Mardi Gras happened this week, which means Lent starts tomorrow. I'm not particularly observant, but the rhythm of it has been on my mind lately. You feast, you stop, you sit with what you have for a while. Then things grow again.
Software teams have seasons too, even if we don't name them. There's always a push toward building: new features, new client engagements, new tools to try. That energy is good. It's the reason the work stays interesting. But it means the quieter maintenance work gets perpetually deferred in favor of whatever's next. We tell ourselves we'll get to it, and sometimes we even mean it.
I've been looking at our Atlassian setup lately. Not because anything's wrong, but because I realized I couldn't remember the last time anyone looked at it with fresh eyes. Jira projects from past engagements still sitting in the sidebar. Confluence spaces with pages that haven't been revisited since they were written. Ticket workflows where the status transitions were designed around how we thought work would move through the team, which may or may not be how it actually moves now. Slack and GitHub integrations that were configured for a moment in time.
When we spin up a new Jira project for a client engagement, we have automations that generate a standard set of initial tickets: setup tasks, access provisioning, the documentation scaffolding for that engagement. It's useful because nothing gets forgotten in the first week. But I honestly can't tell you whether those defaults still reflect what the first week looks like in practice. We set that up, it worked, and we moved on. That's not a complaint. That's just what happens when a team is busy doing the work the tools are supposed to support.
Our Confluence organization is similar. There's a structure that made sense when it was designed, and we've been building on top of it since. I'm curious whether someone arriving fresh would navigate it the way we assume they would. Maybe they would. I don't actually know, because we haven't asked.
Ticket workflows might be the most interesting thing to revisit. The statuses and transitions in a Jira board encode assumptions about how work flows through a team. When those assumptions are right, the board is invisible. You drag a card from one column to the next without thinking about it. When they drift, you start to notice the board as a separate thing from the work. I'm not sure where ours fall on that spectrum right now, and I think the not-knowing is worth addressing.
I don't think any of this is unusual. Every team accumulates this kind of drift. The tools start out reflecting your process, and then your process evolves while the tools stay put. Nothing catches fire. You just gradually spend more energy navigating your own systems than you probably need to.
So here's what I'm thinking: block an afternoon. Maybe a Friday. Not to overhaul everything, because that's its own kind of feast and tends to end the same way. Just an afternoon to look at what we have and ask whether it still fits. Walk through the Jira sidebar, open some Confluence spaces, check where the integrations are pointing. See what we find.
It's not glamorous work. Nobody's writing a case study about a team that archived some old Jira projects. But there's something to the Lent metaphor that goes beyond tidying up. The point of fasting isn't deprivation. It's supposed to make you pay attention to what you actually need versus what you've just been carrying forward out of habit. A couple of hours spent sitting with your own tooling honestly can do something similar.
I've already put time on the calendar. Spring's coming, and I'd rather head into it having asked the questions than spend another quarter assuming the answers.