Getting started: Atlassian services for Robotics research and development.
Robotics being a generic domain, it involves and converges vast and different domains like Mechanical, Electrical, and Computer science engineering. So, it requires a niche and peculiar management workflow and project tracking methodology for rapid development and prototyping. There is no popular tool that is specifically built for robotics project development. Though, there are a lot of platforms that are capable of assisting and tracking the flow of a software development project namely Gitlab, Jira SW, etc. This blog would be a review of the products and services provided by Atlassian and how a small robotics team can leverage its free version to get the most out of it.
As mentioned earlier, Jira SW and its other services are not specifically built for robotics development. But still, its generic nature would help us leverage it by making a few tweaks based on the team’s necessities to accommodate the domain’s niche management and project requirements.
To begin with the project and issue tracking, Jira SW is a good platform that can assist in creating and tracking issues, and organizing sprints. Here, you can create multiple projects and boards to track issues. In an issue, the scrum master or the project manager can assign it to a developer from where he can set priorities, track progress, and deadlines, and organize sprints.
When it comes to development in the robotics domain it has its dependencies across domains, say a mechanical design of the robot’s end-effector heavily influences the kinematic modeling and calibration process of the robot prototype. The Jira SW comes with a feature that can devise roadmaps and also compare them with multiple roadmaps across different development streams. By doing so the dependency between multiple streams of development is made evident at the time of strategizing itself. Yet another feature for constructing scenarios enables the management and strategizing team to plan according to the best and worst teams.
Codebase maintenance and integration can be done using bitbucket. Bitbucket is yet another product by Atlassian and it helps in version control, cloud storage, and code management. The best thing about bitbucket is that it has seamless integration with the Jira issues. The developer can create branches from the issue itself by tracking and recorrecting the code based on the Jira comments. Even handling merge request is quite simple here. Jira SW has integration compatibility with other version control and cloud storage platforms like GitHub and GitLab etc. But I am not sure how seamlessly they integrate as I haven’t used it extensively with Jira SW.
Documentation is another critical practice that plays a huge role in the research and development environment. Documenting not just helps the team in knowledge building and transfer. It also eases the process of writing further funding proposals, patents, publications, etc based on the previous developments and results. The process of clear and analytical writing about what was done during the development process gives space for critically re-thinking and analyzing what better could have been done and it also clarifies ambiguities for the developer himself. There are stories where companies and research labs have won million-dollar worth of patent suits in courts based on documentation made in handbooks and dairies. Just imagine how critical this documentation process is irrespective of how tedious it appears to be.
To carry out such a crucial task Confluence can be useful. It is yet another product by Atlassian that helps in documentation and hosting. It provides various templates for different documentation needs like MoM, brainstorming, work summary, etc. Though there are multiple documentation platforms like Notion which can do that, Confluence has seamless integration with Jira. It might be helpful for the robotics team in sharing knowledge between multiple teams and hosting open-source knowledge. The document search and review process is far better than that of a lot of other products. It also avails hosting facilities of great quality and scale.
The Jira SW platform also meets the demands meeting the requirements to integrating it with other platforms like draw.io, Grant chart, and a lot more. This is one great advantage for Atlassian services over other platforms like GitLab etc.
To balance out the pros and cons of this platform, It is great if the team goes with the paid version of Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket as this has a lot of features that I had mentioned above. If the team has less than 10 members then they can go for its free version that comes with a few basic features. But if the team is a bit large then it has to bear a huge cost for this. A basic cost calculation based on plans for a 30–40 member team for a year is shown below.
In case your team is a bit larger than 10 members and if it is financially not so sound. Then, this tweet is for you.
You can always leverage the free platforms available on the internet. It takes a bit of extra work to automatic and put things in a place on freely available platforms. But it is still worth saving lakhs of money for hiring and paying for other critical resources.
