Bamboo
Features – Collaboration
Builds are not just for looking at. Bamboo allows your team to collaborate around their builds.
Label your builds your way
With Bamboo, you can label your builds in whatever way works best for your team. Easily create labels for builds and view the most frequently used labels. This fosters communication between teams by cross-referencing builds across projects.
You can even tailor your notifications by subscribing to an RSS feed of all builds tagged with a particular label that interests you.
Usage example
Your QA team can not review every build and it can be hard to tell which builds they have reviewed. By using labels such as "QA_passed" and "QA_failed", Bamboo allows them to simply indicate which builds have passed and failed QA.
A manager can then subscribe to an RSS feed of all builds with the label "QA_passed" to only be notified when any build passes a QA review.
Bamboo can also automatically apply labels to builds. This can be useful for things like labelling all builds of a certain project, or any build whose log matches a certain pattern.
Usage example
Your build process is occasionally running out of memory. All builds with logs containing "OutOfMemoryError"s can be automatically labelled "Out_of_Memory". This enables you to get a list of all builds where this problem occurred.
Capture your team's thoughts
Individual team members each have a wealth of knowledge about the intricacies of their code — but how do you ensure that their knowledge is captured and shared?
Bamboo provides a quick and easy comment facility via either the UI or instant messaging. Comments are shared instantly among the team via comment notifications.
Usage example
A developer records a quick commment on how they fixed a particular build failure. A different developer, perhaps in a different office, saves valuable time by having this information at their fingertips.
As well as relaying information about your builds and tests, the collection of comments builds up over time to form a knowledge base.
Collaborate using two-way instant messaging
Not only can you receive build notifications via IM, but you can talk back to Bamboo as well. Just reply in your chat session with either the word "comment" or "label" followed by your message, and your note will instantly be associated with the most recent build and sent to other developers. If you want to reference a past build, just include the build key as well.
This is a great way for a developer to collaborate with the team on any particular build while Bamboo automatically records the conversation in the build history.
Usage example: A developer receives an IM indicating a build has failed and quickly realises why. Using a quick reply to comment on how they plan to fix the build failure, all other developers associated with that particular build get notified within seconds.