Transcript: The Atlassian Ecosystem Podcast Ep. 143: An Egregious Oversight

Ryan Spilken:

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Atlassian Ecosystem Podcast. This is episode 143, An Egregious Oversight, and we are just so guilty, everyone. It's like we're putting ourselves out there for public penance right now for this egregious oversight that we've made. Who's we, that you might be wondering? Well, I'm your host Ryan Spilken, and joining me today as my co-conspirator is Brenda Burrell. Hi, Brenda.

Brenda Burrell:

Hi.

Ryan Spilken:

And not to be outdone by a couple of hardened criminals like ourselves, the egregious oversight comes down to our guest host today. And that guest host is the inimitable, one and only, one of a kind, Adaptavist's chief technology officer, John Mort. Hi, John.

Jon Mort:

Hi, Ryan. Hi, everyone. It's nice to be here. Thanks for having me.

Brenda Burrell:

And that right there is our egregious oversights. Viewers at home, in the three and a half years that we have been doing this podcast, not once, not twice, not thrice, not ever has John Mort appeared on this podcast. And when he joined our Zoom session to record this episode, we were completely baffled with ourselves that we had allowed such an egregious oversight to occur, hence the name of our episode. So to rectify our most glaring mistake, John Mort, would you like to take a minute to tell our viewers at home a little bit about yourself?

Jon Mort:

Ah. Well, yeah. Thanks. Well, I'm John, CCO at Adaptavist, and I've been for nearly a year now. But I've been in the Atlassian ecosystem for 13 years or so and everything, so a long time around, and I've been with Adaptavist for 12 of those. I stick around when I go somewhere.

Ryan Spilken:

Now, I'm very curious about that first year. If you've been in the ecosystem for 13, and with us for 12, I want to know about the first one. But we're going to have to pick that apart at another time, maybe in your interrogation session, when we get the lights on you and play good cop, bad cop.

Brenda Burrell:

I'm the bad cop, by the way.

Ryan Spilken:

All right. Well, we are going to get this started as we always do with our heads in the Atlassian cloud, where there are quite a few interesting features that roll down in the past couple of weeks. So let's start with the JIRA platform, where, in the issue view, the maximum number of displayed child issues has increased to 500. I want to know who was ringing up Atlassian to say, "100 child issues is just not enough. We're just going to need some more on my monitor." If you're looking at this on a normal laptop, what? If you're looking at this on a Batman bat cave array of 10 monitors, it's still a bit like what? But anyway.

Brenda Burrell:

Ryan, do you mean tell you don't have a bat cave set up of monitors?

Ryan Spilken:

I think John Mort does, right?

Jon Mort:

I have one additional screen.

Ryan Spilken:

That counts.

Brenda Burrell:

That counts.

Ryan Spilken:

No, it does. And our CIO, I know, has a back cave display of monitors, but have either of you ever needed to see more than-

Brenda Burrell:

100?

Ryan Spilken:

More than 50?

Jon Mort:

I can't conceive of it. I just don't get it.

Ryan Spilken:

Well, Brenda's counting. You can't see it at home, but she's-

Brenda Burrell:

I'm doing some math. There's some equations floating around in my head.

Ryan Spilken:

Yeah. The graphics are all popping up.

Brenda Burrell:

Yeah. Child issues, I can't think of anywhere I've had more than more than 50. I've certainly had searches where I've had more than hundreds of results, but I'm thinking of an issue with more than 100 child issues, and I can't come up with anything. But if I had that situation, now I know I could.

Ryan Spilken:

Well, you know what? Atlassian claims that you can still have more than 500 child issues, but in order to view those, you'll need to see them in search. Wow. Okay. Also new in the JIRA platform are updates to the on call feature in JIRA. Atlassian has enabled the on call features in your company or team managed JIRA software project, which your admin can enable or disable. And finally, in company managed projects all across the JIRA platform, you can now move fields around to change the issue layout. I'm interested. Atlassian's description says change the issue layout of a company managed project by dragging fields. Doesn't work on my instance yet, but as soon as it does, I'll give you a report on what that's like.

Brenda Burrell:

Stay tuned. Over in the world of JIRA software on cloud, in JIRA roadmaps, the issue limit has been increased from 3,000 to 5,000 issues. And I'm quoting here, "Bask in the glory of longer, more detailed project plans. Your roadmap can now show 5,000 issues instead of the paltry 3000 issues it could before. Much planning, very issues." Wow.

Ryan Spilken:

Wow.

Brenda Burrell:

I can't embellish that. It's already perfection. Chef kiss whoever wrote that. Over in both company managed and team managed projects, you can now view development information on the board. If you've connected a source code management tool to your JIRA project and your team is using issue keys and poll requests, commit messages and branch names, you will now see the development information on your JIRA board. Icons are displayed on issue cards to indicate when there is a poll request, commit, or branch linked to an issue.

Brenda Burrell:

Hover over one of these icons to view more details about whichever, and then click through to view the development activity in your connected tool. So, just additional visibility into the development process on a particular JIRA issue. Very nice. Also, in team managed projects, sub tasks are now included when searching with a JQL sprint clause. There was a bug where search results using the JQL sprint clause did not include sub tasks, that has been resolved. Sub tasks are now going to be included in the search results if they belong to the query to sprint. Useful bug fix. That's an important one.

Ryan Spilken:

And you'll see all 500 of them.

Brenda Burrell:

Yes, you will. Over on the release page, if you've integrated a CICD tool with your JIRA site and your team includes issue keys and branch names, commit messages, and poll requests, you will now have a new column called deployments, which will show an icon to indicate whether an issue has been deployed successfully, and a label to tell you what environment it has been deployed to. So again, just further visibility into that development process. In your roadmap view, you can now filter by component to focus in on the work that matters the most to you. You can filter issues based on assigned component when looking at your roadmap view. There will be a link to additional information on filtering issues on a page we will link to in our show notes. It's links all the way down.

Brenda Burrell:

In team managed projects, there are now new keyboard shortcuts. You can quickly sort issues in your board and backlog, choose an issue, and on your keyboard, select S then T to send it to the top of the list, select S then B to send it to the bottom. Nifty. And last but not least for JIRA software, new settings for completed epics on your roadmap. Define how many completed issues appear on your timeline using the new issue display range function in the view settings menu. You can set your timeline to show completed parent level issues from the last 1, 3, 6, 9, or 12 months. You can also choose to hide all completed parent level issues.

Jon Mort:

So onto JIRA service management, the insight field is now on the statistics gadgets. Reading from the notes, we know that using dashboards to analyze how certain fields and features are being used by your team is incredibly useful, so we've brought that functionality to insight fields. Just like the server version, playing some catch up here I guess, you can now analyze your insight fields in JIRA's service management, using gadgets when configuring a dashboard. These gadgets include pie charts. That's one for our head of product, Jari.

Ryan Spilken:

He loves them.

Jon Mort:

Yeah. It does heat maps, two-dimensional field statistics, and issue statistic gadgets, I guess in keeping with we need to see more things as the performance and scale improvements for loading queues. And looking at this, I pity the team that has more than 1,000 issues in their queue. I really do. But anyway, if you have more than 1,000 issues in the queue, the issue count badge will show 999+. I'm speechless. I don't know. I think you would be in such a bad place if you had that many issues in your queue. Send help.

Ryan Spilken:

Yeah. Just thinking about seeing a 999+ in a sidebar gives me anxiety.

Jon Mort:

Yeah. I can imagine you just want to shut your laptop and walk away, at that point. So the other thing that's been improved is that you can access more help articles within GSM. We've updated the links with GSM to open support articles and the help panel, so that should save time. Generally, looks like a nice little improvement, and quickly identify comments from external email. This is something that's bitten me a few times, actually, is actually knowing when someone's a request participant, and whether they're actually going to get updates or not, so that is a welcome improvement.

Ryan Spilken:

Next for JIRA work management, you are now able to create a project from the left sidebar navigation. Atlassian states you can now easily create a project from the sidebar on the left, by selecting the plus symbol next to your current project's title. I feel like this is a bit of a linguistic kerfuffle, because when you click this plus button, it's not creating a new JIRA project, it's creating a new set of JIRA work management. It's a new divider for JIRA work management.

Brenda Burrell:

That's not going to be confusing at all.

Ryan Spilken:

I am actually confused.

Brenda Burrell:

I am confused. Atlassian, if you're listening, we are confused. Please fix this.

Ryan Spilken:

Send help.

Brenda Burrell:

Send help.

Ryan Spilken:

I want to produce a project from JIRA work man... Wait a minute. Anyway...

Brenda Burrell:

Over in confluence, you can now easily create pages and blog posts in a new tab from any create button. Rather than navigating away from where you are to create a new page or blog post, you can use shortcut combinations to open a new browser tab. You can create in various places, including global, create in the product navigation, contextual create for a blog, or pages or page at any level in the page tree in the space side bar.

Brenda Burrell:

So those are three separate things, but you can create them in the space side bar. You can create content in a new tab by pressing and holding the control key if you're using Windows, or the command key if you're using Mac, and then selecting the create button. You can also right click on a create button and select open in a new tab. So this, what they're really saying is you can use the browser to do things the browser does. This is how I've interacted with JIRA and Confluence for 15 years-

Ryan Spilken:

And literally every other website or thing that you access through the browser. Well, I think the next set of instructions is going to be how you can use the command and tilde key to switch between windows. And if you haven't learned that one yet, I don't know what you're... And listen, control tab will let you flip through tabs in Safari. These are big things coming from Atlassian.

Brenda Burrell:

Well done, Atlassian, on learning how browsers work. So do with that information what you will. Enjoy.

Jon Mort:

I guess the next direction we're heading in is Compass. Sorry.

Ryan Spilken:

Oh, Jon, you're doing great.

Jon Mort:

The joke that no one's ever made before. So on Compass, you can now view or assign com component ownership from the dependencies list. So component ownership information is now visible on the dependency list page, so you can see which team owns components, and assign or change component ownership without leaving that dependency view into Compass as a project. I think it makes a big difference to the usability, and that, I think, is a product that's evolving pretty fast. I'm pretty interested in Compass as a tool for enabling whole teams to know more about what they're doing, so I'm kind of curious about where it's going.

Ryan Spilken:

Well, John, we would point out that you'd be the first person on the podcast to vaguely understand Compass, and that's really good. But what I think that I and Brenda and possibly some of our listeners could use is a little bit of clarity around a component in Compass, and then say a component that you can filter your roadmap on in your own JIRA project. Are those two going to connect, or is there going to be this linguistic separation that we have to get used to?

Jon Mort:

It would depend on how a team is using it. So you could be consistent throughout things, but I can imagine certain team organizations having that diverge. It's all about how you model your projects and your architectures as software gets gets shipped, so there might be some dancing, or it might all be in sync.

Brenda Burrell:

So that's it for our cloud news. We'll shift back over to some updates for on-prem. We'll start with Confluence, 7.17.2, a bug fix release for Confluence that was released on the 10th of May, 2022. So this would be for data center and server, resolves three issues. One bug, you could not create an issue in JIRA cloud from a Confluence on-prem environment. JMX metrics job fills up Atlassian/Confluence.log with performance metrics, in spite of having its own log file. Nothing like writing all your stuff to someone else's log file. It's just rude. And then fast permissions do not support users with more than 1,000 groups. So those have all been resolved in 7.17.2. If you are running an older version, please do take a look at these release notes and decide if this is a bug fix release that will be useful in your organization.

Jon Mort:

So I guess the big release in this server DC world is Bitbucket, so it's the Bitbucket 8 release. This is a .0, so there's quite a lot in there. And it is something that we've been dealing with for the past few months, with early access programs and things for getting script ready is a fairly substantial change on a number of things. But the ticket type feature is Bitbucket mesh, which kind of changes how you can scale your Bitbucket just in installation, and it brings distributed git storage to multi-node data center. I'm really interested to see how teams roll this out and how they end up using it, but it should bring increased performance and high availability for repositories, so something for the big installations.

Jon Mort:

Other things, the release is decluttering unused repositories. This is something to make repositories read only, but make it available so you can now effectively archive repositories to indicate that you're no longer maintaining it, and that drops it from searches and things like that. Just a nice quality of life update. A few updates to the diff view, so hopefully that'll look nicer. There's just a whole load of additional things, so I'd encourage you to just check out the release notes before you consider the .0 release.

Ryan Spilken:

They couldn't be bothered to give us a sick gif of the diff in a diff. I'd love to see the new views, but no gif.

Jon Mort:

One thing that is notable is that there's no longer Windows service support, so you can no longer host Bitbucket on Windows, which is something that they've been flagging for awhile was going to happen, and they finally dropped Windows service support. That's a fairly big thing for those of you running Windows shops.

Ryan Spilken:

Is that H2 Database migration requirement something that our listeners would be benefited to know about?

Jon Mort:

I think if you were using H2 in production, you've got a whole lot more problems than this migration requirements. So I think you're sending out some smoke signals "send help" if you're using H2.

Brenda Burrell:

In addition to the release notes for Bitbucket Data Center and server 8.0, Atlassian has also posted a blog post around changes to deleting snippet comments. So previously, only the author of a snippet comment could delete their own comments. Moving forward, snippet owners in workspace admins will have the ability to delete a snippet comment via API or the UI. The aim here is to give users a self-service option for moderating snippet comments, instead of having to contact the support team for assistance. This blog post gives instructions on how to delete a snippet comment. Alas, no sick gifs here either. Come on, Bitbucket team. We're missing our sick gifs. But if you are looking to delete a snippet comment that you did not author, there are instructions on how to do this, and we'll link this blog post in the show notes.

Ryan Spilken:

Given that this is through the API, is this only for Bitbucket cloud, or does this look like it can be done on either platform?

Brenda Burrell:

This looks to me like it is cloud. It doesn't say.

Jon Mort:

Yeah, this'll be cloud. This is something, we used to use Bitbucket snippets quite a bit for putting code snippets and things, and we used to get a ton of spam on it. And every time, to get some spam removed, you got to open up a support ticket, and it's a whole lot of hassle, so we're pretty pleased to see this, and particularly in the support team. It makes it usable again for snippets.

Ryan Spilken:

And finally, for this episode of the Atlassian Ecosystem Podcast, Atlassian has announced that you, yes you, no, no, Siri, no you. Yes. Yep, with the shirt, you should get pumped for Developer Day 2022. Are you ready to hear the community speak? Because anything's possible, is what they say. Now, it just so happens that we have someone who knows a little bit about Developer Day here today, and that's John Mort. So John, tell us about Developer Day. Why should our listeners be interested?

Jon Mort:

Well, Developer Day, I'm really excited about it because previous Developer Days have been kind of what Atlassian has wanted to tell us in their things, and they've very much pushed the pushed the agenda, but this year they opened it out to include more of the communities. So about half of the talks for Developer Day are from the wider Atlassian ecosystem, and as part of that, they included a couple of people from the ecosystem on the talk panel to [inaudible 00:22:18] and select talks, so that was myself and Remy from Collabsoft.

Jon Mort:

So Developer Day is all about building on the platform that Atlassian provide, so there's talks on Forge, as you'd expect. There's talks on Connect and NP2 development, so there should be something for everyone. If you're doing anything with building on the platform, writing apps on the marketplace or they're just internal apps, then I'd check it out. There'll be some there's some good content.

Ryan Spilken:

John, Forge is that new hotness that Atlassian wants everybody writing their cloud apps on, but Connect, what's going on there? I thought Connect was sort of being quietly pushed aside, but here it is, right up front. NP2, I was not expecting that.

Jon Mort:

Yeah. And this has been the ask from the community for a long while, is to talk more about the things that people are actually using. So Forge is the future, yes, there's things there, but people are building businesses on Connect, which is the cloud apps, and for a server in DC, which is the NP2 development platform. The ask has been, "Let's talk about the now as well as the future." It's like yes, we're excited for Forge, but we have the situation in the present.

Ryan Spilken:

So contrary to popular belief, Connect and P2, not going anywhere anytime soon.

Jon Mort:

No, they can't. There's too much value being shipped on them, and Forge yet has a long way to go to plug that gap for the things. Maybe we'll be having a different conversation in five years time, but I don't think it's going anywhere.

Ryan Spilken:

Well, Jon, speaking of five years time, do you think we can get you back as a cohost, as a guest sometime on the Atlassian Ecosystem Podcast? It's been a lot of fun having you here today.

Jon Mort:

Well, I've enjoyed myself. This has been great, so I'd love to see you again.

Brenda Burrell:

Well, we're delighted to have you, and again, apologies for having waited three and a half years to make this happen.

Ryan Spilken:

An egregious oversight, indeed.

Brenda Burrell:

Egregious.

Ryan Spilken:

And that's it for this addition of the Atlassian Ecosystem Podcast. Thank you so much for listening, we really appreciate it. You want to get a hold of us, be sure to reach out on social media at Adaptavist. So, for Brenda Burrell and John Mort, I'm Ryan Spilken, and thanks again for joining us on the Atlassian Ecosystem Podcast, part of the Adaptavist Live network of shows.