Transcript: The Atlassian Ecosystem Podcast Ep. 120 - Zen Gardening in the Cloud

Ryan Spilken:

Hello and welcome to The Atlassian Ecosystem Podcast. This is episode 120 Zen Gardening in the Cloud. I've got my garden hat on, my muck boots in and I'm your host, Ryan Spilken. And joining me today, in their very nice gardening attire, are Matthew Stublefield and Brenda Burrell. Matthew, Brenda, nice to see you. Fine day to work the garden.

Brenda Burrell:

I tip my sun hat at you Ryan.

Matthew Stublefield:

Today actually wouldn't be bad. We're recording this on a Tuesday, June 22nd, and here in Springfield, Missouri, right in the middle of the country, it's a sunny 74 degrees. Which is much nicer than the 95 degrees it was over the weekend when I was actually working in the garden.

Ryan Spilken:

Look, as long as you put your sunscreen on, I think all shall be well. Now, I don't know about you two but whenever I'm working with one of those Zen gardens, and I do really enjoy them, especially the ones that you can interact with not on a desk but the ones that you go to and you actually pick up a rake and you push things around. One of my favorite things is to turn the rake over and clear the box out. And Atlassian is allowing you to do a similar move in the cloud because you can now delete your sandboxes sooner. You just want to clear your sandbox and start again. You want to wipe it all clean, knock down the castle and build it up fresh so that you can experiment with a new arrangement.

Ryan Spilken:

And that used to be kind of a time-consuming procedure. Well, no longer, because now when you put into delete your sandbox, it is gone, baby gone. Following the cloud platform, we'll take a closer look at the Jira cloud platform where changes have come again and again to the advanced roadmaps. The first one is an overlapping date filter to where you can now focus your view on only the dependencies that require your attention on the timeline. So it seems like a really great way for project managers to see where conflicts are going to be happening in their planned work.

Ryan Spilken:

You're also able to show off epics in the roadmap, but you have to do a little bit of work. So currently you can't see epics in the roadmap and that's by default, for whatever reason. However, if you're the kind of project manager that wants to see epics and how they overlap with your timeline, there is a little bit of JQL magic you can perform, and the incantation can be found in the show notes that we'll be linking you to today.

Ryan Spilken:

Finally, there's a new drag and drop dependency feature in the advanced roadmap where you can just click and drag on the timeline to the front or back of each other to create a, sorry, Mr. Project Management and Ms. Project Management.

Matthew Stublefield:

A relationship.

Ryan Spilken:

A relationship, that's the word. Mr. And Mrs. Project Management champions, these two could tell me what that's called. And now it's just a click and drag procedure to indicate that, and of course it does write back to your Jira issues.

Matthew Stublefield:

I do recall many months ago saying it would be really nice, Atlassian if you're listening, if we could just drag these two issues together in roadmaps and have it create a dependency. So thank you. Thanks guys.

Ryan Spilken:

And you're welcome.

Matthew Stublefield:

And you're welcome.

Ryan Spilken:

And finally, on the cloud platform in general, you are now able to utilize a block list to remove an entire domain from communicating with your Jira service management portal. I guess that was listed under the platform itself because I'm sure that that affects other tools with email inbox, such as Jira work management. For Jira software, the ability to create and schedule future sprints has been implemented widely now. And so if you want to add, if you want to start just penciling in, because we know it's not really too agile to plan too far ahead. But if you want to have some sketches laid down of what your next few months are going to look like, the tool will allow you to create a new sprint behind the current one.

Ryan Spilken:

In Jira service management cloud, you have a new and enhanced view of knowledge base articles for your agents. So when an agent accesses an issue, the suggestions that pop up for their resolution will be quickly displayed in line. And there's some new styling and formatting changes to enhance that cross confluence experience as well. There's also a change calendar that you can work your service desk if you handle change requests. You can actually visualize that in a calendar format, which I think I'm not familiar with the change calendar functionality in the server edition. I don't think I've ever seen that. So this is cool.

Matthew Stublefield:

I'm curious to see what this looks like in practice. As is so often the case, my Jira cloud environment has not yet gotten this feature. So sorry viewers, that I can't really speak on it. But yeah, being able to view, create, reschedule change requests and in the style, the design of a calendar, it's definitely interesting. I could see this being really helpful for, if you're doing like physical plant or accounts and stuff too. But being able to schedule, I'm going to go to this office at this time and do this work on site, for those who are being forced to go back to offices. From my previous, the days of my youth working in a help desk, this would be really nice visualization.

Brenda Burrell:

Matthew, I think you're the youngest person on here.

Matthew Stublefield:

It doesn't mean I don't have days of my youth.

Ryan Spilken:

And it doesn't mean that they weren't misspent either. That's a totally other story.

Brenda Burrell:

True story.

Ryan Spilken:

His time in IT. So Confluence cloud has made managing global permissions easier, a little less drill down to get your users connected with the permissions they need to do their work. They've reorganized the page itself into tabs by user type, and the look itself has been cleaned up. As usual, Atlassian has a great track record of putting these designs through UX and improving visibility and accessibility. So, sounds great to me. And it also includes some filtering in the permission. So you can really quickly narrow down what you need to do as an administrator. As a user, you can now view the pages that you visited most recently. This is a feature that I live by in my day-to-day life in Confluence server. So that it's now on cloud is a good touch.

Ryan Spilken:

I always am looking at, well, what was I just looking at the other day? You know? So I go to recently viewed and I access that. They have improved that experience for the cloud user. You can now view the page tree in any space based on when you viewed the pages with the most recent at the top of that list. So I think that's going to be a really nice way to view content through Confluence. And finally, in Confluence cloud, team calendars also has a new look. So all of this calendaring, all of these grids with numbers on them are getting freshly faced. Just as before, you're able to access all the calendars and events and create new ones and such, but it's just a shiny new interface tuned for accessibility. And that's it for the Atlassian Cloud updates from the last two weeks.

Matthew Stublefield:

Let's turn our attention to a Jira software server and data center. We've got, 8.17.1. This point release resolves three bugs. The first and darkly amusing one to me, it's titled, disabling or uninstalling advanced roadmaps disables Jira software. If you had upgraded Jira software from an earlier version to 8.15 or 8.16, so this only, this was introduced in 8.15. And then disabled our uninstalled advanced roadmaps, you then lose the Jira software application. And it could not be re enabled from the UI. So first off, for those of you who are on 8.15 or 8.16, beware, don't turn off advanced roadmaps because it will kill Jira. They just, they have a very codependent relationship, that's really what's going on here. If you upgrade to 8.17.1, it's fixed. It's also a list of the fixed version, 8.18.0, or just don't, just never disable advanced roadmaps.

Matthew Stublefield:

I think that's what Atlassian was really trying to get at here.

Ryan Spilken:

Why would you though?

Matthew Stublefield:

You're stuck with it forever. Other bugs, video attachments had stopped playing and chromes, fire browsers, probably an issue with chromium or something. Header navigation color. So fairly minor. If you're not an advanced roadmaps customer, you know, maybe this point release isn't that important, but if you are, I would definitely recommend doing that. Because sometimes you got to turn something off, turn it back on to test it, and you don't want turning off a plugin to disable your entire application and make it impossible to reenable. So, yeah, that's Jira software 8.17.1 for you.

Ryan Spilken:

Oy. My heart goes out to the people who had to discover that bug the hard way.

Brenda Burrell:

Right.

Brenda Burrell:

Moving on to Jira service management on prem. So Jira service management, 4.17.1 is out as of June 15th. Four bugs fixed in this one with an overlap with some of what Matthew had said. The first one in this list being the one that would cause me to recommend that you do upgrade. And that is an issue that should be hidden with a security level or visible in service management SLA reports. So that's one that I would recommend that you go ahead and upgrade to 4.17.1 if at all possible, just because of some security and visibility issues there.

Brenda Burrell:

When viewing the link to major incidents custom field, in Jira's custom field administration section, you get an error that has been resolved. Video attachments in Chrome and safari resolved, and header navigation highlights, background color not taking effect. So if you're trying to style things, you would think you'd be able to change colors in your editor. So, yeah. Check out Jira service management, 4.17.1 just for bug fixes, but one that I think is pretty important

Matthew Stublefield:

In Confluence server and data center, we've got 7.12.2. This includes a major severity security vulnerability that's been patched. This was a vulnerability disclosed in Tomcat. There were two different CVEs for it. Tomcat nine, zero and eight five. Effectively we'll link to the releasements of course. I want to say what this vulnerability actually is, and the ticket doesn't say. So now I'm opening it up to see what the vulnerability thing states. Okay. Of the first one, NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, acknowledges to configuration edge case it's highly unlikely to be used. It is risky, but like probably not that big of deal.

Matthew Stublefield:

But the second one is, when responding to certain types of connection requests, duplicate request headers could happen where user A and user B both see the results of user A's request. So obviously there's security permission to implications there. So would recommend based on the resolution of these Tomcat vulnerabilities that you upgrade Confluence to 7.12.2, to patch us if you're on an older release, presumably there's a going to be a hot fix. So keep an eye out for that. Beyond that there's a bug to fix the log JMX metrics jobs so that displays those metrics as anticipated. And a page property report header fix. But the security vulnerability is really the key thing to look at and get upgraded in Confluence 7.12.2.

Brenda Burrell:

I get to share probably the biggest news this week. This gos is hot, dropped today.

Matthew Stublefield:

Are we talking about, gos, Ryan?

Ryan Spilken:

Hot gos?

Matthew Stublefield:

Ryan Gosling action here?

Brenda Burrell:

You know, that would probably help me to adopt some of these new products more quickly. I'm just saying.

Matthew Stublefield:

We need a little celebrity spokesperson for Atlassian.

Brenda Burrell:

Celebrity spokesperson. I would actually take Ryan Reynolds over Ryan Gosling. So Atlassian if you're listening. Yeah. Oh, I would like to specify which Ryan I would like to have as my celebrity spokesperson for your products.

Ryan Spilken:

I feel attacked, but go on.

Brenda Burrell:

I'm sorry, Ryan.

Ryan Spilken:

Those Ryan's.

Matthew Stublefield:

She just prefers Ryan.

Brenda Burrell:

Ryan Reynolds.

Ryan Spilken:

Yeah, no, it's cool.

Brenda Burrell:

I just can't help it.

Ryan Spilken:

She's a Ryan kind of gal, I guess.

Brenda Burrell:

Yeah, I guess. Dropping today, June 22nd, the day we record this wonderful podcast. BitBucket data center, 7.14. Now, you know, BitBucket data center, not everybody's using BitBucket data center. But for those of you that are, the highlights this week is enhanced integration with Jira software cloud. And we had a little discussion as we were prepping to record of why Atlassian might've gone this direction.

Brenda Burrell:

BitBucket data center can now send enhanced development information to your Jira software cloud site. This is going to allow you to do things like you see your development tools directly on the Jira issue, which, if you're integrated on Jira server, you're used to them. This is now sending additional information along with branches commits and pull requests, but there's some new automation and reporting features that are going to allow you to calculate cycle time metrics.

Brenda Burrell:

I'm a big fan of cycle time metrics. So this is the time it takes to get something from first commit on a branch to production, cycle time there. Linked BitBucket repos displayed in the code tab on Jira cloud. And then you could also trigger automation for Jira events. So branch created, commit created, pull request created, pull request declined, pull request merged. This allows you to do some powerful stuff with workflows in particular.

Brenda Burrell:

So a lot of really good stuff that's being added to this integration with Jira software cloud. So this is already available in BitBucket cloud to Jira software cloud, but there are a number of organizations that aren't ready to move BitBucket to cloud. And this is going to accommodate folks that are able to get onto, say Jira and Confluence cloud, but need their repost to be on prem. So this adds a lot of these features in for that directionality, that integration. And if you're not already linked, it will prompt you to do so the first time you try to use any of these new features. So if you are on BitBucket data center and are elsewhere on cloud, you have a lot of new features. So definitely check out that integration. We'll link to the release notes in our show notes.

Matthew Stublefield:

I was a little surprised that they didn't add some of this to Jira software data center. So this is part of the insights functionality. We talked about this a few months ago. It's the deployment frequency of the cycle time. Like the stuff that you can now get Jira software cloud integrated with BitBucket cloud. I think you actually just see this in BitBucket cloud.

Matthew Stublefield:

And we've been really enjoying the deployment frequency reporting period after. It's not like the most helpful thing, but it does sort of make us feel good when we see like, wow, look at how much we're deploying. Cycle time, particularly nice. We'd love to see that insights come to Jira software data center. I wonder if that's on the roadmap, or if this is going to be, you know how we used to see features getting added to data center and not to server? I wonder if this is going to become one of those wedge features that Atlassian uses to try to drive people from Jira software data center to Jira software cloud.

Brenda Burrell:

Could very well be.

Ryan Spilken:

I think that is an absolutely fair question.

Brenda Burrell:

Some additional updates to the merge process. So many of you are running continuous integration builds to ensure code quality and make sure governance policies are being enforced. There's some additional, it's a required builds merge check, which that's, to me that's a collection of words that have been slapped together. I confess that, I had to read this chunk several times for it to really make sense in my head. So required builds merge checks.

Brenda Burrell:

So what's going to happen is if you are a repo admin on BitBucket data center, you have more flexibility and control over pull requests getting merged into important destination branches. You can select which bills must pass a particular build check in order to merge into specify branches, as well as which can be excluded. So for instance, if something's urgent, you could add a pattern of hotfix dash star. And so any branch that starts with hotfix dash whatever, you're not going to have a successful build check. Now, maybe you should, but that's an example. So this gives you the option to say, protected, certain branches are protected. We're not going to allow merges without it passing a successful build.

Ryan Spilken:

Unless you put in, unless you put in that tech. Okay.

Brenda Burrell:

Yeah. So you have the option of no exclusions. You can do it by, you know, here's a list of branch names that are protected. Here's a branch pattern that's protected. Or, here's a branching model that's protected. So this is, this is global across BitBucket, but you can specify which repos we're looking at. You can also do the same for exempt source branches.

Brenda Burrell:

So you could say, nothing's exempt, or a particular name branches are exempt, or a pattern is exempt, et cetera. So there is more information on adding this required builds merge check linked to in the page that we will add to the show notes. Another thing that I really like, and Atlassian, if you're listening, in addition to my request for Ryan Reynolds as your spokesperson, you have a cleanup tool in BitBucket. So if you go to your cog wheel menu, as an admin, you can go to the cleanup menu and it's going to give you a size filter on the repos page.

Brenda Burrell:

So in data center, 7.13, they added this advanced repo management where you can see all the repos in the instance. Now you can filter them based on size so that you can manage them and you go, which ones are the biggest, which ones are the smallest? Can we do this in Confluence, please? Please, please, dear Atlassian, please add this to Confluence. Just saying.

Ryan Spilken:

It might be easier to get Ryan Reynolds.

Brenda Burrell:

If you can get me one of two, I'll be happy. Also, in this release, we now support Postgres 13 and get to 2.32 for server. So just some additional supportive platforms. A number of resolved issues, 19 resolved issues, BitBucket data center. Lots and lots of things in this release. So 7.14, If you're running BitBucket data center, please do take a look at those release notes. Lots of goodies for you there.

Matthew Stublefield:

I really want for this cleanup tool help you deal with unwanted data. I feel like what that needs is like a user filter as well. Just like anything that Stublefield has submitted is probably trash. Let's just clean that up. Let's just get that unwanted data out of there.

Brenda Burrell:

But to be fair, there is the, you know, this user has left the company or whatever. Maybe those repos are no longer being used. You can clean them up that way. I would love to see last commit date filter, or at least being able to sort. When was something last updated? If we're not committing to a branch anymore, can we get rid of it? So there's plenty of ways to clean up contents. This is a lovely start. The fact that it exists just makes my brain happy. Again, please do this in Confluence. Please, please, please. Yeah. So wonderful update for BitBucket data center. Admins go nuts.

Ryan Spilken:

And finally. You might've seen some news lately about a return to the office. And how some people are so aghast at the idea of returning to an office that they've quit their jobs. You might be an Atlassian admin out there whose boss is telling you, or an Atlassian user out there, whose boss is telling you, you got to get your butt back in the seat. Well, do you?

Matthew Stublefield:

Was that, was that rhetorical?

Ryan Spilken:

Well no, it wasn't rhetorical. Because if you're looking for a place to work where you don't have to go into an office, and you want to be, you want to continue with remote life, we at Adaptavist, we embrace that remote life and we've got a ton of positions open. So we're going to link to our recruitment page and you can come work with Matthew, Brenda and I. And I don't know if there, if anything else could sell you, I don't even know what it would be besides our generous perks.

Matthew Stublefield:

It's worth noting, Adaptavist, we operate in 15 countries now. So listeners, you may not know this. We've grown quite a lot over the years and we've got open positions and services and product and HR and talent and analytics, and just sort of all over the place. So take a look. We do have offices in some places. So I'm actually back in the office today. Here at Springfield and Missouri in the US, while we've been in the news a lot lately for a, not a-

Ryan Spilken:

Spurious reasons.

Matthew Stublefield:

Not a good track record of the pandemic. Yeah. I wouldn't even call it spurious. But you know, we were very lucky and we're really on the ball. All of us in the office got vaccinated so we've been back in the office now for a few weeks now. And it is, for us, we're not required to be, which I think makes a big difference. We have the option to come into the office. And it's like, it's like being able to take a breath when you haven't been able to for a while. Just seeing people face-to-face has been really nice. But having that flexibility, you know, I'm still working from home three or four days a week. You know, that's what we like to provide people, is that flexibility. So as Ryan said, Adaptivist, we're hiring. We got a lot of positions open. If you are looking to move remote, want to stay remote, check out the careers page. Feel free to list Matthew Stublefield as your referer.

Brenda Burrell:

To be clear, there are positions that would not work with any of the three of us. So if that's your selling point.

Matthew Stublefield:

If you want to avoid us, that's not hard to do, really.

Ryan Spilken:

Most people do. No, no it's. Yeah. And even are, I think all of our respective teams have positions open. So you can work with us or without us, and we would love, we'd love to have you. We always like to hear from our podcast listeners. So if you're looking for a gig that is full remote, you're ready to not go back to the office, we're ready to hang out with you at Adaptavist. I have two strong words for you, okay? Come on.

Matthew Stublefield:

Come on.

Ryan Spilken:

Come on.

Brenda Burrell:

Come on.

Matthew Stublefield:

Come on. So thank you for joining us again for episode 120 of Adaptavist Live, The Atlassian Ecosystem Podcast. As always, you can hit us up on social @Adaptavist. Be sure to like, share, subscribe this podcast. Tell your friends who are Atlassian admins, or even the ones who aren't, maybe they want to become Atlassian admins. You know, this is one avenue for doing that. And for Ryan Spilken, Brenda Burrell, I am Matthew Stublefield, thanks and we'll see you next time on Adaptavist Live.