It's a really gratifying feeling when a company that you admire finds you, signs on as a customer and becomes a vocal advocate. We recently experienced this when EllisLab, the owners of the open source project CodeIgniter, a leading PHP framework, and ExpressionEngine, a widely used-web publishing platform, signed on with Assembla.

Not only does EllisLab make great software with the help of their energetic open source community, but they also share a story that is typical of successful development teams.  When EllisLab started working on ExpressionEngine, their development team was two guys who could literally finish each other's sentences and they used subversion, more for file sharing than hardcode version control. 

As their team and product set grew, they opted to hire the best talent that they could find and soon found themselves with a globally distributed team and in need of help staying organized.   So they did what many would do in their situation and adopted an Agile approach - starting with scrum reports and daily standup meetings (via skype).  For the first year, their distributed Agile team used spreadsheets in Google docs to keep track of their sprints and burn down charts. 

They soon realized that they could be even more effective if they used professional tools that were built spefically to help Agile teams.  Thus began a fairly long search that ended with EllisLab choosing Assemba as their Agile tool of choice.

Here's what Derek Jones, Ellis' CTO, had to say about us, "Assembla is the product that is saving us from having to write our own Agile software management tool. This is a tool that anyone working in a team should check out." Whew, it looks like we just dodged the bullet there - these guys do make great software after all.