Atlassian listen

After my recent rantings about the ongoing issue with the Confluence EAP not containing all steps to final release, I was delighted to get this:

Hi Guy,

we are aware of the problems that you describe, and about to solve them. We have committed ourselves to a fortnightly iteration mode, and will release to our internal systems Wednesday every second week. This Milestone release will be used inhouse for a week, and then be available to the public. Obviously those milestone releases won't be perfect (and especially not loadtested like the release candidates), but at least they are good enough to be used by the complete Atlassian staff around the clock for 7 days. And that is not too bad either, I guess.

We have just today released Confluence 2.7 Milestone 2, and while we can't tell you an exact release date, we can tell you that we try to make the major structural changes early in the release cycle. Like in 2.6, the Release Candidates will be running on CAC for at least a week before we make them public, and from now on those Release Candidates will also be available through our EAP, hopefully giving you plenty of additional time.

We are currently also setting up a plugin-testrig for integration-testing with the latest Confluence build, which will test all our officially bundled plugins, all our recommended plugins, as well as a few selected external ones for basic compatibility (triggered by a successful main build on our continous integration server Bamboo). did encounter problems in the past, and want to avoid this in the future. Once we have this testrig running for our major plugins, we should discuss this as soon as possible to get you into the loop as well. We hope that you can soon get automatic email-notifications on the day the integration of one of your plugins breaks.

We are not there yet, but we will be getting there very soon!

Cheers,

Per Fragemann
Team Lead Confluence
Atlassian Software Systems

This means that developers can get far more testing done on new releases before end-customers start upgrading and this should become a huge benefit for the Confluence community

There will still be a need for manual testing of some plugins - eg. our Theme Builder has visual interface that needs testing to see if, for example, style sheet changes have had an adverse affect on it (something you can't really do with unit tests), but at least now we should be able to do such testing more reliably if we're able to get the final RC in the EAP!

It will take a while for everything to sort itself out but this is a major step forward!