Happy reading

Welcome to the Atlassian newsletter. This month the shiny, new SharePoint Connector for Confluence steals the show! Also, read about Agile processes, t-shirts for our new products, the reading list and more. Happy reading!

Introducing the SharePoint Connector for Confluence

Last week at the kick off the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, we announced our new SharePoint Connector for Confluence.

What is it?
In sum, the SharePoint Connector for Confluence does exactly what it sounds like it would do: allows customers to bridge the products together. Two separate collaboration repositories can live separately yet be used together. First generation features of the new plugin include cross-product search, content sharing, and linking. Single sign-on between the products is accomplished via Atlassian Crowd.

Continue reading or watch Robert Scoble's interview with Mike and Jeffrey about the announcement.

Atlassian Agile Process, Part 1

Atlassian adopts a range of development process elements with a strong focus on Agile methods. In practice each product team defines their own process while also attempting to learn from other teams. In JIRA and Confluence, the two largest teams pushing roughly 10 developers each, the process is a fairly complete adoption of Scrum plus XP (eXtreme Programming).

Continue reading.

New JIRA Plugin: GreenHopper for Agile Teams

One of the recurring religious debates in the agile community is paper cards vs. issue-tracking. One of our very own developers, Charles Miller, is a big fan of using paper cards for planning, although he is quick to note that the Confluence team uses cards in addition to JIRA.

So, what to do? Well, fortunately, Atlassian partner Pyxis has stepped in with a great solution. Take a look at GreenHopper. It's a full implementation of the Agile planning wall in a JIRA plugin. They just released version 1.2.1 with a host of hot new features.

If you haven't seen this yet, you owe it to yourself to take a look. It could change the way you use JIRA... forever. (Just pretend I said that in my best movie-trailer-guy voice.)

Where to next?

• Continue reading
• Get more info on the plugin homepage
• Watch an informative video on GreenHopper
  

Plugging Memory Leaks in Confluence

Recently the Confluence team became aware that our public facing instance, http://confluence.atlassian.com was slowly leaking memory. This blog entry is the story of how we found and fixed the leaks.

What makes us think there's a leak?
The initial reason we thought there might be a memory leak was because of the OutOfMemoryErrors occurring semi-regularly. However, that doesn't necessarily imply the app was leaking memory. It could just mean that periodically it received so much load from users that it needed more memory than it had.

The second clue was this graph of Confluence's memory usage. The red line shows the amount of memory used after a complete garbage collection is performed.

Continue reading about memory leaks in Confluence.

Clover 2.0 Spices Up Code Coverage

In case you haven't heard the news, Clover 2 was just released! Clover is one of our newer products thanks to the Cenqua acquisition. It shows your tests in a whole new light — telling engineers precisely what tests get executed by their code and how to build better software. We have spent a lot of time on Clover, forging the next level in code coverage testing tools.

• Continue reading
• Download Clover 2
• Browse the feature tour
• Buy Clover today

Wiki Usage Statistics at Atlassian

A commenter on a previous blog post asked how much use the Atlassian internal wiki gets. I have no idea if these statistics will be interesting to anyone, but somebody asked, right?

A bit of background first. Our internal Confluence instance has been running since late 2003, back when Atlassian had a staff count in the single digits. Since then we've pretty much doubled in size every year to our current total of around 125 staff. In that time we've amassed some decent numbers.

Continue reading to see all our wiki stats.

Atlassian Shirts: FishEye, Clover and Crucible

Hot off the printing presses: new Atlassian FishEye, Crucible and Clover shirts. New enterprise customers (that purchased since our acquisition of Cenqua on August 1st) will be receiving theirs in the mail shortly. They're also for sale on the Atlassian store.

See all 3 t-shirts here.

Distributed Agile Development Best Practices From Atlassian & GlobalLogic

Join us on November 1, 2007 at 10 am PT for a free webinar hosted by GlobalLogic, an Atlassian partner, to discuss Agile development practices. The webinar "Distributed Agile Development Best Practices From Atlassian & GlobalLogic" focuses on challenges and solutions of developing applications amongst distributed engineering teams.

Continue reading.

Our Reading List

Here are a few of the blogs and sites we've been tagging around the office:

• Think you can't draw diagrams with HTML and CSS, right? Think again.
• We have some hardcore Mac users at Atlassian, so of course this nightmare was tagged: "How I PC'd an Apple GD"
• Interesting study here on the brain of visionary people vs everyone else.
• Startup tips anyone? Our co-founder, Mike offers some in this video interview. While we're talking Mike, flip through an informative slideshow he posted called Organisational Wiki Adoption.

Thanks for Reading

Thanks for your time! Stay tuned to our blogs for new posts on SharePoint Connector, Clover 2 and all things Atlassian.

Cheers!
Your Mates at Atlassian

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