70 JIRA INSTALLATIONS AND HIGH QUALITY TARGETS FOR GAMING
Ubisoft introduced Jira in 2007, initially in response to a need for optimized game quality management. The software has since become a real quality control platform, with a quick roll-out to production studios to facilitate collaborative working on projects and support game quality upstream.
Since it was implemented, Jira has won over some 8,000 employees, and on the basis of this experience, Ubisoft has deployed two other Atlassian products: Confluence and Bitbucket.
Ubisoft has 70 Jira installations running on several servers, with teams in Montreal, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, Singapore, Sydney, Osaka, Casablanca, Abu Dhabi, Puna and several cities in Europe, China and Japan.
Eric Lemay, Jira Application Administrator, explains that Jira architecture offers numerous advantages. These include ”granular delegation of access rights and simplified maintenance by Ubisoft’s Jira team, which consists of six highly specialized people working on Jira full time.”
Jira is now used by staff in all teams and departments, from games production to purchasing, production of associated services, the Jira team itself and the teams that develop internal tools. Eric explains that all the teams converted to Jira very quickly with no real need for the internal Jira team to convince them: they simply advocated ”freedom of use” and inspired “a willingness to boost collaboration through Jira”.
The games production teams, which manage the production pipeline and project and task management, are the most active Jira users. Eric confirms that ”the production teams are constantly looking to innovate and use the software as much as possible.” Within each production team, a support team manages a service platform with Jira Service Desk to manage all production-related requests centrally, responding as quickly as possible.