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Transcript: The Atlassian Ecosystem Podcast Ep. 114 - 18 Days and Counting

Ryan Spilken
Ryan Spilken
8 April 21
Adaptavist Live Podcast Banner

Show notes

On this episode Brenda, Matthew, and Ryan countdown the days till #AtlassianTeam21 and cover the following articles:

Atlassian Cloud Updates 3.22 - 4.05:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/cloud/blog/2021/04/atlassian-cloud-changes-mar-29-to-apr-5-2021
https://confluence.atlassian.com/cloud/blog/2021/03/atlassian-cloud-changes-mar-22-to-mar-29-2021

Jira 8.16:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftware/jira-software-8-16-x-release-notes-1044110509.html

JSM 4.16:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/servicemanagement/jira-service-management-4-16-x-release-notes-1044111238.html

Confluence 7.11.2:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/issues-resolved-in-7-11-2-1050549145.html

Skip artifact downloads in Bitbucket Pipelines:

https://bitbucket.org/blog/skipping-artifact-downloads

ALMWorks presents Structure.Deliver:

https://almworks.com/blog/build-project-roadmap-without-killing-agile-process.html

Atlassian Community 2020 Year in Review:
https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Off-topic-articles/Atlassian-Community-2020-Year-in-Review/ba-p/1648429

Transcript

Ryan Spilken:

Hello and welcome to Adaptavist Live, the Atlassian Ecosystem Podcast. This is episode 114, 18 days and counting. What are we counting, you may ask? Well, is it fingers and toes?

Matthew Stublefield:

I have just enough, Ryan.

Brenda Burrell:

Bottles of beer on the wall.

Ryan Spilken:

Yeah. No, no. If you're listening to this on Friday, April 9th, then it is 18 days away from Atlassian's Team 21 and here to talk about it with me are Matthew Stublefield and Brenda Burrell. Hi, Matthew. Hi, Brenda.

Brenda Burrell:

Hello.

Matthew Stublefield:

Good to see you guys.

Ryan Spilken:

Always a pleasure. We start, as we often do in the Atlassian Cloud, where several updates have been rolled out to the Jira platform, so let's take a look. In the new issue view, the comment bar now adjusts depending on activity sort. The comment bar is getting smart, depending on whether you sort activity by oldest or newest first. In particular, it is now ensuring that you can always comment right above or below the newest comment. When you're updating your team, you're going to have the newest context right in front of you. There is new and improved security for the GET filters REST endpoint. This will affect developers in the ecosystem because they've rolled out a security patch to keep data safe from anonymous access while using the deprecated GET filters REST API. This API endpoint will no longer return your project names and owner information to unauthenticated users. Project creation has also been updated in Jira, where creating projects is now simpler with the new template library.

Matthew Stublefield:

It makes me wonder if the Jira project templates are going to work the same way as the new Confluence page templates, where you create a page and then afterwards you select the template you want to use. When you create a project and then change the template after the fact.

Ryan Spilken:

That hurts.

Matthew Stublefield:

Oh, It feels like a...

Ryan Spilken:

Ouch. Shouldn't you just be using Jira work management, if that's what you want?

Matthew Stublefield:

I assume that will be the case. We had project templates and server for a very long time where it just sets up your issue types and workflows, whatnot, with some different defaults kind of template you select. Just bringing that to cloud, but the language that they use here, it reminds me of that recent Confluence story we talked about with the page templates.

Ryan Spilken:

Oh, yeah. I'm sure if Atlassian announces it, we'll cover it in the same granularity. If you can change your Jira project after the fact, I want to shake the person first hand who suggested that.

Matthew Stublefield:

Honestly, it would be a nice feature to be like, "Oh, I want to change my issue types and workflows. I want do them all at the same time." Instead of having to go through and modify nine different schemes, I just want to swap templates and then it does the automatic migration. You just do your little matching drop downs, that actually would be sweet. Atlassian, you can contact me for royalties on that one, just whenever you're ready.

Ryan Spilken:

Don't forget to cut a... Don't forget... We're his agents...

Brenda Burrell:

10% off the top.

Ryan Spilken:

In response to heavy demand, trash is now available for Jira software and core projects. As we all know and love, accidentally deleting a project can cause irrevocable data loss. Now, when you move, there is a safety net in place and admins will still be able to restore projects from the trash, permanently delete, view when a project was moved to the trash, see who did it, not going to rat anybody out, but we're going to know, and we'll be able to view when a project has been permanently deleted. Atlassian has also added the ability to quickly refine and reset your search results from within a project in the top search bar of a project menu and a new reset button. You don't have to blow on the cartridge or anything. If you've added deployment data, you can now filter that by a date range in the deployments view, and finally, in roadmap, you can remove the epic bar by default.

Ryan Spilken:

Jira Service Management, on the other hand, has had a handful of really nice quality of life upgrades for the ESM teams in your cloud life with the new incident timeline. If you use major incidents in your projects, you can now view their entire history in Jira Service Management with the timeline so you'll be able to see what's going on with the incident as it occurs, see what's being done and what still needs to be done to resolve it. To view them, you'll go to incidents and under major incidents, select ongoing or past, then you'll be able to find which one you'd like to explore and select view in the timeline column to see more about that incident.

Matthew Stublefield:

I'm really curious about the backend for this incident command center, this video and voice call tool, because there's elements there that we saw from Stride. It's really reminded me of that and I know that when Atlassian did their partnership with Slack, I thought they had transferred a lot of that onto Slack, but I know they've had some acquisitions since then. This is really interesting and I wonder if we will see this level of integrated video voice functionality coming to other places within the tools. You can picture like, "Oh, let's have a quick call about this Confluence page, click a button, put in some profiles," it ops up for people or on an issue or something like that. This is really interesting. I wonder where this is under the hood.

Ryan Spilken:

Yeah. That's the next big thing is the incident command center is rolling out this week. If you are a Jira Service Management user and you have access to the ICC, hit us up ASAP on the DL in our DMs. Another fantastic addition to the Jira Service Management experience, make changes to multiple linked spaces at once, so you're able to select multiple spaces and unlink them or change who can view them by going into project settings, knowledge-base right from Jira Service Management. Finally, across the entire cloud suite of tools, you have enhanced invite visibility, so you're now able to quickly and easily invite your team, your friends, your family, into your Atlassian cloud instance with the new menu bar. That's it from the cloud.

Brenda Burrell:

That's a lot from the cloud.

Ryan Spilken:

Yeah.

Brenda Burrell:

Especially the incident command center, that's big news.

Ryan Spilken:

Well, yeah.

Brenda Burrell:

In things that are not cloud for Jira server and data center, we are very happy about 8.16.x. 8.16 came out March 23rd, a few really cool highlights. You can get more information around how custom fields are being used. We all know that custom fields while they're incredibly flexible and give us a great deal of power, phenomenal cosmic powers...

Ryan Spilken:

Itty-bitty-database.

Brenda Burrell:

Yes. It can be really tricky as an admin to know, "Okay. How do we clean this up? Are we using this? Can I get rid of it?" You can now go in and get more information about the usage that you can go, "Okay. We're not using this one as much. We can get rid of it." There's two new columns, issues and last value update, showing you how many issues are using that custom field and when was the last time new value was updated. Columns are sortable. This should help admins. Ryan's face.

Brenda Burrell:

Yes, if you are a Jira admin, this is the update for you and this will make life a lot easier. You can also... It gets better. It gets better. You can bulk delete custom fields. Being able to see the usage was great, but now we can get rid of multiples at once so you can select a group and delete them altogether. As Atlassian says, "It's not that we want you to use it particularly often, but we're guessing that with the new features, you'll find a plenty that can be delete right away." If your performance is a little laggy, if you need to clean up, there's some tools to do so.

Matthew Stublefield:

As a reminder for the Jira admins out there, when you delete a custom field, you are deleting the data stored in those fields as well. If you just remove a field from the screen, the data is still stored there. You could restore the field, but the data is still there. No big deal. But when you delete that custom field, it's gone and the custom field screen now shows you which screens it's on and has a bunch of helpful data to help you decide, "Is this the thing you want to do or not?" But with great power comes the great ability to screw things up royally. Be careful when hitting that bulk delete there.

Brenda Burrell:

Indeed. Indeed. I'm sure we can look forward to a trashcan for deleted custom fields at some point.

Matthew Stublefield:

That would be nice.

Brenda Burrell:

I do want to point out those are both labeled as data center only and then you can also configure default values for description field. I like this one. You can now add a default value to multiple issue types and projects instead of just having that link description field staring you in the face. That's nice. Nice feature. Users log in with multiple identity providers, letting your users choose which one is right for them as they log in, checking the status of data pipeline exports, feeding information into BI platforms like Tableau or Power BI, keeping Jira safe by disabling basic authentication. Again, advising a switch to SSO and disabling basic authentication completely, some indexing improvements for better performance, lots and lots of result issues and nice long list for this particular set of updates.

Brenda Burrell:

The Jira Software 8.16 release notes, we'll link in the show notes. Again, if you are a data center admin or a server admin, you want to take a look at those pretty much as quickly as you can because there's some nice, nice things in there. Jira Service Management releasing 4.16, also March 23rd. A lot of these are the same updates as what you would see on the Jira 8.16 release notes.

Matthew Stublefield:

It's also an update across both Jira and Jira Service Management around indexing that I think is really, really cool. Actually, a big change here, Atlassian has introduced two different queues for indexing. There's now a user queue that gets priority and then everything else, all this background tasks. If you kick off re-index, that means user actions will continue to work. In the past, you could do a background re-index, but everything would slow down. You could still do stuff, but it might impact performance. This should reduce that impact on performance and they say things like background re-indexing SLA recalculation, which is always painful if you have a whole lot of issues in your service management interface. It should be about 10% faster with the full index consistency retained. This almost, it's not really a footnote on the page, but it does feel minimized and yet I look at that as one of the really big, big improvements here. Really nice work on that one to the team of Atlassian.

Brenda Burrell:

I think because it's the last in the list that it's easy to skim over that and I confess I did, but you're absolutely right, Matthew. That's a huge improvement to the way they handle the indexing. Very often, if there are issues, I'm working in Jira and I created a filter and I don't see it as I try to pull it into a dashboard, "Oh, have you re-index legally?" There are lots of things that are fixed by a re-index and putting the priority on the users, that's a very clever solution to a thing that it's just the indexing has just been this way in the Atlassian tools for as long as I can remember. This will slow down everything, but we've got to do it to make things run, so we're just going to eat it. Having this sort of improvement is a really major thing. Matthew, thank you for calling that out as a much bigger deal than it would look like just hanging out at the end of that list there.

Matthew Stublefield:

Onto Confluence, 7.11.2 was launched 25th of March. This is a bug fix release, but with at least one exciting update. There are six total, but there's one that I voted for so I feel particularly happy that this bug has been fixed. Page history versions that were not reordered or renamed when deleting an intermediary one. Let's say you had three versions, version one, two, and three, and you deleted number two, you would then have version one and version three of the page instead of version one and version two after the deletion. That had a knock on impact for some stuff for Script and then for Confluence. Nice to see that that's been fixed. Some improvements to how tables, particularly table headers are handled. Confluence 7.11.2, quick bug fix release should be a smooth upgrade, but as always, check the upgrade notes as you go through that.

Ryan Spilken:

Does anybody see Confluence Server 61076, The Office Macro? Because The Office is capitalized, it makes me think of the TV show.

Matthew Stublefield:

Wouldn't that be like just the greatest April Fool's joke? You'd have to do it on cloud so it would go out, because otherwise, people wouldn't necessarily see it. But it's like on April 1st, Atlassian could release a macro called The Office Macro with a capital O. It just plays a random office GIF of Giphy or something. I think that's all it does.

Ryan Spilken:

This year's April Fool's joke was pretty good.

Brenda Burrell:

For next year, Atlassian, when you use our idea, again, royalties can be delivered directly to us.

Ryan Spilken:

10% off the top. Don't worry about.

Brenda Burrell:

10% off the top. Matthew is on fire.

Matthew Stublefield:

I accept cash, checks, Bitcoin... and Dogecoin also accepted.

Brenda Burrell:

NFTs.

Matthew Stublefield:

Yeah. I'll sell you an NFT for these ideas.

Brenda Burrell:

On that note, more words that sound techie that some of us on this call struggle with understanding. No offense, dear Ryan. We love you.

Ryan Spilken:

Fine. Fine. Fine.

Brenda Burrell:

For those of you that are using Bitbucket Pipelines, you can now disable artifacts downloading on certain steps that do not require any artifacts. This seems like a no-brainer, but it will allow for faster builds and can reduce costs overall as a result. There's a flag that will be added to the scripting that's done for the pipeline, the blog post that we will link to in the show notes, we'll give an example of what that script looks like. Further information on using artifacts in your build steps are linked to from this article, so it's a very quick little post just to, "Hey, this thing is here." As always, we will link to it in the show notes. If you're running Bitbucket Pipelines and you're interested in that little performance enhancement, please do check that out.

Ryan Spilken:

Now, on the podcast, some big news from our friends over at ALM Works and here to announce the launch of Structure-Deliver, are ALM Works Head of Solutions, Jeremy Stark, and Head of Marketing, Dave Rosenlund. Jeremy, Dave, thank you so much for joining us.

Dave Rosenlund:

Thanks for having us, Ryan.

Jeremy Stark:

Thank you for having us.

Ryan Spilken:

All right, guys. Now, according to our very own Nelson Jordan and I quote, but I won't impersonate, "From my perspective, Structure-Deliver offers tremendous value and is a great addition to the Structure product family. It fills a void in the Jira enterprise agility journey by enabling project managers to more easily coordinate senior management's longterm plans while letting Agile teams be agile." That is high praise from Nelson. Tell us, who did you build Structure-Deliver for?

Jeremy Stark:

Structure-Deliver is for anyone who's managing the large scale portfolio level projects at an organization and is responsible for coordinating that project around dates that leadership is trying to hit. This will generally involve projects that span multiple teams and these teams are working in an agile process, so their requirements are coming in just in time. You're working with a project that doesn't have a full scope set, and you're working against... You're trying to target a date that leadership is coordinating other groups within the organization around such as marketing or fulfillment or shipping or some other groups in the organization. The dates matter, and this is something where I think Agile has done a really good job of breaking down the waterfall mentality that existed in organizations, but one thing that has stayed true is that leadership still does coordinate around dates longterm and we need tools to help us coordinate those dates because the Agile processes that we're using are very much focused on the immediate iteration and pivot model. Trying to coordinate that approach with leadership's need for longterm planning is where Deliver comes in.

Matthew Stublefield:

You guys just send us a few brochures, leaflets, screenshots in advance. For our viewers at home who are listening to this podcast, because you can't actually view it, I'm looking at a stacked chart here with some milestone markers and some projections of dates, like you said, because that's the type of thing we tend to look for as human beings. I'm reminded of Jira softwares, epic burn down, version burn down, something that takes your Sprint data and projects forward to give you an idea of, "How many more Sprints you have ever... When this work is likely to be delivered?" what differentiates Structure-Deliver from the built-in native Jira functionality?

Jeremy Stark:

Yeah. When we first started looking at providing date projection, as part of our solutioning, really, because Structure itself as a data platform has been part of portfolio of the solutions for a while. But when it comes down to having a simple way to communicate to leadership how a dozen teams are coordinating a thousand tickets, some of which don't even exist yet, we didn't see the exact solution we were looking for. One of the things that Deliver brings, and one of the key weaknesses that we saw in some of the other products, and it goes back to what I was saying about this just-in-time scope generation for Agile teams. Deliver will do scope prediction for teams based on their historical grooming practices. For example, one of the canonical examples I use is you have an iOS team and an Android team and you give them a requirement and they want to have parity between the platforms, but the iOS team will take that Epic and break it down into 18 little tasky stories, but the Android team will break it down into five or six big chunky stories and will swarm those stories.

Jeremy Stark:

They just have different ways of approaching and thinking about work. When you're looking at ticket counts per Epic, Deliver will look at the metrics for how the teams break Epics down historically and come up with scope predict predictions per team to fill out a project that is very sparsely populated in terms of actual scoping, will give you an end scope target, which is an aggregate of all the teams, but based on how those teams think about work. It combines that with what we call team throughput, which is a lower level metric than story points or velocity and things like that.

Jeremy Stark:

We combine those two metrics with scope prediction and the team's throughput and we can simulate these teams executing against their projected backlogs into the future, which brings me to the next thing we didn't see, which was a single graph that you could put in a status meeting that told you everything you needed to know about a project and would create a visceral response in leadership if you looked at that graph and you say, "Okay. We know what our long pull team is. It's billing. They're six weeks over the deadline. Now, immediately, everyone's aligned on what we need to do that week." The questions need to ask, the outcomes we're looking for by next week. By managing the process in that way, you can keep looking at your highest risk teams, focus on the right questions, bring the right aid, and then next week, you'll see what the change is and managing a project in that way has been very effective at hitting dates.

Matthew Stublefield:

Just to make sure I'm understanding, so it's pulling or rather it's taking into account the historical performance? It's actually using presumably something like time and status or time from open to close or something like that. Something like Jira would present the control chart, but using that to inform these projections?

Jeremy Stark:

Yeah.

Matthew Stublefield:

It's like everything I always wanted from advanced roadmaps, but advanced roadmaps never delivered.

Jeremy Stark:

Something like that. Sure. You can use these other tools and be effective with them. One of the key things with Deliver that we're working on is providing the data you need and not a data bit more than what you need. I think we can get overwhelmed with data and we spend too much time developing narratives around just this avalanche of data and then you have multiple narratives in the organization and that generally is not helpful at all. It's better to have one narrative that you can push against, frankly, even if that narrative is wrong. Proving that narrative wrong is the right work. What we're trying to do with Deliver is give you just enough data to ask three good questions every day and that's generally a pretty good cadence to be in.

Brenda Burrell:

How long does it take to build up the data that you need to do these predictions? Obviously, the more data you have, the better their predictions are. In Jira, you have to get through three sprints or whatever to see anything really. How much do you have to have in place in order for these to start to come into play?

Jeremy Stark:

Yeah. Six weeks is generally a pretty good data set to work with.

Brenda Burrell:

Okay.

Jeremy Stark:

What you'll find note... If you start a new team six weeks in, they're probably not going to be stable. They're going to have high variants, which Deliver will tell you about. A team that's been formed for over six months is going to generally have a pretty stable process or they're going to be as stable as they're going to get. Then, you grab... We actually grabbed one quarters worth of data for every team when we're doing the historical analysis and then for the project data, we just use what we have. In Deliver, when you first start a project, you haven't got any project data, so it's using the historical, but as the project starts to collect actuals, you'll start to see the influence of that project on the timelines.

Brenda Burrell:

Cool.

Dave Rosenlund:

Jeremy, do you want to add a little bit about the dials and knobs that the portfolio manager can use working together with the individual project managers to tune the forecast?

Ryan Spilken:

Well, Dave, congratulations, you've been promoted to cohost.

Jeremy Stark:

You can see how my automatic deference to the host kicked in. To put a fine point on it, one of the things Deliver is really focused on is the data that you don't have in Jira, which leads organizations to very bad practices like putting in stub stories just to fill out, say a Gantt chart. We have the scope prediction, but we also allow for Epic indication. I don't have a good catchy name for this, but you can start a project with a team and sit down and just in an hour hash out a few epics the team might know about with their product owner, but the team also says, "We're going to probably generate three or four more epics before we're done. We just don't know what they are yet." Well, you can tell Deliver to expect four or five more epics from a team and it'll keep track of that.

Jeremy Stark:

As those epics get added to the structure, it'll deduct it from the count, which means that you can basically plan out the full scope of this project and then see that scope arrive as the teams figure out what they need and generate and if they go over that scope, it will also indicate that, "Hey, we're seeing more scope from this team than we planned for. Go have a conversation, figure out what's going on." It's really just trying to direct you in real-time against the expectations that were set and give you an opportunity to set those expectations early, so you can get a commitment from the teams and go to leadership and say, "This is what we think we can do."

Ryan Spilken:

That's really cool. If I'm hearing you correctly, it sounds like you need to be a Structure user in order to use structure deliver. Am I right?

Dave Rosenlund:

That's absolutely right, Ryan. Yeah. Structure works on top of Jira, but it requires Structure to do what it does.

Jeremy Stark:

Which I'll use... Another thing that we found is Structure is probably the best data aggregator in Jira. I'm just going to put that out there. I'm a long time Structure user before I even joined ALM Works in this. That's the product that I found. One of the problems that I've seen with other tools is that they don't have a good data layer and Structure is that data later for us. As the Deliver product owner, I see Structure really as my data platform and it's a very powerful platform to be building on top of.

Ryan Spilken:

All right, Dave. Where and when can we get our hot little lands on Structure-Deliver?

Dave Rosenlund:

It will be available very, very soon on Atlassian marketplace. If it's not already there by the time you've listened to this podcast, we'll be making a big deal about it during Team 2021. We have a white paper available on the Team 2021 website. We'll have additional content and materials available via the marketplace at our own website. We have actually a fairly large backlog of customers that are chomping at the bit to get their hands on this. We actually, in our Q1 Newsletter, which is shipped last week, we had a little blurb in there about Deliver and we have at about 70 or 80 initial responses from customers looking for, "Let me know as soon as this is available. I really want to try it." I think we really hit the mark with this one.

Matthew Stublefield:

I want to note that Structure-Deliver will be available for Jira server and data center.

Dave Rosenlund:

Jira server initially and of course, server apps will run on data center, but we're also working with Atlassian on the approved for data center designation.

Matthew Stublefield:

Okay.

Dave Rosenlund:

As soon as it's officially approved, we'll add that designation to the marketplace as well. That's a good question.

Matthew Stublefield:

The never ending question is actually cloud. When is that coming along?

Dave Rosenlund:

Customers will determine whether or not this is something... Or how quickly we bring this to cloud. We think initially the demand will be in that data center and server segment and especially customers that are thinking about moving to data center versus cloud. But if the demand is there for cloud, then of course we're going to do cloud.

Ryan Spilken:

Jeremy Stark and Dave Rosenlund from ALM Works. Thank you so much for joining us and good luck with the launch of Structure-Deliver.

Jeremy Stark:

Great. Thank you guys.

Dave Rosenlund:

Thank You, Ryan. Thank you guys.

Matthew Stublefield:

Last during our last two weeks cycle between podcasts, Atlassian published their Community 2020 Year End Review. Here on the podcast, typically at the end of the year, we do our end of year shot cast, which by the end of 2021 is likely to be our end of year, Tea and Scones cast. We just can't. We're just not as young as we used to be.

Ryan Spilken:

It's going to become like Breakfast Coffee cast.

Matthew Stublefield:

The Brunch cast. The Community 2020 Year End Review has a bunch of interesting graphics and stats, looking back on what happened in the community. There are some really impressive numbers here, but we had a bit of an interesting chat internally on our Slack, because some of the numbers, they are big and impressive, but they also make a quirk on eyebrow and go, "Well, what does that mean exactly?" The top one here, a number of community visitors, there were 20 million total visitors in 2020, which is just astounding. I don't know. I assume that they're talking about unique visitors as well, so worldwide 20 million unique individuals came to community and of those 20 million, 19 million were new in 2020.

Matthew Stublefield:

Almost everybody... I mean, that's still a million people who were not new. That's still a lot of people, but the vast majority of those coming to community were new this year, which is very cool. 96.2% of all visitors were new, but it varies as [Tyrone 00:31:10] goes, "But what about other people? Did they not return?" We can look at the stats they link to, say the 2019 community and review where there were 18.6 million total visitors, 17.7 of those being new. Again, almost one million person, delta. Out of those 17.7 million visitors who were new in 2019, only one million returned.

Matthew Stublefield:

This is where some of the stats you go, "Those are really big, exciting numbers," but it does raise an eyebrow to make you go, "I wonder what's going on here." My title at Adaptavist, I'm the head of education so there's a lot of stats about training here, which are interesting, new to training 97.5% who are new to training. That doesn't particularly surprise me. One of Atlassian's initiatives this last year due to COVID was offering a bunch of training for free through the Atlassian community, which was awesome, help people skill up and get access stuff. They've launched a bunch of free stuff and they highlight the most popular training videos by [inaudible 00:32:21] Jira basic, 67%.

Matthew Stublefield:

At the same time when I dig into this, I see that they're conflating popular with view count, not necessarily likes on a video or shares or NPS scores or anything like that. It appears to just be views, which doesn't actually mean something that's popular or that they like it, just that they viewed it. We were having this conversation just around meaningfulness with statistics and conclusions you can draw. How do you use those to influence your strategy development and your goal setting for the future? How do you use that to drive change? Looking back through the last couple of years of the community stats, it does makes me wonder like, "What changes there are?"

Matthew Stublefield:

Because even going back to 2018, which was the first year they did this, 17 and a half million total visitors, 16.9 million of them being new. There's a huge turnover in community visitors and our visitors just coming once, so it can mean multiple times. There's really big stats on the views by content type and 70 million question views, 57,000 questions with 74,000 answers. It's a fairly low engagement rate overall. I see the same thing on the YouTube videos when you look at the proportion of likes to views, it's lower than the YouTube average across all YouTube views, about 40% lower than the average across all YouTube videos.

Matthew Stublefield:

What I would be interesting and if anybody from the Atlassian Community Team is listening and wants to have a chat with us about it or either on the podcast or off, would love to talk more about where you're headed next? It looks like it's been a fairly stable trend the last few years, but when dealing with such a large and diverse community, because Atlassian is now a worldwide software organization, how do you increase engagement? If you're getting tons of new people in, that funnel is super wide, it's almost unbelievable. 19 million new users in a year, but if only three to 5% of them stick around year to year and is it the same? Is it that same one million users that's actually from last year that stuck around or two years ago? Maybe there's a small core people sticking around year to year, but then all new people are leaving. I don't know. It'd be interesting to dig into this more deeply and then explore changes you can make to be get it be stickier to increase engagement.

Matthew Stublefield:

We have seen, I think some changes to how the discussion forums work over the last year to the badging and introduce some gamification. I've seen an increase in email, like automated emails that go out that prompt you to come back and re-engage. I think they are taking steps, but that's the type of thing I would love to see more of from the Atlassian community and the leaders in the future, not just look at the number of views, but more information on how they're using that knowledge, that information, that data to drive improvements in the Atlassian community platform and engaging with users. Next year, we'll look at 2021, but if it's the same thing, if the trend continues, it's going to be... There's 25 million total visitors this year and 26 million or 24 million are new.

Ryan Spilken:

But only one of them is the most active leader, winner award and Adaptavist colleague, Nic Brough. There could be only one Nick.

Brenda Burrell:

Hi, Nic.

Matthew Stublefield:

Always be posting.

Ryan Spilken:

That's it for this edition of Adaptavist Live. It looks like we're going to have a lot more news in the coming weeks with team just around the corner. Thanks for listening. Be sure to connect with us on social and read the transcript along with our show notes on adaptavist.com. From Matthew Stublefield and Brenda Burrell, I'm Ryan Spilken and we'll see you next time on Adaptavist Live.