.

Why Employee Computer Monitoring Software is Essential

Employee computer monitoring software provides businesses with insights into their workforce's daily activities. In an era where flexibility and accountability must go hand in hand, this software supports productivity while also reducing time lost on non-work-related activities.

Key Benefits:

Increased Accountability: Employees are more likely to stay on task when they know their activities are tracked.

Productivity Analysis: Identifies productive and non-productive hours, helping to refine work processes.

Enhanced Security: Helps protect sensitive data by detecting unauthorized access or risky behavior.

Core Features Every Business Needs in Monitoring Software

Not all employee monitoring software is created equal. Here are the must-have features that align with the latest workforce management trends and support effective time tracking.

1. Real-Time Activity Tracking

Real-time activity tracking enables managers to see which applications and websites are being used by employees at any given moment. This feature is particularly useful for remote and hybrid work setups where direct supervision isn’t feasible.

Immediate Oversight: Managers can check activities in real-time, which is useful for quickly addressing any deviations from assigned tasks.

Improves Focus: Knowing that their activities are visible in real-time encourages employees to stay on task.

2. Time Tracking and Reporting

Accurate time tracking is essential for managing workforce efficiency and payroll. Many businesses benefit from integrating their monitoring software with a time card calculator, which makes payroll calculations easier and more precise.

Automated Time Logs: Tracks login and logout times, work duration, and breaks, reducing manual input.

Detailed Reports: Provides summaries of productive vs. non-productive hours, helping managers to optimize team efficiency.

Payroll Integration: Seamless integration with time card calculators simplifies payroll, ensuring employees are paid accurately.

3. Screenshots and Screen Recording

For industries where task accuracy and compliance are critical, taking periodic screenshots or screen recordings provides an added layer of accountability. This feature is especially useful for tasks that involve data entry, design work, or any detailed digital tasks.

Visual Proof of Work: Screenshots provide managers with evidence of task progress.

Enhanced Security: Helps detect and prevent potential data breaches or policy violations.

Compliance Monitoring: Useful for ensuring employees adhere to industry-specific regulations.

Read more 👉 Best Jira Alternatives for 2024

4. Productivity Analysis Tools

Modern employee computer monitoring software often includes productivity analysis tools that track metrics such as time spent on specific applications, idle time, and task completion rates.

Customizable Metrics: Managers can set productivity benchmarks for different roles or projects.

Identify Bottlenecks: Pinpoints tasks or applications that may be slowing down productivity, enabling process improvements.

Enhanced Reporting: Provides insights into team and individual productivity trends, aligning with workforce management trends towards data-driven decisions.

5. Idle Time Tracking

Idle time tracking monitors periods when the system is inactive, helping managers distinguish between active work time and time spent away from the desk. This feature is essential for accurate productivity analysis and better time management.

Reduces Non-Work Time: Employees are less likely to take extended breaks, knowing their idle time is monitored.

Optimized Work Schedules: Helps identify patterns of inactivity, which can be addressed through better scheduling or task assignment.

Supports Time Card Calculations: Reduces discrepancies in time tracking, ensuring that idle periods are not mistaken for work hours.

Aligning Monitoring Software with Workforce Management Trends

As workforce management trends evolve, there is a growing emphasis on creating a balanced approach to employee monitoring. Businesses are increasingly focused on enhancing productivity without micromanaging, and employee computer monitoring software supports this by providing data without constant oversight.

Trends to Consider:

Hybrid and Remote Work: Monitoring software provides visibility into remote work, aligning with the shift toward flexible work models.

Data-Driven Decisions: Workforce management is increasingly based on data, and productivity insights from monitoring software support informed decision-making.

Work-Life Balance: Modern software allows businesses to respect boundaries while still ensuring productivity, which aligns with the trend towards a balanced work environment.

Potential Drawbacks and Ethical Considerations

While employee monitoring software offers many benefits, there are ethical considerations that businesses should keep in mind. Over-monitoring can lead to distrust and decreased morale. Implementing software that provides transparency and respects privacy boundaries is essential.

Best Practices:

Communicate Clearly: Inform employees about the purpose and scope of monitoring.

Set Clear Policies: Define what will be tracked and establish rules around privacy.

Respect Personal Time: Avoid tracking activities outside of work hours to foster trust.

Read more 👉 Geofencing Management Software: The Complete Guide

Integrating Monitoring Software with a Time Card Calculator

Integrating computer monitoring software with a time card calculator simplifies payroll and attendance tracking. When used together, these tools ensure that employees are paid accurately based on their actual work hours.

Benefits of Integration:

Automated Payroll Calculations: Reduces manual work and human error in payroll.

Simplifies Attendance Records: Automatically logs working hours, making attendance tracking effortless.

Reduces Disputes: With accurate records of time worked, employees and managers are less likely to encounter payroll disputes.

Key Takeaways

Employee computer monitoring software, when implemented thoughtfully, is an asset that enhances productivity, accountability, and efficiency. By focusing on core features like real-time tracking, productivity analysis, idle time monitoring, and integrating with tools like time card calculators, businesses can streamline their operations while supporting modern workforce management trends.

Conclusion

In an era where productivity and security are more critical than ever, employee computer monitoring software provides valuable insights that help businesses make informed decisions. By choosing software with essential features, companies can not only enhance accountability and efficiency but also foster a work culture that supports productivity while respecting employee boundaries. For organizations looking to stay on top of workforce management trends, adopting the right monitoring software and integrating it with time-tracking tools like a time card calculator is a step in the right direction.

[deltainfoteklive]

Jira vs Airtable

In the fast-paced world of project management and collaborative work, having the right tools can make all the difference. Two popular options in this realm are Jira and Airtable. Both platforms offer unique features and functionalities that cater to various project management and collaboration needs. In this article, we'll delve into the details of Jira vs Airtable, highlighting their strengths, weaknesses, and use cases to help you decide which tool aligns better with your requirements. Jira vs Airtable: Exploring Key Differences When it comes to selecting a project management and collaboration tool, it's crucial to understand the nuances of each platform. Let's take a closer look at how Jira and Airtable compare across different aspects: Flexibility and Customization One of the key differentiators between Jira and Airtable lies in their approach to flexibility and customization. Jira is known for its extensive customization options that allow teams to tailor workflows, issue types, and fields to match their specific needs. On the other hand, Airtable offers a user-friendly interface that enables users to create custom databases and tables effortlessly. While Jira's flexibility caters to more complex projects, Airtable excels at simplicity and quick setup. Project Complexity and Scalability Considering the scope of your projects is essential when choosing between Jira and Airtable. Jira is designed to handle complex projects with intricate workflows and advanced reporting. Its integration with various development tools makes it a preferred choice for software development teams. Conversely, Airtable is best suited for smaller projects and teams that prioritize ease of use. Its scalability is limited compared to Jira's capacity to handle large-scale projects. Workflow Management Efficient workflow management is at the core of project success. Jira offers robust workflow automation features that enable teams to streamline processes and automate repetitive tasks. It's particularly advantageous for teams adhering to Agile methodologies. On the other hand, Airtable focuses on simpler workflows, making it suitable for creative teams and smaller businesses that require less intricate process management. Collaboration and Communication Collaboration is a critical aspect of project management. Jira offers integrated communication tools, such as commenting and @mentions, within its interface, enhancing collaboration among team members. Airtable, while offering collaboration features, is more focused on data organization and sharing. Choosing between the two depends on whether you prioritize seamless communication or data-centric collaboration. Reporting and Analytics Data-driven decision-making is facilitated by strong reporting and analytics capabilities. Jira provides advanced reporting with customizable dashboards and charts, allowing teams to gain insights into project progress and performance. Airtable, while offering basic reporting, is not as robust in this aspect compared to Jira. If in-depth analytics is crucial, Jira might be the better choice. Integration Possibilities The ability to integrate with other tools in your tech stack can enhance overall productivity. Jira boasts a wide range of integrations with development, testing, and collaboration tools, making it a go-to solution for software development teams. On the other hand, Airtable integrates with various third-party apps, but its integrations are not as extensive as Jira's. Choose based on your team's integration requirements. Ease of Onboarding Smooth onboarding is vital to ensure that teams can adapt to the chosen tool quickly. Airtable shines in this aspect with its intuitive interface and user-friendly design. New users can easily grasp its functionalities, making it suitable for teams without extensive technical backgrounds. Jira, due to its complexity, may require more time for training and familiarity. Pricing Structure Budget considerations play a significant role in tool selection. Airtable offers transparent pricing tiers, making it easier to predict costs as your team grows. Jira, while powerful, can be more expensive, especially when integrating with multiple add-ons and plugins. Analyze your budget and feature requirements before making a decision. Jira vs Airtable: FAQs Can Jira and Airtable be used together for different aspects of a project? Yes, it's possible to leverage the strengths of both platforms for different project stages. Jira can handle complex development workflows, while Airtable can be used for initial brainstorming and data organization. Which platform is better for small creative teams? For small creative teams, Airtable's user-friendly interface and data organization capabilities make it an ideal choice. It simplifies project management without overwhelming users. Does Jira's complexity lead to a steep learning curve? Jira's extensive features and customization options do contribute to a steeper learning curve. However, the investment in time and training can lead to efficient project management once mastered. Can Airtable accommodate large-scale projects? While Airtable is versatile, its scalability is better suited for smaller projects. As projects grow in complexity and size, Jira's robust features and scalability become more advantageous. How does Jira's integration ecosystem compare to Airtable's? Jira boasts a comprehensive integration ecosystem, particularly for development tools. Airtable's integrations are versatile but not as extensive as Jira's, especially in the software development domain. Is one platform objectively better, or does it depend on specific needs? There's no one-size-fits-all answer. The choice between Jira and Airtable depends on project complexity, team size, budget, and the need for customization. Assess these factors to determine the best fit. Conclusion Selecting the right project management and collaboration tool between Jira and Airtable hinges on understanding your team's requirements and project characteristics. Jira excels in complex workflows, extensive customization, and robust reporting, making it a preferred choice for software development and larger projects. Airtable, on the other hand, is perfect for smaller teams and projects that value simplicity, ease of use, and quick setup. By analyzing your specific needs, you can make an informed decision that aligns with your goals and leads to more successful projects. Read the full article

[technologyvivan]

JIRA vs Confluence

What’s Jira?

Talking about Jira, we need to separate several products of the Jira line – Jira Software, Jira Service Desk, Jira Core, and Jira Align. 

All of them cover some essential practices of ITSM and ITIL and help with project, task, incident, and resource management in different business spheres, trusted by many agile teams. 

Jira products make it easy to increase the productivity level and transparency in the project and respect collaboration in the team. 

What’s Confluence?

Confluence main dashboard

This Atlassian solution is best for a well-structured Knowledge Base. Confluence helps to store, share, and collaborate on the collective knowledge of your teams. It’s a wiki platform that keeps all precious information in one secure place, making a single source of truth for your company. 

Confluence encourages a collaboration mindset, making it easy to collectively edit, leave feedback, mention colleagues, and discuss decisions online.

JIRA vs Confluence

[atlassianreleasenotes]

Jira Software 8.0.0 Release Notes

We’re pleased to present Jira Software 8.0.

Highlights

Look and feel: Scrum and Kanban

Better email notifications

Significant backlogs load faster

Dropping Linked pages count to boost performance

New priority icons

New options in advanced search

Massive performance improvements

Faster indexing

REST API for issue type schemes

Smaller improvements to make your day

Bonus resources

Jira mobile app

Pre-upgrade planning page

Resolved issues

Interested in trying a shiny new version? Don't forget to renew your active software maintenance! Renew now.

Read the upgrade notes for important info about this release and see the full list of issues resolved.

Compatible applications

If you're looking for compatible Jira applications, look no further:

Jira Core 8.0 release notes

Jira Service Desk 4.0 release notes

Look and feel: Scrum and Kanban

We’ve started refreshing Jira’s UI some time ago, and Jira 8.0 brings another wave of changes in this area. This time, we’ve focused on improving the Scrum and Kanban boards and backlogs - these are one of the most commonly used views, and we always aim at making your time spent with Jira more enjoyable and productive.

At the same time, we’ve made sure that these changes don’t disrupt existing workflows or apps, or anything that you’re already accustomed to. Go ahead and try Jira 8.0 to see the changes for yourself, we’re pretty sure you'll enjoy them, just as we do!

Better email notifications

With every issue update sent in a separate email, email notifications can get overwhelming. Digging through a pile of emails first thing in the morning is never a good idea, that’s why we’ve embarked on a mission to make notifications smarter, and less chatty.

In Jira 8.0, you can batch events that occur close together, and receive them in a single summary email. Every email like that groups events that occurred in a single issue within the 10-minute window, and is very helpful when you’re doing any bulk updates, or when your teammates create issues and fill them in in one go. Here’s how a summary email looks:

Your Jira admin can enable this feature by going to (cogwheel) > System > Batching email notifications. Learn more

Significant backlogs load faster

Big backlogs can take time to load, and teams usually work with a small chunk of the issues at a time. Knowing this and striving to make backlogs render faster, we've changed the default to display only 100 issues (90 from the top and 10 from the bottom) from your backlog. The remaining issues can be displayed if you click Show all issues.

On top of this change, we've introduced a number of backend changes that resulted in faster initial loading. For example, when we tested a backlog of 10K issues, it loaded in 4 secs as opposed to 85 secs in earlier versions of Jira.

Dropping Linked pages count to boost performance

To significantly improve Jira performance, we've decided to drop the count of pages linked to epics and sprints. You can still track linked pages and see if there are multiple pages linked but the exact count in numbers is no longer there.  

This change does wonders to Jira performance, so no count no cry in this case.

New priority icons

We’ve got a lot of feedback about our priority icons not being distinctive or accessible, and we have to agree with that. Finally, after countless hours of designing, user testing, and even looking for inspiration in Egyptian hieroglyphs, we’ve decided on a set of simple and clear icons that will make it easier to distinguish what needs to be done first. Here’s a comparison of old and new icons that you’ll be seeing around Jira:

New options in advanced search

Here are some new options that you can use when searching for issues with advanced search:

Find authors (updatedBy)

Search for issues that were updated by a specific user, within a specified time range. Whether you’re looking for issues updated in the last 8 hours, two months, or between June and September 2017 - we’ve got you covered. Learn more

Find link types (issueLinkType)

Search for issues that are linked with other issues by particular link types, like blocks or is duplicated by. This will help you quickly find any related blockers, duplicates, and other issues that affect your work. Learn more

Massive performance improvements

Because of the changes and improvements we’ve introduced, Jira 8.0 is significantly faster than the previous versions. It’s not only about faster indexing that you can read about below, but also the most commonly used views, like boards and backlogs.

Here are some sample results that we’ve observed when comparing Jira 8.0 to Jira 7.13 (2 million issues):

Viewing boards improved by 62% (Data Center: 60%)

Viewing backlogs improved by 87% (Data Center: 87%)

Searching with JQL improved by 33% (Data Center: 31%)

Browsing boards improved by 16% (Data Center: 22%)

We’ve also observed significant improvements (30 - 50%) when testing a typical action (mean of all actions that we run in our tests) in Jira containing different data sets (increased number of projects, issues, boards, workflows, and so on).

To see all results, go to Performance and scale testing.

Faster indexing

One of the big changes coming in Jira 8.0 is the upgrade of Lucene, Jira’s search-based subsystem engine. Though not visible at first glance like other user features, this change brings significant improvements to indexing, which makes it easier to administer and maintain your Jira instance. Here’s an overview of how this change affects indexing:

All of the following performance improvements are based on the Jira 8.0 vs Jira 7.6 comparison.

Reindexing Jira takes much less time Reindex duration is 71% faster (in our tests, a 3h reindex dropped to 53 minutes.) This means less time spent on reindexing after major configuration changes, and quicker upgrades.

Jira indexes are smaller, and easier to maintain Index size has shrunk by 48% (in our tests, the index size dropped from 19GB to 9.9GB.) This means a faster, more stable Jira that is easier to maintain and troubleshoot.

Jira performance is stable over time No need to reindex often, as performance stays consistent and doesn’t degrade with time.

Jira is more stable and predictable Memory issues that occurred with intensive search functions, like very complex JQLs, are nonexistent in our 8.0 tests.

For more detailed performance results, see Performance and scale testing.

REST API for issue type schemes

Jira 8.0 brings REST APIs to let you manage issue type schemes outside of the user interface. As a Jira admin, you can perform the following actions:

Create an issue type scheme and associate it with projects

Retrieve individual or all issue type schemes, together with the associated projects

Change or remove projects associated with a scheme

Delete issue type schemes

For more info, see Issue type schemes in Jira REST API docs.

Small improvements to make your day

4-byte characters

Jira now supports 4-byte characters with MySQL 5.7 and later. This means you can finally use all these emojis you’ve dreamed about! Here’s a guide that will help you connect Jira to a MySQL 5.7 database. You can find more details about this change in this suggestion.

Add-ons are now apps

We’re renaming add-ons to apps. This has already changed in our Universal Plugin Manager some time ago, and now Jira follows suit. This change shouldn’t really affect you, but we’re letting you know so you’re not surprised when seeing this new naming in the Jira administration and other pages.

Using sprints when your backlog isn't sorted by rank

The easiest way to move your issues from backlog to one of the sprints is by using drag & drop. This, however, doesn’t work for backlogs that aren’t sorted by rank, effectively making such backlogs very difficult to use. We’ve heard your feedback, and added a way to move your issues to a sprint by right-clicking them, and sending to any sprint you want. More details in this suggestion.

Bonus resources

Performance and scale testing

With every Jira release, we’re publishing a performance and scaling report that compares performance of the current Jira version with the previous one. The report also contains results of how various data dimensions (number of custom fields, issues, projects, and so on) affect Jira, so you can check which of these data dimensions should be limited to give best results when scaling Jira. You can get the report for Jira 8.0 here.

Security overview and advisories

We’ve created a document for system administrators who want to evaluate the security of the Jira application. The document answers a number of questions that commonly come up when customers ask us about the security of our product. It will also list any security advisories published for Jira 8.0. You can view it here.

Jira Software mobile app - soon to follow the 8.0 release

We’re excited to share that Jira 8.0 will come together with the Jira mobile app, currently in beta. You will be able to use the app to view your work on the go and stay up-to-date with anything that’s going on in your projects.

The app will be available for iOS and Android.

Look out for the app on Google Play and App Store.

Pre-upgrade planning page

Now you can plan your next upgrades with a tailored upgrade plan recommended for your instance. It will help you get upgrade-ready by highlighting the important steps you need to follow, populated with up-to-date information that’s specific to your instance and upgrade path.

The pre-upgrade planning page is available not only for Jira 8.0, but also earlier versions (7.4.3+). When you upgrade the Atlassian Troubleshooting and Support Tools app (you can do it from within Jira), this page will appear under (cogwheel)  > Applications > Plan your upgrade.

Issues in Release

Fixed: Arrow toggle in issue detail view does not work

Fixed: Remove unnecessary check permission for project in findRapidViewsByProject

Suggestion: Boards - Unnecessary permission checks for issues

Suggestion: Backlog - Epic linked pages trigger extra DB queries

Suggestion: Boards - Subtasks trigger many extra DB queries

Suggestion: Kanban board - IssueIdCallback loads documents to get only id

Fixed: IE11: Kanplan backlog view fails to load due to JS error in EpicsInlineDialog

Fixed: Jira development panel goes out of sync with fecru

Fixed: More > Agile Board will not load ( spinning )

Suggestion: Allow Priority field to display the actual value rather than a colored arrow

Fixed: Scrollbar and its slider are being hidden by backlog and/or sprint header in JIRA 7.4.x

Fixed: Misaligned header on Kanban board

Suggestion: Allow the creation of a sprint when the backlog is sorted by something else than rank

Suggestion: Ability to use sprints when backlog not sorted by rank

Suggestion: Improve the way the Backlog is loaded for better performance and/or rendering of a large number of items

Fixed: Asynchronous cache replication queue - leaking file descriptor when queue file corrupted

Fixed: New line character in issue summary can break issue search detailed view

Fixed: Jira incorrectly sorts options from Select List custom fields with multiple contexts

Fixed: DefaultShareManager.isSharedWith performs user search 2x times

Fixed: Unknown RPC service: update_security_token

Fixed: Copying of SearchRequest performs user search

Fixed: Data Center - Reindex snapshot file fails to create if greater than 8GB

Fixed: The VerifyPopServerConnection resource was vulnerable to SSRF - CVE-2018-13404

Fixed: XSS in the two-dimensional filter statistics gadget on a Jira dashboard - CVE-2018-13403

Fixed: DC index copy does not clean up old files when Snappy archiver is used

Fixed: SQL for checking usages of version in custom fields is slow even if no version picker custom fields exist

Suggestion: Improve FieldCache memory utilisation for Jira instances with large Lucene

Fixed: Search via REST API might fail due to ClassCastException

Fixed: Upgrade Tomcat to the version 8.5.32

Suggestion: Webhook for Project Archive on JIRA Software

Fixed: Deprecate support for authenticating using os_username, os_password as url query parameters

Fixed: JQL input missing from saved filter

Fixed: CachingFieldScreenStore unnecessary flushes fieldScreenCache for create/remove operation

Suggestion: Favourite filters missing in Mobile browser view

Fixed: DC node reindex is run in 5s intervals instead of load-dependent intervals

Suggestion: Don’t log Jira events to STDOUT - catalina.out

Fixed: Adding .trigger-dialog class to dropdown item doesn’t open a dialog

Fixed: Issue view/create page freeze

Suggestion: Add Additional Logging Related to Index Snapshot Backup

Suggestion: Add additional logging related to index copy between nodes

Fixed: JIRA performance is impacted by slow queries pulling data from the customfieldvalue table

Fixed: Projects may be reverted to the default issue type scheme during the change due to race condition

Suggestion: As an JIRA Datacenter Administrator I want use default ehcache RMI port

Fixed: Two dimensional filter statistics gadget does not show empty values

Suggestion: Embed latest java critical security update (1.8.0.171 or higher) into the next JIRA (sub)version

Fixed: JIRA inefficiently populates fieldLayoutCache due to slow loading of FieldLayoutItems

Suggestion: Provide New look Of Atlassian Product For Server Hosting As Well

Fixed: Startup Parameter “upgrade.reindex.allowed” Not Taking Effect

Fixed: Remote Linking of Issues doesn’t reindex issues

Fixed: Index stops functioning because org.apache.lucene.store.AlreadyClosedException is not handled correctly

Suggestion: Add Multi-Column Index to JIRA Tables

Fixed: ‘entity_property’ table is slow with high number of rows and under high load

Fixed: JIRA Data Center will skip replication operations in case of index exception

Fixed: Improve database indexes for changeitem and changegroup tables.

Suggestion: CSV export should also include SLA field values

Fixed: Priority icons on new projects are not accessible for red-green colour blind users

Fixed: Two Dimensional Filter Statistics Gadget fails when YAxis is a Custom Field restricted to certain issue types

Fixed: Unable to remove user from Project Roles in project administration when the username starts with 0

Suggestion: The jQuery version used in JIRA needs to be updated

Fixed: MSSQL Selection in config.sh Broken (CLI)

Suggestion: Upgrade Lucene to version 7.3

Fixed: User Directory filter throws a 'value too long’ error when Filter exceeds 255 chars

Suggestion: Add support for 4 byte characters in MySQL connection

Fixed: xml view of custom field of multiversion picker type display version ID instead of version text

Fixed: Filter gadgets take several minutes to load after a field configuration context change

Suggestion: Ship JIRA with defaults that enable log rotation

Fixed: The xml for version picker customfield provides the version id instead of the version name

Suggestion: JQL function for showing all issues linked to any issue by a given issue link type

Suggestion: Ability to search for issues with blockers linked to them

Suggestion: Reduce JIRA email chatiness

Source

[holytheoristtastemaker]

As long as there has been software, there has been a need to maintain and debug it; and as the world we live in is changing, so does the way we debug software. One of the key changes the world is seeing is remote work. Working remotely, and hence debugging remotely, isn’t new but it’s now taking the world by storm — whether we want it (modern workflows) or not (as elements like COVID-19 reshape our society). The debugging relations matrix Like most things in life this new way of working comes with both pros and cons, to best understand these and how this increasing trend will affect developers and the people around them, we should look at the debugging relations matrix, in which “Dev” stands for developers – e.g. software engineers, production engineers, SREs, etc. “Code” stands for the software being developed, used, and debugged. “User” stands for the person or persons using the software or overall product, and “Support” stands for the initial staff responding to detected issues or user requests. User / Code – Users can’t help: With the complexity of modern software, migration to the cloud, and the overall expansion of backend components, users have very little access to the software and very little ability to understand it. While this isn’t affected directly by remote work; it does affect the other axes. Dev / Code – Everything is remote and going further, companies adopting tools to adapt: With SaaS and cloud, code in production is always remote, and often so are staging and even the baseline development environments. Similar is the case for IoT, and edge computing solutions. And these of course join the classic remote customer on-premise deployments. On top of this remote-work makes it impossible/impractical for developers to get closer to the software even in the cases where it was technically feasible. This explosion outwards means that all software is created equal, and organizations know it makes sense to invest in remote access and monitoring to the software- and budgets for monitoring / logging are increasing and access for debugging is becoming commonplace.    Dev / User – “PEBKAC”: Developers (on average) often find customer interactions challenging, coming from often introverted and sarcastic/cynical mindsets. A common saying among devs is – PEBKAC – problem exists between keyboard and chair. Working remotely makes all cases here much harder-  both identifying it as true, or disproving it. Support / User – Getting to the bottom line / root-cause becomes harder: Person to person communication suffers greatly from remote interactions, and this manifests here most dramatically, as both sides are remote from the code and understanding it. While this axis usually has the most channels set in place (chats, conference calls, customer relation management, case management), getting the full picture, and being able to recreate incidents on the customer side, or replicating incidents on the support side remains and becomes even more difficult. The pain-points of this axis stream down (rather than trickle down) to the dev/support axis. Dev / Support – innovation is coming : This realm of communication is ripe for innovation: The need to allow remote access democratizes access to software and debugging- paving the road for new shared tools. Unlike the Support/User channel which has seen multiple new offerings, communication between dev and support remains much as it did a decade ago. Mainly using ticketing systems (e.g. Jira) with the slight exception of tasks/project management solutions (e.g. Monday) which aren’t really geared towards the needs here. The conversation around debugging, replicating issues, and obtaining and observing the right points of data – was always complex and has become even more so with the explosion of software and going remote. Support / Code – Opportunity to empower support eng.  – challenge in uplifting them: While tier-3 or tier-4 support engineers are capable of doing debugging, their limited access to the software remotely or otherwise makes it impractical for them to attempt even in the cases where they have enough skill. Support’s limited access for debugging also affects their ability to communicate with developers, as both sides are looking through different lenses on the same issues, and fail to work on a joint status picture. As remote work democratizes access (everyone is as far or close to the data as anyone else), by creating debugging solutions that adapt for both remote work, and various skill sets, there is a huge opportunity here to empower support engineers (on all levels) both enabling them to debug and solve issues on their own (removing pressure from R&D) and to better communicate with their fellow engineers. How to debug remotely – a modern balancing act Looking at the intersection of developers, support, code, and users, we’ve seen that there are many challenges that arise from the combination of the explosion of software and the growing trend of remote work. There’s no avoiding the question of what we can do to improve our debugging capabilities in this remote world. And for the best results we are required to balance bridging the gaps that are created by the new shift, while embracing the new mindsets that benefit from it. Scale vs Familiarity One of the main tradeoffs in moving to remote work is one of scale vs familiarity – while we lose the intimacy and closeness to both our code (few instances) and our customers (physically remote) we build and gain command and control solutions to manage things from afar and in greater scale.  As such the first step should be to acknowledge this change and harness the power of tools and solutions that either have a scale mindset built into them, or empower our teams to adopt the scale mindset themselves. A classic example would be to adopt microservices and distributed software principals, which at their core allow teams to break down software into smaller components, so they can be more easily deployed, scaled-up, but also debugged – by allowing multiple  team-members to connect to multiple shared components, without having to synchronize the shared access. Another example can be seen in a tool like Rookout, where scale and distribution is built into the fundamentals of the tool – flipping usual debugging flows on their head, and instead of having the developer/debugger connect (over the network) to each and every component they wish to debug, have all the components connect back to a command and control system, which allows developers to on-demand choose which components they wish to debug in an elastic system, without having to struggle with connections. Screenshot from Rookout – showing distributed debugging filter A Team effort – support and engineering Another key area that is highlighted by the debugging relations matrix is team communication, and specifically communication between support and R&D teams. As communication suffers we can bridge the gap by investing more in culture, methods, and tools to augment communications. These should surpass shallow ticketing approaches, and focus on conveying quality data – rich with details on incidents, software, and user behaviours. By enabling our team members to share live detailed full pictures, and specifically live debug sessions so they can handoff investigations with ease. Example screenshot of a live sharable debug session in Rookout Summary As the explosion of software collides with a world adopting more and more remote work, many challenges arise for developing, maintaining, and debugging software. The effects can be seen all across the debugging relations matrix- from the developers themselves, the users, through the support teams, and of course the software itself. Teams are now required to walk a fine line – balancing between the bridging the gaps created by the shift (e.g. gaps in communication, data access / availability), and embracing new mindsets that benefit from it (e.g. Distributed software and scale, remote access and control, shareable interfaces and sessions). Indeed a challenging tightrope balancing act, but those who perfect it won’t only survive the shift, they will lead the future.

http://damianfallon.blogspot.com/2020/04/debugging-in-remote-world.html

[cladeymoore]

Reliability Engineering at Coinbase

Why Reliability Engineering?

Why is Reliability Engineering relevant at a company like Coinbase? Why would we want to build a Reliability Engineering team?

“Our goal is to make Coinbase the most trusted and easiest to use digital currency exchange.”

-Brian Armstrong, Co-founder & CEO

It all comes back to what our CEO Brian Armstrong said about Coinbase wanting to be the most trusted. Our goal in the cryptocurrency industry is to create an open financial system for the world — and part of that requires us to build the most trusted digital currency exchange. In order to be the most trusted exchange, we need to be the most reliable. Being reliable is a competitive advantage in our industry, while being unreliable is a serious risk to our business.

Before you get too deep into this article, please note that we’re actively hiring great Reliability Engineers, so if any of this sounds interesting to you please head over to our Senior Reliability Engineer job posting here.

What is Reliability Engineering?

The mission of the Reliability Engineering team at Coinbase is:

“Help engineers design & keep their promises in production.”

The word “promise” in our mission statement is a reference to Promise Theory which was invented by Mark Burgess. While we use many of the principles from the Google SRE books, we found Promise Theory to be more human-friendly than the term “Service Level Objective” which is a bit jargon-y. Based on the investigations into safety and reliability by people like Sidney Dekker and companies such as Toyota (see the Toyota Way), we consider reliability to be ultimately a human challenge. For this reason we preferred to reference a concept which every human already understands — that of making and keeping promises.

Major differences between Reliability Engineering at Coinbase vs Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) at some other companies:

We are generalist software engineers first and foremost. We focus on solving challenges by writing better software rather than adding more and more humans to push buttons. Everyone on the team is a strong software engineer, working on multiple software systems in a variety of programming languages.

We do not have front-line pager responsibility. We are on-call for the systems that we ourselves own (e.g. the Coinbase observability stack), but we are not the first line of incident response for other teams. Service and product teams have their own pager rotations.

We like to apply the metaphor of ‘teaching a person to fish vs giving them a fish’ to how we operate — our mission is to “teach teams to fish” in terms of reliability. This is in contrast to “giving them a fish” by handling front-line pager duties on their behalf. Another way of putting it is that our goal is to up-level every engineering team at Coinbase to be self-sufficient in Reliability Engineering.

How do Reliability Engineers work?

One of the important things to realize about reliability engineering is that it is inherently cross-cutting throughout the organization. Reliability is not itself a functional silo — it is a value and a business output. Our customers are every single engineering team at Coinbase. Since we work with so many customers, we have defined different models of engagement to meet their needs:

Advisory. This is answering questions, or responding to ad-hoc requests without formal deliverables. For example responding to “Help me monitor/scale/improve my thing” questions in Slack, or jumping into production incidents to support responders.

Consulting. We often run structured reliability workshops and pairing sessions with other teams. In these engagements, we have a shared goal (in our case, OKR) with the team we’re consulting with — thus there is a measurable outcome. While consulting engagements are formal, they are typically part-time endeavours.

Embedding. Sometimes teams will need full-time reliability support from our engineers, and they request that we physically sit and work with them, participating in their standups, sprint plannings, etc. This is where we use embedding. Similar to Consulting, this work has a shared goal and measurable outcome (OKR) — the difference is the reliability engineer is a temporary (typically, one calendar quarter) member of the customer team.

Beyond the various ways we engage with customers, we follow a standard “agile” software engineering process. We have a weekly planning meeting to update our Kanban board, conduct monthly retrospectives and hold daily standups. Longer-term strategy and measurements are captured in quarterly OKRs which we derive from customer feedback and internal discussion.

Introducing the Coinbase Reliability Engineering Team

The Reliability Team was founded in 2018 with one engineer (Luke Demi) and myself (Niall O’Higgins) as manager. Since then, we’ve grown to 7 engineers and shipped a lot of improvements.

In the words of folks on the team, here are some accomplishments we can speak about publicly as well as impressions and experiences from working on reliability!

Luke Demi

After joining Coinbase in 2016, my initial efforts within the company focused on building self-service infrastructure for engineers. However in 2017 as interest in cryptocurrency surged, Coinbase began to experience outages across our systems. Solving these types of reliability problems excited me, so I dove in head first to get to the bottom of these issues.

We were able to survive 2017, but it was clear that in order to withstand future surges and provide a reliable experience for our customers we would need to make reliability a core component of the engineering culture at Coinbase.

I find the Reliability Team exciting because we’re able to both advise teams on best practices for choosing reliability indicators (Service Level Indicators AKA SLIs) and promises (AKA SLOs) as well as build the tools that let engineers understand the performance of their systems in production.

Maksym Naboka

I joined Coinbase in July 2018. Being the 3rd engineer on the Reliability Team was an amazing experience. There are so many things I love about the company and I’d like to highlight few of them:

An opportunity to work with / learn from smart and talented people.

Project ownership. An engineer on the Reliability Team owns a project all the way through from design to shipping.

Ability to contribute to Open Source.

Learn, learn and learn. Coinbase provides so many opportunities to learn new technology. It feels like we are utilizing every spare minute to learn new things! We have Lunch & Learn sessions with guests from leading technology companies, every engineer has an annual educational budget to go to conferences or take online classes.

Delicious meals on site :)

Amy Li

When I first joined the Reliability Team in November 2018, I was under the impression that I would be thrown into the deep end of blockchain — drowning in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and smart contracts. Colleagues also warned me of endless firefighting and nightmarish on-call rotations. Fortunately, this was not the case.

The Reliability Team doesn’t work with blockchains directly and aren’t the first ones being paged for every single incident. Each Coinbase team owns the daily operations of their specific products or services. This allows for distributed knowledge across the organization.

As a new college graduate I initially felt overwhelmed, but everyone on the team has been incredibly supportive and willing to share their knowledge. Within a month, Niall and I improved our incident management system by integrating it with JIRA. I wrote my first design document to further integrate PagerDuty with our incident management system and I am continually making incremental changes to our system.

One of the most important things I’ve learned is that working with amazing team members is priceless. The Reliability Team is a group of curious, empathetic, and intelligent individuals and there’s no other group I would rather be with for five days a week.

Paul Henry

The most interesting part of being on the Reliability Team for me is our high-level perspective across the organization. Since we are not tasked with handling day-to-day operations of any specific Coinbase product (Coinbase.com, Coinbase Pro, Coinbase Wallet, etc), we can focus on improving the ability for teams to observe and understand their systems. This means that teams can move faster, incidents are resolved quicker, and there’s a decentralization of knowledge across the organization.

Here’s some examples of improvements that I’ve contributed to over the past year:

Writing lightweight stats, tracing, and logging libraries for the various languages in use across the organization.

Contributing to “paved roads” for various languages and ensuring that developers have a good starting point for new services, with sane defaults.

Introducing new vendors (such as Datadog) to bring more dimensions of observability, unlocking new ways of monitoring systems.

Bringing a perspective of reliability to technology choices made by teams and helping them ask the right questions.

Contributing to our deployment tooling to integrate high level monitoring by default on all services.

Enabling the use of gRPC across the organization through client generation in various languages and integration into our AWS architecture. See blog post “gRPC to AWS Lambda: Is it Possible?”

In addition to shared tooling, we engage with many teams across the organization by running workshops, review sessions, and office hours.

Workshops are hands-on sessions that focus on topics like observability tooling and promise construction, within the context of that team’s services or problem domain.

Review sessions happen both early in the design process for services and later when they are nearing production. These reviews do not act as a gate or “green check mark” for teams, but instead make sure that they are asking the right questions and highlighting ways that the reliability team can level up teams across the organization.

Office hours are open time every week for any engineer to bring problems or feedback to our team by pairing with an engineer. Topics usually include: how to build effective monitors and dashboards, integrating tracing or metrics libraries, what database should I use for this particular problem, and more.

At the end of the day, my favorite part about the Reliability Team is the diverse set of engineers we have. The breadth and depth of knowledge shared by everyone is a great support structure for tackling a problem of any scale.

Jordan Sitkin

I have an unusual background for an infrastructure engineer. I studied graphic design in school and worked for the first half of my career as a designer. Joining the Reliability Team was, for me, the latest step in a long, ongoing journey away from the front end. I’ve really enjoyed the new challenges I’ve faced on this team and have been pleasantly surprised at how often my experience as a designer ends up being relevant here.

My favorite part about being on the Reliability Team is being close to where the excitement is happening across the company. The greatest need for reliability expertise is often around new product launches or new-found success of some existing product. We’ve been pursuing a new model of embedding reliability engineers in other teams where their expertise is needed most. I’m personally currently embedded in the Consumer team, which is responsible for Coinbase.com and the Coinbase mobile apps. I’ve enjoyed feeling close to the front lines of product development while still focusing on infrastructure.

Another rewarding aspect of being on the Reliability Team has been turning our work into conference talks. Over the past year I had the chance to speak at MongoDB World and QCon about designing load testing strategies. I had never given a talk before, so this was a great learning opportunity for me and I ended up having a lot of fun doing it.

Working on the Reliability Team is one of the most fun positions at Coinbase because we get to be a part of so many different initiatives and projects across the company. We’ve got a great diversity of expertise on the team. I’ve never learned so much so quickly.

Reliability Engineering and the Future

In the past year, our team has helped all of Coinbase build a culture of reliability in the following ways:

Moving the entire engineering team from a reactive stance on reliability (firefighting, etc.) to a proactive one (installing smoke detectors) with service level indicators and promises.

Providing a world-class observability stack comprised of three pillars — tracing, metrics and logs.

Designing and implementing high-performance infrastructure services.

We look forward to doing much more over the next year such as:

Building the serverless foundation to accelerate feature development.

Helping move to a service oriented architecture by building core infrastructure such as the service mesh.

Leveling up every single team in terms of performance engineering, quality and incident response.

If any of this sounds interesting to you please head over to our Senior Reliability Engineer job posting here.

This website contains links to third-party websites or other content for information purposes only (“Third-Party Sites”). The Third-Party Sites are not under the control of Coinbase, Inc., and its affiliates (“Coinbase”), and Coinbase is not responsible for the content of any Third-Party Site, including without limitation any link contained in a Third-Party Site, or any changes or updates to a Third-Party Site. Coinbase is not responsible for webcasting or any other form of transmission received from any Third-Party Site. Coinbase is providing these links to you only as a convenience, and the inclusion of any link does not imply endorsement, approval or recommendation by Coinbase of the site or any association with its operators.

Reliability Engineering at Coinbase was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

from Money 101 https://blog.coinbase.com/reliability-engineering-at-coinbase-8b6956ba802f?source=rss----c114225aeaf7---4 via http://www.rssmix.com/

[lbcybersecurity]

Optimizing Your AppSec Investment with Value Stream Mapping

“Value stream mapping” – that’s a Lean methodology for logistics and supply-chain processes, right? What does that have to do with software security?

Good question! In the ’80s, value stream mapping applied to logistics and supply chain processes in the Japanese manufacturing industry. The success of the methodology for manufacturing led to wider adoption, including adoption in Lean software development, where the processes to create and deliver software are mapped as value streams of both material (artifacts) and information flow.

This concept came up recently when I was participating in a webinar on application security ROI. My co-presenter, SANS analyst Jim Bird, recommended using value stream analysis to determine, and lessen, security’s impact on engineering processes. In his accompanying report, he writes: “We need to look at our security decisions not only in terms of risk and direct costs, but also in terms of how they impact engineering value chains and how to minimize these impacts.” For example, when security testing is conducted in the development process is an important consideration in terms of lessening impact – addressing security issues in completed code is much more cumbersome than addressing them when still coding.

Bird uses another example of software composition analysis vs. threat modeling. Teams can fairly easily add automated software composition analysis into the build without changing how the team works. Total costs are modest: an upfront license for the tool and integration into the build. From that point, feedback is immediate and straightforward on each build: The tools show where vulnerabilities were found and how serious they are, with few false positives.

One Step Further: Using Value Streams to Maximize AppSec Investments

I like the idea of taking this approach one step further and thinking in terms of value streams when considering your overall approach to AppSec. We can apply value streams to understand how your AppSec tools and processes will impact your development workflows, and where and how you can optimize your AppSec investments. As VP of Engineering at CA Veracode, I need to optimize my AppSec investment within my own engineering team. Constantly under pressure to deliver faster, cheaper and better, I need to make AppSec as seamless as possible, while reducing the most risk possible. To do this, I start with the company’s security policy, which defines our company’s tolerance for risk. At CA Veracode, we have a very low risk tolerance; security is the core of our business, and we handle sensitive data on behalf of our customers.

Our security policy establishes:

Recommended libraries, frameworks, embedded components: This is key to making the path of least resistance for developers a secure path.

Standards for software license use

Requirements for remediation of vulnerable code and components

Controlled access to OSS repositories

From there, I think about the investment in application security in terms of each software value stream. I want to make sure that my investments match the particular complexities, data storage needs and other differentiating factors of each value stream. For instance, some of our software value streams use different software methodologies (Agile, Scrum, DevOps), different tooling (Eclipse, JIRA, Jenkins, etc.), different technologies and modalities (microservices, embedded components, etc.) and handle different types of data (different levels of sensitivity).

Case in point: our static analysis product is one of our software development value streams. The data that flows through that stream is extremely sensitive, requiring a deep AppSec investment in data encryption and protection. In contrast, our eLearning product, another value stream, manages less-sensitive data presented through a web interface. The eLearning value stream requires a less data-oriented security investment, primarily involving checking for vulnerabilities in the web interface. A third software stream, our product Greenlight (for security unit testing), uses a brand new continuous deployment pipeline. Aligning security with this value stream requires deep automated integration of security with the delivery pipeline.

In the end, it comes down to supporting the business and mapping security investments to business priorities. Thinking about application security in terms of value streams is one way to create this alignment and to apply the right security technology and approach to maximize ROI.

Ongoing Process

It’s important to note that this is not a one-and-done project. I don’t ever consider our investment in application security “complete.” There are always product, technology and process changes that will in turn require our AppSec investment to be tweaked and optimized.

Again, quoting the SANS report:  “The magic is in determining the right balance between proactive control, reactive agility, tolerance for the risks facing your organization and selecting the right tools and practices to make your applications secure without slowing development.”

For More Information

Get more details on using value-stream mapping to optimize your application security investment in the SANS ROI of AppSec webinar and report bundle.

The post Optimizing Your AppSec Investment with Value Stream Mapping appeared first on Security Boulevard.

from Optimizing Your AppSec Investment with Value Stream Mapping

[deltainfoteklive]

Jira vs Airtable

In the fast-paced world of project management and collaborative work, having the right tools can make all the difference. Two popular options in this realm are Jira and Airtable. Both platforms offer unique features and functionalities that cater to various project management and collaboration needs. In this article, we'll delve into the details of Jira vs Airtable, highlighting their strengths, weaknesses, and use cases to help you decide which tool aligns better with your requirements. Jira vs Airtable: Exploring Key Differences When it comes to selecting a project management and collaboration tool, it's crucial to understand the nuances of each platform. Let's take a closer look at how Jira and Airtable compare across different aspects: Flexibility and Customization One of the key differentiators between Jira and Airtable lies in their approach to flexibility and customization. Jira is known for its extensive customization options that allow teams to tailor workflows, issue types, and fields to match their specific needs. On the other hand, Airtable offers a user-friendly interface that enables users to create custom databases and tables effortlessly. While Jira's flexibility caters to more complex projects, Airtable excels at simplicity and quick setup. Project Complexity and Scalability Considering the scope of your projects is essential when choosing between Jira and Airtable. Jira is designed to handle complex projects with intricate workflows and advanced reporting. Its integration with various development tools makes it a preferred choice for software development teams. Conversely, Airtable is best suited for smaller projects and teams that prioritize ease of use. Its scalability is limited compared to Jira's capacity to handle large-scale projects. Workflow Management Efficient workflow management is at the core of project success. Jira offers robust workflow automation features that enable teams to streamline processes and automate repetitive tasks. It's particularly advantageous for teams adhering to Agile methodologies. On the other hand, Airtable focuses on simpler workflows, making it suitable for creative teams and smaller businesses that require less intricate process management. Collaboration and Communication Collaboration is a critical aspect of project management. Jira offers integrated communication tools, such as commenting and @mentions, within its interface, enhancing collaboration among team members. Airtable, while offering collaboration features, is more focused on data organization and sharing. Choosing between the two depends on whether you prioritize seamless communication or data-centric collaboration. Reporting and Analytics Data-driven decision-making is facilitated by strong reporting and analytics capabilities. Jira provides advanced reporting with customizable dashboards and charts, allowing teams to gain insights into project progress and performance. Airtable, while offering basic reporting, is not as robust in this aspect compared to Jira. If in-depth analytics is crucial, Jira might be the better choice. Integration Possibilities The ability to integrate with other tools in your tech stack can enhance overall productivity. Jira boasts a wide range of integrations with development, testing, and collaboration tools, making it a go-to solution for software development teams. On the other hand, Airtable integrates with various third-party apps, but its integrations are not as extensive as Jira's. Choose based on your team's integration requirements. Ease of Onboarding Smooth onboarding is vital to ensure that teams can adapt to the chosen tool quickly. Airtable shines in this aspect with its intuitive interface and user-friendly design. New users can easily grasp its functionalities, making it suitable for teams without extensive technical backgrounds. Jira, due to its complexity, may require more time for training and familiarity. Pricing Structure Budget considerations play a significant role in tool selection. Airtable offers transparent pricing tiers, making it easier to predict costs as your team grows. Jira, while powerful, can be more expensive, especially when integrating with multiple add-ons and plugins. Analyze your budget and feature requirements before making a decision. Jira vs Airtable: FAQs Can Jira and Airtable be used together for different aspects of a project? Yes, it's possible to leverage the strengths of both platforms for different project stages. Jira can handle complex development workflows, while Airtable can be used for initial brainstorming and data organization. Which platform is better for small creative teams? For small creative teams, Airtable's user-friendly interface and data organization capabilities make it an ideal choice. It simplifies project management without overwhelming users. Does Jira's complexity lead to a steep learning curve? Jira's extensive features and customization options do contribute to a steeper learning curve. However, the investment in time and training can lead to efficient project management once mastered. Can Airtable accommodate large-scale projects? While Airtable is versatile, its scalability is better suited for smaller projects. As projects grow in complexity and size, Jira's robust features and scalability become more advantageous. How does Jira's integration ecosystem compare to Airtable's? Jira boasts a comprehensive integration ecosystem, particularly for development tools. Airtable's integrations are versatile but not as extensive as Jira's, especially in the software development domain. Is one platform objectively better, or does it depend on specific needs? There's no one-size-fits-all answer. The choice between Jira and Airtable depends on project complexity, team size, budget, and the need for customization. Assess these factors to determine the best fit. Conclusion Selecting the right project management and collaboration tool between Jira and Airtable hinges on understanding your team's requirements and project characteristics. Jira excels in complex workflows, extensive customization, and robust reporting, making it a preferred choice for software development and larger projects. Airtable, on the other hand, is perfect for smaller teams and projects that value simplicity, ease of use, and quick setup. By analyzing your specific needs, you can make an informed decision that aligns with your goals and leads to more successful projects. Read the full article