This is the 29th of our Monday Night Specials, a series of virtual events with voices from the Atlassian ecosystem.

Bevy: https://ace.atlassian.com/e/m6ju7x/

Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/de-DE/ACBEBB/events/272693221/

Community Post: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Berlin-Brandenburg/RSVP-Panel-The-Freedom-to-Choose-the-Right-Tool-for-the-Job/gpm-p/1463887

Panel

Hubert Kut, eBay

Christan Reichert, re:solution

Peter van de Voorde, MongoDB

My journey in IT world started as a support engineer. I realised quickly that a lot of teams straggle with collaboration, transparency and tracking work done/undone. That was the time when Atlassian kicked the door down and jumpstarted my career. From that time I'm Atlassian Evangelist, Solution Architect and passionate about Agile Methodology. My business goal is to facilitate people's work by giving them tools that are available from anywhere and at anytime. Key words for myself are simplification and automation.

Christian Reichert is a network security veteran, as well as Co-Founder of resolution. He joined the Atlassian Marketplace shortly after it's creation in 2012 & loved being part of the ecosystem. resolution today belongs to the Top 30 Marketplace Vendors.

Christian Reichert worked across different IT roles in his long career. Starting off as a networking & security engineer building both enterprise & service provider networks. He then got promoted for Intact Integrated services as the CTO for a large multi-national network consultancy & operations company. Both being responsible for internal IT but also customer facing products.

After the acquisition of Intact by WestconGroup, one of the largest IT distributors worldwide, he served as VP Services on the EMEA Leadership team, being responsible for all Professional, Training, Support & Managed Services that WestconGroup sold & delivered across EMEA.

I'm leading multiple teams around the world focused on building out the MongoDB Community.

We are part of the MongoDB Developer Relations organisation and responsible for helping MongoDB users connect, learn, and share through the MongoDB online community, the MongoDB User Groups, and the MongoDB events around the world.

I've been working remotely and managing remote teams for 5 years across cultures, timezones, and continents. I've been part of developer communities since over a decade when I still was a Java Developer.

Excellence in Software Development = Business Performance

The idea for this panel came with an article by McKinsey in April 2020: Developer Velocity: How software excellence fuels business performance

Short version: Industry leading companies excel in software development and one of the means to achieve that excellence is empowering developers with world class tools.

Sounds easy, but life rarely is.

Software developers today have the choice between literally hundreds of tools for dozens of languages to solve problems and design their software development lifecyle. See for example the Periodic Table of DevOps Tools https://digital.ai/periodic-table-of-devops-tools and the multitude of add-ons on the Atlassian Marketplace. Many of them are open source and free, or at least you can try them before you buy either an “enterprise”/”Pro” version and/or support package. Sometimes it seems that every couple of weeks somebody promotes an earth-shattering new tool or a new language pops up that is suddenly all the rage for “cutting-edge” development.

Again, there are hundreds of “world class” tools and it probably has never been easier or cheaper to experiment - to find the right tool for the job and with the propagation of loosely coupled architectures like e.g. microservices, tools in the same building may vary from team to team and still produce working, even excellent, solutions in software.

Developers - on average - like to experiment. IT-managers, Procurement, Legal departments mostly do definitely not. And what role does (horror of horrors) IT-Governance have in this world of plenty?

So the idea is to assemble a panel to discuss the different aspects of “freedom of choice” in an enterprise environment with the audience to answer a few questions: