Abstract
With Kick-Ass Software Development you actually get stuff done. Feedback cycles are short, code quality is awesome and customers get the features they lust after. Less mangers managing, less testers testing and less IT-operators operating. The developers take the power back, making them much happier. Sound like paradise? It is!
This session will show you how we do Kick-Ass Software Development at Atlassian. I will talk about how we: use pull requests for better code quality; collaborate fast to develop ideas; avoid meetings to get more stuff done; tighten our feedback loops to fail faster; shorten our release cycles; and work together happily on different continents. It’s a great way to develop software and we think it can work in your company, too.
Sven Peters 
I’ve seen this talk yesterday at the JUG Darmstadt. Very interesting and very helpful, although it will be very difficult to establish such culture. But step by step…
One of the questions is, how to split the tasks into two day branch and merge steps you talked about.
Thanks Jörg. Good question. We organize our work tasks in bigger chunks in Epics which could be in other environments named projects, like ‘Pay by credit card’. Than we break that down in a good amount of user stories “enter credit card details”… Than comes the tricky part of sizing tasks for these stories in the smallest possible portion of work that you could deliver and try to size tasks approximately all the same size. Not said that this is easy but helps us first with seeing how much we can deliver short term without estimations and second to make feature branch development easier.
Great talk! I just joined Atlassian and most of this is still relevant in 2017.