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  • Dec.14.2017

The complete Atlassian DevOps journey: Visibility

  • Dec.14.2017
  • Reading time mins

DevOps, DevOps, DevOps… it seems to be the buzzword on everyone’s mind, but few organizations have truly been able to nail it down. While the fundamentals for your DevOps journey should remain the same, the process of “getting there” will be different for each organization.

While companies commonly use Jira, how the tool is leveraged starts to become more complex when continuing down the DevOps journey.  When it comes to development, engineers typically prefer either GitHub or Bitbucket, and further down the pipeline (pun intended) organizations normally adopt Jenkins or Bamboo to execute their builds.

Yet a complete DevOps journey implies that the organization has succeeded to have end-to-end visibility and automation. Fortunately, this is provided out-of-the-box with the Atlassian suite.

I will dive into an ideal “workflow” that provides these two key goals to those starving to consume DevOps benefits: end-to-end visibility and automation. Let’s first dive into visibility – automation will be covered in part two of this blog.

Why visibility matters in DevOps

While DevOps as a goal can be different for each organization, the differences narrow when it comes to the benefits of visibility. In IT we talk a lot about breaking down walls between departments, but maybe not as much about what we can actually see beyond the ruins.

Let’s take a look at a scenario of an organization who has adopted the full Atlassian stack: Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, Fisheye/Crucible, Bamboo, and Hipchat. Here is an example Jira issue, barebones, lacking any “visibility”:

For the trained eye, it’s clear that critical information is missing:

  • How can I branch off this issue directly without having to manually associate?
  • What about the builds that I want to associate with this development?
  • Where are my peer reviews?
  • What is the development status of this issue?

As you can see, a Jira issue (a new feature in this case) without integration is only as powerful as the manual steps involved in tracking it.  What if the assigned developer could start working on the feature directly from the ticket? What if multiple developers working on the feature could see their peer code reviews from Crucible?  What if the QA team could see the associated builds related to the feature after the developer has merged his work?

Well luckily, with the Atlassian Suite, it provides the appetizer, main course, and dessert for the end-to-end “gourmet” experience of visibility.

Here is another Jira issue, which captures the “holy grail” of complete DevOps, providing us this sought after end-to-end visibility.

 

You can view the branches related to the issue:

 

 

View your commits related to the issue:

 

 

View your builds related to the issue:

 

 

View all development information related to your releases, specifically by version:

 

 

Visibility is essential keys to completing your DevOps journey.  While there are ways to configure, script, and modify the Atlassian tools to provide some level of visibility with GitHub, Jenkins and other tools outside the Atlassian ecosystem, the native integration of the Atlassian tools are hard to beat – it provides a level of support and growth that is hard to match.

Coming soon to a screen near you – Part 2: Automation!

The above sounds great, but how do I do it? In my next blog, I’ll walk you through how to automate this process, including:

  • Workflow Triggers
  • Workflow Post Functions
  • Branching Workflows
  • Bamboo Builds and Agents
  • Peer Reviews in Crucible
  • and more!

Until then, sign up for our monthly Valiantys newsletter and stay in the loop as to what you need to know to navigate your DevOps journey.

 

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