Skip to main content

The Atlassian Ecosystem Podcast Ep. 105 - Never Gonna Give Cloud Up

Ryan Spilken
Ryan Spilken
10 December 20
live

Show Notes

On this episode of the podcast, Brenda, Danny, and Ryan dive into updates from Atlassian including...

ScriptRunner for Confluence: Replace text on multiple pages
www.adaptavist.com/blog/find-and-r…onfluence-pages

Atlassian Cloud Updates November 2-16 confluence.atlassian.com/cloud/blog/2…o-nov-9-2020

confluence.atlassian.com/cloud/blog/2…-nov-16-2020

Jira Service Desk is now Jira Service Management:
www.atlassian.com/blog/announcemen…rvice-management

Confluence 7.9:
confluence.atlassian.com/doc/confluen…6537698.html

Bitbucket Cloud New Code Review Experience: bitbucket.org/blog/new-cloud-cod…-review-experience

We also preview next week's episode of #TeamTitans with special guest, EasyAgile Co-CEO Nick Muldoon.

Thanks for listening! Please subscribe, like, share, comment, review, or whatever you like to do with podcasts these days on our page, and get in touch with us on social @ Adaptavist

Transcript

Ryan Spilken: Hello and welcome to Adaptivity Live, The Atlassian Ecosystem Podcast. This is episode 105, Never Going to Give Cloud Up. Rick Astley is not here today. I'm your host, Ryan Spilken, and I'm joined by Brenda Burrell and Danny Coleman. Brenda, Danny hello.

Brenda Burrell: Hello.

Danny Coleman: Howdy.

Ryan Spilken: It is worth noting that we are recording this episode on Tuesday, November 17th, which also happens to be known as a very important holiday. Brenda Burrell's birthday. Happy birthday Brenda.

Brenda Burrell: Thank you both. It's been a great day.

Ryan Spilken: That is so awesome to hear and a bright spot in the year that is 2020, but not to dwell. We're not going to spiral today folks. We've got a lot of Atlassian news to cover, and I think we're going to start with you, Danny. Huh?

Danny Coleman: Oh yeah. Let's get going. We are talking about Jira Service Management, which is sort of a rebrand of Jira Service Desk but not just a rebrand because there's a lot that is changing. We're talking about full service management capabilities. IT Service Management is where Atlassian is looking to double down here. And they're bringing functionality from Opsgenie into Jira Service Desk. Sorry Jira Service Management. Got to get used to that. We're talking about on-call scheduling, alerting, incidents swarming. A lot of what Opsgenie brings to the table is now going to be integrated into Jira Service Management in the cloud, as well as deeper integrations with software, Jira software Bitbucket, Confluence, more change management focused around DevOps.

So being able to automate risk assessments, advanced approval workflows, deep integrations with Bitbucket Pipelines, Jenkins, that kind of thing. So, this is really a sea change in terms of how Atlassian is presenting their service management offering to the ecosystem. And what we're going to see here in the future, it looks like even is their Insight and Bit bucket integration. That's not there yet, but Mindville Insight and Bit bucket will in the long run be coming to Jira Service Management. What do you all make of this? This is huge.

Brenda Burrell: It is huge. A number of these things are challenges that have faced our customers for a long time. We've partnered with many clients to build a lot of this exact list into Jira, Jira Service Desk. How do we handle asset management? How do we handle change requests, change management, incident management? A lot of these things are currently, you have to build them by hand. And so this is going to solve a lot of problems for a lot of customers. And to have it built in is just going to make things so much more smooth and seamless for IT groups in particular. But if you're following ITSM methodologies, life got a whole lot easier for you.

Ryan Spilken: Yeah. That's where the big value add is, is in just having the tools at hand to support the stuff that's on the books. Now I do think this is humorous, because long-time podcast listeners might remember when we actually spoke with Tommy Villein of the company formerly known as Insight. The former owner of Insight. And I don't know if he knew at the time or if the discussions had begun, but he was really optimistic about the addition of asset management into the Jira platform as it was. And their product was a spectacular tool for doing it. So then that's-

Brenda Burrell: Yes.

Ryan Spilken: Coming to the thing. It's just, it looks great. They've done a great job of putting something together and big ups to you. We look forward to reporting on the new versions as they roll out.

Danny Coleman: Yeah and one last note about this is, no surprise, cloud is the big hitter here. So you get that Opsgenie integration natively in cloud. If you're looking for on-prem, you can get it, but it's not integrated by default. And we'll see if Insight and Bit bucket follow suit when they're available.

Ryan Spilken: Yeah. The article that we will link you to in the show notes doesn't have a solid release date for server edition. Does it? There's no on-prem edition, excuse me. I should restate-

Danny Coleman: Right.

Ryan Spilken: In light of the past two weeks.

Danny Coleman: Yes, it is coming soon TM.

Ryan Spilken: To Data Center, of course.

Danny Coleman: Right? Yeah.

Ryan Spilken: Well, we are trying something new on the podcast today, and we would sure like our listeners' feedback about it. Instead of breaking down the Atlassian products into cloud versus server. We're just going to break them into software. So the section on Jira will include both cloud and on-prem editions. If you like that, let us know. If you don't like it, also let us know. If you're completely indifferent, let us know. So let's go ahead and check out what's new in Jira and all that's new in Jira this week is from the Cloud. And most of it comes in the form of updates to advance roadmaps. They've rolled out a feature which will allow you to see when an issue has been assigned to both a Kanban team in a sprint. So, Kanban teams don't operate on sprints, but you could theoretically assign an issue in a program view to a team that doesn't sprint.

So you'll get a warning when that happens. Speaking of Kanban, they've improved again, the combined capacity algorithm to be able to let issues spill over into any remaining capacity that you have left. If you have an issue that's going to take 40 hours over the course of two weeks, instead of allotting 20 hours per week, roadmaps is going to assign as many hours as possible in week one and then spill anything over into week two. So that seems like a better way to handle that. Also, you will be able to filter by epics in your Pipeline view. Being able to see a release from the top-down from the portfolio all the way down into the actual code commits with deployment pipelines and sortable as well, which is kind of nice. You also have some options to customize the roadmap. You can display all incomplete or complete epics with or without dependencies progress and so on, and then set your timeframe to your liking so you can switch.

So this custom view is now available throughout the Jira platform. You're also able to see, get repository information in Jira. Something that you get a deeper, basically it's surfacing information from your code builds into your Jira issues. So a cleaner, more transparent view for the DevOps operators among us. And finally for Jira Cloud, the sidebar navigation has some new sections. So under the 'Operations' heading in your sidebar, you're going to find Services, On-call and Alerts if they're enabled. You've got a knowledge base, which will let you see your knowledge and reports and under 'Customers and people' you can see your channels, your team invites, and so on. You can also add your own links with shortcuts and that's it for Jira this week.

Danny Coleman: Skipping on the Confluence, and we'll start with cloud. Big update in the mobile iOS version of Confluence Cloud 2.74 offers dark mode. So for those of you looking to reduce eyestrain, dark mode is here for Confluence Cloud. And they make note in the release notes that this is just the first alteration, they are asking for feedback. So, definitely seems like something we might get some updates for as we go.

Ryan Spilken: I love a dark mode.

Danny Coleman: Right? Anything that can have dark mode.

Brenda Burrell: Everything should have dark mode.

Danny Coleman: Dark mode. Yeah. In addition to dark mode, there's also a new macro available for decisions. So Confluence in the Cloud has decision elements that you can have on your meeting notes page and whatnot, but they didn't have anywhere where you could really aggregate decisions from across multiple pages. Now we have a decision report macro that you can insert into your pages, pull all your decisions from across your instance or across multiple pages and see where all your decision points lie in one place. So that is Confluence Cloud. And then for Confluence on-prem 7.9 has been released as of November 10th. And there's some pretty big updates. The first one is for Data Center we now have the ability to upgrade your Confluence instance without any downtime, as long as you're talking about-

Brenda Burrell: Whoo-too.

Danny Coleman: Yeah. As long as you're talking about a bug fix release within the same build number, then you can upgrade across multiple nodes without ever taking the instance itself down.

Brenda Burrell: It's nice.

Ryan Spilken: That is slick.

Brenda Burrell: That's very nice.

Danny Coleman: Obviously, no downtime upgrades are going to be a huge factor, if you have a mission critical instance of Confluence that you need to keep up. Though, if you do need to upgrade to a new build number of safe going from Confluence 7.9 to 7.10 or something like that, then that is going to be still. Then that is still going to require some downtime. Another new upgrade for Confluence is Personal Access Tokens for APIs. So, if you have to deal with tokens for your APIs you know why this is important, much safer alternative to using a username and password for authenticating your API. We're also going to see some performance improvements for very, very large instances of Confluence. So, reduction in CPU usage, quicker loading for large complex instances is going to be a lot faster with some of the performance improvements they rolled out.

Finally, if you're using office files in your Confluence pages, they've reworked how those pages load in Confluence 7.9 what'll happen now is the page itself minus any Word, Excel or PowerPoint files will load. And then once the rest of the page is loaded, then it'll load in Word, Excel and PowerPoint macros. So it's making sure that it gets the rest of your content first and then the office documents come in. And that's great because sometimes those files are really large and prevents just that one file could prevent the entire page from loading. Now you get the bulk of your content and then anything that's really large is going to come in after. So it gets your content to your users quicker. And then there's also some other bug fixes that we will link notes to in the show notes. And that's Confluence.

Brenda Burrell: We're at Bitbucket. This week we have news for Bitbucket Cloud. Some new features that are being added that are kind of exciting. If you're using Visual Studio Code, you don't have the option to view in VS Code directly in the dropdown, in the pull request menu. So you get a whole new dialogue in cloning a repository when you're in the pull request, you can now get directly to VS Code. Just integrates that IDE a little bit better. They've also edited some really cool metrics that allow you to see into your build CPU and memory usage. I think that is super slick. That's going to give you a... For instance, if your build is running and using a lot of memory, you're going to get warnings on that. So a really nice feature for those of you that are running builds and cognizant that you're using system resources and everything.

The big news for Bitbucket Cloud is the new code review experience being available. Lots of nice new things. You now have a little, you have a right sidebar that is made up of what they're calling widgets. Everything is a widget in variably. But you have a lot that you can just get a real quick at a glance view of how things are going. So I can see that, checks have been passed. I can see that the bills have been passed. Tests have been resolved. I see what files are involved. I can see where they are in relation to the branches. There's a new activity feed. That's going to show your activity on that pull request. Giving you a quick overview of the activity since you last looked at it. Improved file tree navigation, visual representation of the file structure. I really like the way that looks, good design, clear iconography to show this is what we're talking about.

So here's this kind of file. Here's that kind of file. You can leave the inline comments in the side-by-side view. This is a really big thing. It's not particularly called out in the blog post, but anybody who does code reviews and looks at the side-by-side diff is going to love this. So you can still collaborate while you're comparing the diffs. No more having to go back and forth or keep multiple windows open. This tidies this up very nicely.

Danny Coleman: Did they give you any gifs of the diffs?

Brenda Burrell: There are no gifs of the diffs. There is a screenshot, but it is sadly lacking in anything moving any unicorns, any emoticons it's, it gets the job done. But they really missed an opportunity to gift the diffs. On that note, moving on, you have integrated code reports helping you to find and fix bugs quicker. You can get code quality reports from partners in the sidebar of the pull request directly. This is going to help a lot with finding bugs.

You can turn your feedback into actionable work. There's tasks in the pull requests that burry themselves, super quick fixes just, hey, do this one thing real quick, and then we'll be able to get this pull request to move through. Collaborate across teams with native Jira integration, so you can, as we're used to collaborate on the Jira tickets. It's a nice new experience. The screenshots are very thorough. Even if they're not gifs. It's more collaborative, it's more efficient, it's really nice. There's not a set rollout data just in the coming weeks you'll have the option to opt out. If you do want to opt in you can, click your avatar on the sidebar, go to Bitbucket labs and new pull request experience. Of course, we will be linking this blog post with all this info, but not enough gifs in the show notes for this podcast episode.

Ryan Spilken: It's worth noting that, now on top of the Atlassian Cloud update pages, they are putting an official notice that that new view is coming to everyone in 2021. So expect your view to change someday, but that you'll see at the top of the notes. And I suspect you'll see that at the top of the notes for the remainder of the time that the old view is available.

Brenda Burrell: I think the new view is really nice and folks are going to want to switch to it fairly quickly. It's got a lot of solid information, a lot of useful information. And like I said, this little bitty sentence in the middle of the blog post about, hey, inline comments in the diffs, that by itself is a reason to switch.

Ryan Spilken: Nice. And finally, from Adaptavist, we've put up a blog post that Confluence administrators are going to want to read, especially Confluence administrators that have access to ScriptRunner for Confluence. Why? You say that's a good question. Fair question. And here's why, because our very own Tiffany Wortham has outlined a method with which you can find and replace text across several Confluence pages at once. This has been one of the most common requests that I've heard from users in my entire time in the Atlassian Ecosystem. How can we replace texts on multiple pages at once? Well, Tiffany is first of all, a brilliant developer. I watched her do this live. I watched her write this code live and it was.. We did it on The champion, our webinar last week, and it was incredible. And so now we've shared the code and we've shared the insight on the Adaptivity blog. So if you want to replace Confluence text, we got it.

Brenda Burrell: This is magical. I mean-

Danny Coleman: It's fantastic. Go ahead. Sorry.

Brenda Burrell: Absolutely magical.

Danny Coleman: Yeah, this is fantastic. If you're a dev team that likes to use, for example, if you'd like to use code names for your projects. But then maybe you want to change those code names after it's already released, retroactively change all your documentation to reflect a new product name, for example. That's just one of a million use cases I can think of.

Ryan Spilken: Oh yeah. And the code that Tiffany gives you, gives you enough. You have enough rope to hang yourself with, if you want to change a lot more texts on a Confluence page, you can... It really, because it's already a script. If you want it to do other things while you're there, do so at your own risks. I mean don't tell anybody I told you to do that, but you've got enough code there to really get yourself into trouble. So-

Brenda Burrell: With great power comes great responsibility.

Ryan Spilken: And I think everybody listening to this podcast knows that, right? You guys know that.

Brenda Burrell: Absolutely.

Danny Coleman: But double-check your permissions just in case [crosstalk 00:19:12]

Ryan Spilken: And finally, next week on the Adaptivity Live podcast channel, we are so lucky to be joined by CEO of Atlassian partner, Easy Agile, Nick Muldoon. Here's a sneak preview of Nick's episode.

Nick Muldoon: And I probably did an overstep. I mentioned that I'm a bit of a broadcaster. I probably overstepped the mark and said, this is ridiculous. Like this is the furthest thing from agile. Like this is chaos. And it was like, Twitter was not a typical agile transformation. Most agile transformations are large enterprises that are trying to go from waterfall to agile, from very rigid bureaucratic processes to agile. Twitter was the opposite end of the spectrum. It was complete in abject chaos, and that were trying to bring some semblance of stability and discipline to what they were doing. And so the opportunity came up to actually join Twitter and help them on that journey. So I was an Atlassian team member, then an Atlassian customer at Twitter, and now onto an Atlassian marketplace partner at Easy Agile. So, it's been a bit of a journey through three different personas related to Atlassian over the years.

Brenda Burrell: Well, folks, thanks for tuning in today on this wonderful day that is my birthday. I appreciate you joining us. It's been a pleasure as always to discuss this with you. We hope you found this episode useful, as mentioned please do let us know if you like the slight change to the format of by application versus by platform. Like it, love it, hate it, lose it, ambivalent, let us know. Find us on social and as always we'll place the show notes or we'll place links to the articles that we have discussed in the show notes. So check all of those things out. They're super useful. Yeah. On behalf of Ryan Spilken and Danny Coleman, thanks so much for listening and we'll see you again in a couple of weeks.