Happy Reading

Welcome to the Atlassian Newsletter. This month... Atlassian signs an OEM agreement with WANdisco, learn about our plugin support policy, read our first Crowd case study and lots more. Happy reading!

Talking Nerdy

Developers really do have a language of their own, one which can be hard for non-developers to decipher. A terse sentence fired over IM can communicate reams of information. "It's a kludge, but put the tuple from the database in the cache."

The problem is — as this video shows — even developers themselves can have a hard time understanding each other.

Introducing WANdisco's JIRA MultiSite and JIRA Clustering

We're excited to announce a new OEM agreement with WANdisco. They have developed a new product, JIRA MultiSite and JIRA Clustering (one product, two configurations) that offers high availability and scalability for JIRA.

Some of the features of JIRA MultiSite include:

• Allowing IT organisations to gain immediate visibility into individual issue and overall project status across all development sites
• Balancing workload across servers at multiple locations
• No single point of failure since there is no sharing of disk, CPU or memory between servers with JIRA MultiSite

JIRA Clustering allows for:

• Clustering over a LAN to balance workload across multiple JIRA servers at a single location
• Each server in the cluster to have its own independent database replica that is kept in sync with all of the others
• Failover and automated disaster recovery to insure business continuity

Continue reading.

Atlassian Supported Plugins

Our community of plugin developers is extremely generous with their help. However, some customers have asked for a more formal support channel. Others have asked for Atlassian to offer guidance about which plugins we feel are the most well-tested, stable and reliable.

I'm happy to announce a fairly significant change to how we deal with these user-contributed plugins by way of the first set of "Atlassian Supported" plugins. We've selected about a dozen of the most useful and widely-used Confluence plugins, and are designating them as "Atlassian Supported". What does that mean exactly? Well, to start, that means that we've reviewed the plugins and made sure that they have met certain criteria. A supported plugin must:

• be available in Developer Network SVN
  
• have its dependencies in the Developer Maven Repository
  
• have a JIRA project
  
• have a Bamboo Project
  
• be in the plugin repository (for Confluence)
  
• have unit and functional tests with a certain amount of code-coverage
  
• have complete, accurate and attractive documentation on Confluence
  
• display a compatibility matrix for the last three product releases
  
• be internationalised

Continue reading.

My Tests Touched What?!

Mapping a test to the classes, methods, even lines that it executed has to be my favorite new feature in Clover2. This is called per-test coverage in Clover2, and helps answer the following questions:

Which tests cover class X?
Many projects dutifully begin following a test-naming convention such as XTestCase.testYYY. This convention falls apart quicker than it takes you to google "Behavior Driven Development", or as soon as you have to write a regression test for a bug you just found.

Every line of source code has the following pop-up in a Clover2 report:

Continue reading.

Introducing... JIRA Studio

We're proud to introduce the newest addition to the Atlassian product portfolio — JIRA Studio. JIRA Studio is a hosted development suite, combining best-of-breed coding tools with JIRA's issue tracking and workflow engine to create an integrated development platform.

JIRA Studio integrates:

• JIRA - the world's best issue tracker
• Confluence - the enterprise wiki
• FishEye - repository viewer
• Crucible - peer code review
• Crowd - user management and single sign-on
• Subversion (SVN) - bullet-proof version control

A preliminary website has been launched for JIRA Studio at http://jira.com. Head over and take a look at the details, screenshots, etc., and if you're interested, sign up for our mailing list so you know when the beta version will release.

Learn more about how JIRA Studio links between all the different applications.

Atlassian Helps Drive the World of Warcraft Economy

Okay, I'll admit it — I love playing World of Warcraft. Not that it's an unusual thing to admit — there are 9 million people paying US$15 each month to participate in this multi-player online gaming universe. (Do the math and you'll realise what a money-spinner it is for Blizzard!)

And, now, I've got one more reason to play due to Atlassian's support of an Open Source project used by many of those 9 million players. In fact, WoW uses a community license of JIRA, FishEye and Crucible!

Continue reading.

Caption Competition

Featuring Chris Owen, senior Confluence developer:

Announcing Enterprise Hosting

Did you know that we recently announced public availability of Enterprise Hosting for JIRA and Confluence? Enterprise Hosting is a great way to start using our wiki and issue-tracker without an upfront investment or dedicated IT resources. Your only concern is focusing on your business, not system and application administration.

A few features of Enterprise Hosting:

• Dedicated (non-shared) instance of JIRA or Confluence
• Ability to create custom themes in Confluence
• Integration with your existing applications via LDAP, API access, etc.
• Enable anonymous access
• Manage your own plugins

Enterprise Hosting is our second hosted offering following last February's launch of our popular Confluence Hosted. In less than a year, we've had nearly ten thousand people sign-up to try Confluence Hosted, which makes us even more excited to expand our hosted offerings to other products.

Continue reading.

SSO Integration: How Crowd Connected the Apps

We're excited to introduce our first Crowd case study! Learn how Appfire Technologies connected Crowd to a handful of different applications, including Salesforce.com.

Our Reading List

Here are some blogs and sites we've been tagging in our office:

• Join the discussion on how multi-core may be bad for Java.
• Have you seen the Datamancer's steampunk Victorian laptop yet?
• Get the lowdown on exactly how we're optimising postgreSQL pl/pgsql queries to improve our online ordering system at Atlassian.
• Looking to procrastinate more? Check out BuyMyDrink's procrastination flow chart.

Thanks for Reading

If you're in London on 6 December, 2007, come to our partners' Atlassian User Group.

Cheers!
Your Mates at Atlassian

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