The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1930 with a mission to “attain optimal physical, mental, and social health and well-being for all infants, children, adolescents, and young adults”. One of the ways AAP achieves this mission is to provide advocacy through web applications like AAP.org and HealthyChildren.org. These AAP flagship websites, among others, play an important role in providing relevant and credible information to pediatricians and parents.

Rudi Sugiato, Sr. Manager for Applications and Development, leads a team of application developers who maintain many of these AAP mission-critical applications. Rudi joined AAP in 2013 and immediately set out to improve and standardize AAP application development processes.

At the time, AAP used a waterfall methodology and a legacy ITSM tool that was outdated and difficult to use. Teams spent months on some projects only to find out later that priorities had shifted, and the organization no longer needed that work.

Incremental changes to existing applications took a long time to validate and had to be deployed manually every week. This introduced inconsistencies and instability to the application.

After Rudi joined, AAP decided to implement Agile methodology in application development projects throughout the organization to better support the staff. As part of this change, Rudi implemented various DevOps and automation processes to streamline AAP application development lifecycle, promote consistency, and ensure better auditing of changes for every production release.

The solution: expand the role of TFS/Azure DevOps, which the team already used for version control, to also include work item tracking, unit testing, and build and release automation.

But staff and non-technical users felt overwhelmed with the Azure DevOps UI and preferred to use Jira for collaborating and tracking the changes. So for the change to work, Rudi had to evaluate solutions to help AAP get the best of both worlds. This was when he came across TFS4JIRA: the solution to sync changes between TFS work items and Jira.

He began his free trial period, went through the data mapping process, and implemented synchronization. Once configured, Rudi began his initial sync and saw that the app did exactly what was needed.

Setup was easy, didn’t require a lot of technical knowledge, and there was no complicated licensing. They were able to configure and perfect their settings so that the integration between the two systems worked harmoniously.

Once synchronized, Jira issues automatically created TFS/Azure DevOps work items for the developers to review, and Jira users could track where the request was in the development process. The developers, in turn, could review updates made to the tickets, such as changes in priorities, notes, attachments, and all other default and custom fields.

The teams could communicate while working within their preferred platform, which greatly increased collaboration.

Another TFS4JIRA feature that Rudi’s team came to rely on was the support for TFS check-ins add-on in Jira. All changes are initiated and documented in Jira, which includes all of the necessary information, discussion and testing verification.

Business and staff provide relevant information on the change/feature that they need. Developers then make and check in the changes under the same Jira ticket. The TFS check-in add-on for Jira allows anyone to see both request and solution under one unified view in Jira.

This feature is critical in helping AAP document, review, audit, and troubleshoot any changes made to production applications.

“The Solution is simple… All we needed to do [was install the app] and the setup is simple. I really couldn’t think of a better or easier solution to keep the two in sync.”
Rudi Sugiato, Sr. Manager for Applications and Development

The American Academy of Pediatrics has been a loyal TFS4JIRA customer since 2015. Rudi likes the functionality and reliability of the app, which runs silently in the background of his daily operations. Sometimes, he even forgets the app is installed, which means it’s working well.

Not only did TFS4JIRA help Rudi achieve a more automated and reliable development process, but he has received outstanding support and quick fixes to any roadblocks they’ve come across.

TFS4JIRA provided instant collaboration for the teams executing daily tasks within TFS and Jira. By allowing them to work within their platform of choice, AAP was able to become more efficient, productive, and agile.

If you’re interested in integrating your Jira and Azure DevOps so that you too can deliver more, try TFS4JIRA for Jira for free.

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How the American Academy of Pediatrics improved their Agile practice and became more collaborative with TFS4JIRA

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