For the large scale enterprises, an important aspect in handling the operations is cloud. With rapid digitization, cloud has become an extensively necessary part. Although there are many options available for cloud integration, one of the most preferred options is that of the Atlassian Cloud.
Why people prefer this cloud platform is because it gives the businesses an easy way to future-proof their operations. With continuous innovations across its many features, the integrations and extensibility that gives an assurance and the capabilities that help to ship with speed and quality, Atlassian Cloud is a platform most famous among its users.
Featuring for the Cover Story of The Business Fame’s issue of “The Best Performing Atlassian Solution Partners to watch in 2021” is Marvelution, a company that promises its customers simplified solutions.
The Company-
Marvelution started out as a way for its founder, Mark Rekveld, to share his coding work with the world. And has since grown into a small company that provides software development consulting and development of its own software be it open or closed source.
“Solutions in the Making!”
It al started in 2007 when Mark Rekveld founded an open source umbrella project named Marvelution. This project was the home a several open source projects that where used all over the world. In 2015 Mark saw the opportunity to establish Marvelution, the company, to further develop the open source projects as well as professionalise the support options for customers. This resulted in adding support for Jira Data Center and Jira Cloud to the Jenkins Integration for Jira app. The main product of Marvelution.
The vision of Marvelution is to simplify the integration between Jenkins and Jira, allowing users to gain insight in build results and their relation to issues to may informed decisions. While also providing ways to automate repetitive tasks to reduce the change to human error.
The Products and Services-
Marvelution currently mainly focuses on its Jenkins Intergation for Jira app. The Jenkins Integration for Jira app provides insight into issues and their relationship with builds in Jenkins. Allowing you to answer questions such as; are the builds for issue X passing now? Are all the build green for issues in version Y? Can I release version X? The Jenkins Integration for Jira app allows Jira users, developers, release managers, QA engineers and alike, too quickly and easily see the build status of any issue they are interested in and make informed decisions based on that.
Where the competitors use issue comments to link Jenkins builds to Jira issues, Marvelution uses custom view elements added to Jira to show this information. The main advantage of this is that the comments don’t get polluted with comments that make it hard to find customer/user comments.
Next to this Marvelution is also developing an automation engine that allows administrators to configure a rule that should be executed when a build or job in synchronized to Jira. Allowing to simply create, and release, a version in Jira if the release build was successful. Or automatically transition an issue if a developer start work on it. And many more automations.
Another differentiator is that Marvelution believes in having a single source of truth and a single place to manage this truth. Marvelution has opted to place this source of truth in Jira where users can configure and maintain the integration. Competitors tend to use the Jenkins build pipeline where users can configure the integration. This will result in the source of truth being distributed across the CI/CD landscape making it harder to maintain.
How Jenkins Integration for Jira Works with Marvelution-
Stop going to Jenkins to search for builds linked to Jira issues.
Get the latest build state for an issue right inside Jira with Jenkins Integration for Jira.
Teams–
Spend less time searching for Jenkins builds
· who does the job belongs to?
· where is the job located in Jenkins?
· answers in seconds, all within Jira
Development–
Easier software development with Jenkins-Jira integration
· build details within the release report
· warnings for failing or unstable builds
· view and plan releases with confidence
Reporting–
Visualize build information from Jenkins in Jira issues
· find issues with failing and successful builds faster in Jira
· get all related build information for issues
· links to other identified builds, issues and projects
Synchronization–
Customize which builds to synchronize
· synchronize jobs from multiple Jenkins site managed from a single location is Jira
· control which jobs are (and are not) synchronized
· only synchronize to Jira once a job is enabled for synchronization
· jobs within a folder also available for synchronization
“Streamline work by automating repetitive tasks for Jenkins builds”
The Road Ahead-
“The future of Marvelution is I think a bright one.”
Marvelution on its journey will keep innovating and coming up with marvelous solutions for the customers to. The team loves to connect with their customers and know their feedback to improve the app user experience.
Company growth may be part of this future, isn’t a goal or mission by itself, but will be decided if/when it is needed to continue to support customers.
Marvelution at this time doesn’t adopt a marketing strategy. Its users and customers have always found Marvelution either through the Atlassian Marketplace or through web searches. Whenever some searches for Jira and Jenkins or how to integrate the two Marvelution has always been among the top results. Till now there was no need to develop a marketing strategy.
Marvelution has received feedback from customers that the use of the Jenkins Integration for Jira has made it easier and faster for them to answers questions that before take a long time to answer.
“Resulting in less stress to get the answers and more time to focus on other topics.”
Know the Leader-
Mark Rekveld- Leading the Way
Mark Rekveld is the Founder of Marvelution. After finishing his bachelor’s degree in Informatics, Mark focused on Java software development. During his career, he developed a real passion for lean development and open-source software. So much so that he started sharing his hobby projects as open-source software, which founded the way for Marvelution B.V.
Next to his love for open-source development, Mark is also a big Google, Android, and Atlassian fanatic. He has always had, and still has, an appetite to grow in knowledge and skills related to
software development, the process of development, the development style, and solution architecture. Founding the company allowed Mark to share his knowledge with a bigger audience that he cherishes.
“I enjoy coding and want to get all the little details right. Jenkins Integration for Jira is an example. It started with solving my own problem.
I felt the integration process between Jenkins and Jira was inefficient so I built ways for me to do less work. It has never been one magic thing, it is many little things I have added over time which I have learned with the help of the Jenkins and Jira communities. Thank you.
This is a reason I personally deal with all support requests, I like helping users as they help me build things I’m happy with.
I build and maintain everything here in the Netherlands, I live about 20 km outside of Amsterdam.
I initially focused on Java software development after getting a bachelor’s degree in Informatics. I care about lean development and being a member of the open-source community.”
Mark’s Message to the Budding Entrepreneurs-
Don’t be afraid to fail. Failure is the best teacher you will have. Where would we be if we didn’t fall? We would never learn to get up and try again. This is the same in al aspects of work and life. Don’t see failure as a negative or as a first chance to give up. Failure teaches you what didn’t work so you can learn form it and try something different. Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t. But it’s guaranteed that you will learn something in the process of making it work.
