The latest trends and developments in the technological world are full of hidden potential and a plethora of opportunities to scale business and provide solutions for many hurdles or roadblocks. One of the most important and revolutionary innovation was the Jira software by Atlassian The Jira software was initially developed as a bug and issue tracker but has now evolved into a powerful work tool for all kinds of use cases, ranging from requirements and test case management, agile teams, project management teams, task management, etc.
Marvelution is one such company working in this field and providing Jenkins integration for the Jira app. Jira is the number one software development tool for agile teams and Jenkins is the most used open-source automation tool. This not only makes their services unique but also helps in providing their clients with agile, flexible, feasible and unique solutions to their respective needs. As Jira and its integrations have practical applications in many industries, it becomes highly efficient and lucrative for the companies to use this.
Jira serves as a powerful and innovative tool used by Software, Professional Service, Media & Communication, Education and Healthcare industries, and the list goes on. Today, Jira is the go-to software development tool for agile teams, also it can be expanded with integrations with source code management and continuous integration tools to streamline development processes and provide different and unique solutions.
Marvelution has truly changed the possibilities and opened the hidden potential of Jira by their unique and innovative services. Their list of happy and satisfied customers, and with more in the queue, speaks for their reputation and expertise of the team and hold of their services in the market.
The Road to Success:
Marvelution began its journey as an open-source project, starting its journey in 2007. Marvelution was founded as an umbrella open-source project, that would hold all the open-source projects that Mark Rekveld, CEO of Marvelution was working on. This not only helped Mark to grow his knowledge and understanding of different software development frameworks, methods and architectures but also helped him in understanding the intricate details and processes that are of key importance, etc. Earlier Mark was focused on working many projects mainly as a consultant, leading to the inception of Marvelution. One of the first projects was Jira Hudson Integration, the predecessor of the Jenkins Integration for Jira app. This success allowed Mark to establish Marvelution, the company, in 2015.
The journey of Marvelution is unique and different in every sense but one that is common to all successful companies is their initial challenges, hurdles, etc. and Marvelution is no different. The challenge with integrating Hudson (now known as Jenkins) with Atlassian Jira was that each build result added a new comment to an issue in Jira, resulting in important user comments getting lost between all the build comments. Marvelution overcame this hurdle by opting a better integration between the two applications. This project has been adopted by 3000+ customers during its course as an open-source project. After establishing Marvelution the company, the biggest challenge was to come up with a pricing model of the open-source projects.
When it comes to the question of a company’s growth, the growth in headcount and the number of clients was not the focus of Marvelution but the overall growth of the company from an open-source project. Thus, when it comes to the graphs and performance of Marvelution, the only changing figures since its inception is the sales revenue and those numbers speak enough and with Marvelution paying extra attention to their customer’s feedbacks, prompt responses to support requests even when there is no SLA (Service-Level Agreement) bound to the request speaks sufficiently if not less about Marvelution, their long-standing success and the demand for their expert and skilled solutions.
Marvelution’s Unique Service Offerings:
Marvelution’s currently focusing on its Jenkins integration 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? Is 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.
Marvelution’s services are unique and custom-made to their client’s needs and changing demands, truly setting them apart from the competition in the market. 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.
In addition 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 is working on it.
Marvelution’s services are unique and custom-made to their client’s needs and changing demands, truly setting them apart from the competition in the market.
Another differentiating factor of Marvelution is that they believe 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.
Marvelution spearheads the companies providing Jira solutions due to many reasons, one of them being driver feedback Marvelution receives from their customers. This can be both bug reports and feature requests and is then mixed with their out-of-the-box thinking and unique ideas for products and services. Another deciding factor is technical advancements and changes needed to make sure the products and services keep performing to the high standard set by Marvelution.
Back in 2018 Marvelution launched a new beta product Jenkins Integration Automation for Jira. After 2 years of testing with 300+ customers, Marvelution is proud to announce that the core of this new app is bug-free and ready for production. 2021 will be the year this new app gets fully integrated with the main Jenkins Integration for Jira app.
The brain and the man-power behind Marvelution:
Marvelution is truly a unique company, with their unique products/services, their expertise and skilled offerings. The company leaves a mark and commands all the respect it deserves and the recognition for their pioneer work in Jira Jenkins integration. The most surprising and astonishing factor apart from their products/services, long-standing history, respect in the industry and amongst competitors, growth is the fact that it has only one employee, the CEO and Founder, Mark Rekveld.
Mark’s professional experience started in 2007 after finishing his bachelor’s degree in Informatics. Since then, he has had several consulting jobs with big and small firms alike. All the while developing and maintaining the projects under the Marvelution umbrella project as a side job. Marvelution started as a way for Mark 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 software be it open or closed source. The current main focus on the Jenkins Integration for Jira and the Jenkins Integration Automation for Jira add-ons.
Mark strongly feels one of the key achievements of his entrepreneurial journey is the establishment of Marvelution BV from Marvelution the open-source umbrella project, this would be the launch of the Jenkins Integration for Jira app for Jira Data Center and Jira Cloud.
Mark has worked for and with over 300+ clients and has a lot of special moments and cherished bonds that he shares with his valued clients, and when asked to point out a specific one, he feels that there isn’t a specific client experience but the special “group” of experiences are those where the customer is prompt in responding and just as eager to solve the issue at hand. Some of these interactions can take a long time from the point where the customer initially creates a support request till the proposed solution is accepted.
All this not only fuels the confidence of the clients in Marvelution but also is very valuable to Mark as they not only establish a good client relation but help him grow as a software developer and as a support engineer.
