Generally, Atlassian provides different tools for product, content, and services development commonly used by many small, midsize, and enterprise organizations. The Atlassian stack consists of a suite of tools that provide different benefits to the developers and project owners. Specifically to improve productivity and collaboration among team members. These tools perform specific functions in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) to enable product, service, and content delivery into production. The most acclaimed tools used from the Atlassian stack are Confluence, JIRA, and Bitbucket.
A rich history.
Atlassian has been incredibly successful in the 15 years since their inception. Firstly, growing their customer base to 85,031 customers in more than 170 countries. In fact, their revenue has grown by 34% or more in the last six quarters. Furthermore, they have reported a net gain in every fiscal year. Their mission is to unleash the potential in every team. Again, their goal is having every technical worker, in every team and company use an Atlassian product every day.
The Atlassian Market place
Another strength of Atlassian’s is the success of their Atlassian Marketplace. This a platform for third-parties to develop and sell integrations and add-ons to Atlassian products. A complementing platform for outside developers to create and sell integrations and add-ons for Atlassian products. So far the marketplace has garnered over 2,000 add-ons and extensions in its lifetime. Similarly, Atlassian has reaped over $30 million in revenue from the 25% portion that they claim from each sale. That says a lot about their authority and the Atlassian Stack, right?
The Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC)
In a SDLC, the development process goes through a series of steps before the application is released into production. Furthermore, precise use cases are determined, and design requirements are scoped. Collaboration within the development team with the application owners at the beginning of a project, is essential. This in order to successfully deliver business value to the end users. Code development starts as soon as the design specifications are locked in. Consequently, a new project is kicked off to track the progress and the issues during the development cycle.
Where the Atlassian Stack Comes in!
Generally, different software revisions are managed and tracked by a version control system for different iterations of code changes. The engineers or developers write code. Followed by a build and test phase before new code is committed and changes are integrated into the main code base. Upon successful compilation and packaging of source code, the final build is deployed for staging or user acceptance tests. This is typically the last phase before code is released to production. Atlassian stack tools fit into the scheme of things for an agile and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflow.
The CI/CD workflow
Generally, Atlassian’s stack enables agile and continuous integration of workflows by simplifying and automating the development and deployment of applications. Data that is generated during the SDLC is stored, managed, and protected by any business and asset owner. Specifically, project owners and development team members require scalability, collaboration, documentation, staging (preproduction testing), and data recovery. This helps against any loss or disaster during the development and deployment process.
So what is part of the Atlassian Stack?
Confluence
Specifically, this tool replaces the traditional “wiki pages” to allow the organized documentation of use cases and requirements. Generally, Confluence enables exchange and knowledge sharing between development teams and project owners. It becomes the only place you need to go for all your important documents. Confluence is basically a product for team content creation and sharing.
JIRA
Generally, this the most popular and commonly used task management tool, along with Confluence from the Atlassian stack. Specifically, JIRA tracks the progress of a project and issues reported and solved by the development team members. The Confluence tool uses plug-ins or add-ons to communicate automatically with JIRA. This combination of tools allows software incidents, changes, and new feature requests to be logged. Then simultaneously directed to the developers directly responsible for an application
Bamboo.
This is a tool for Continuous Integration (CI) workflows that feed build, test, and deploy activities.
Crucible.
Specifically, Crucible provides workflow-based code review and assigns code reviewers to approve the changes.
HipChat/Slack.
Recently combined with Slack. HipChat is an instant messenger that allows developers and DevOps admins to instantly communicate among themselves internally. Specifically, HipChat provides notifications to development teams and enables improved collaboration to complete projects efficiently. HipChat is strongly for team messaging and communications.
Bitbucket (Git).
Generally, Atlassian’s solution for source code management and serves as a version control system for team code sharing and management. Formerly known as Stash, Bitbucket provides “pipelines” for code manageability for continuous delivery. Bitbucket also comes with built-in support for code reviews. Additionally, Bitbucket has a plug-in to communicate with JIRA to automatically open bugs or incidents from a failed or unsuccessful build. Later, JIRA then tracks the bug until it gets resolved.
Conclusion
Generally, Atlassian tools run in production at many business organizations. Specifically, Atlassian stack has a vast range of capabilities and benefits for development teams of all sizes. As well as project owners, in different phases of the development and deployment cycles. Remember,data manageability and availability are critical elements of any well-designed software development lifecycle. Conversely, Atlassian tools provide superior performance, efficiency, resiliency, and data protection. Organizations benefit from improved developer productivity, improved control over operational metrics associated with IT performance, improved efficiency ,and ROI.