We’ve been talking a lot in the past 6 weeks about how excellent tooling can compliment excellent on-the-ground processes, with a special eye toward the approach known as DevOps. For those just tuning in, DevOps is a shorthand way of saying “Hey, y’know how Agile brings product management, dev & QA together, and emphasizes automation? Wouldn’t it be awesome if we invited ops and IT to the party too?”
And it is pretty awesome. That’s why so many teams are interested in the cultural and technical practices that go along with it.
There is no tool that will magically transform you into a DevOps team. It’s each team’s commitment to breaking out of the ruts they’re in with repetitive manual processes and hand-off documents that makes the difference. What we’ve done with Bamboo 5 is create a tool to facilitate that. If you missed any of our preview blogs so far, here’s a recap:
- Bamboo 5 ties Jira versions and release candidate builds of your application together programmatically for better tracking from the planning phase all the way through development and release. (read more)
- Teams spread across time zones have additional challenges when it comes to collaborative development, testing and releasing. With developers in Sydney, San Francisco, and Gdansk, Atlassian is all too familiar with this particular pain! We sat down in a Google Hangout to chat with users who are struggling with the same things, and generally geek out. (watch it here)
- Better communication helps tame the beasts known as software releases. No surprise there. Commenting on release candidates, flagging them as broken or approved, and other Bamboo 5 features bring improved cross-team communication from the theoretical into the now. (read more)
- We’ve added per-environment deploy permissions that blast away bottlenecks for dev and QA, while still letting stability boffins keep production tightly controlled. (read more)
It all boils down to getting teams to collaborate better across job functions, silos and geographies. Organizations that embrace continuous improvement on these fronts deliver better software, ship it sooner, and retain more of their top talent.
So look for the official release of Bamboo 5 next week and get ready to bridge the chasm between dev and ops!
UPDATE: Bamboo 5 has landed! Take the tour here.