Atllasian tools – a brief overview
We have been exploring Atlassian tools and in this blog we want to share our knowledge and experience with these tools. It would be difficult to capture each tool in detail in one blog. That is why in this blog we will cover
Brief detail of each tool
Key features and advantages
In our subsequent blogs we will discuss each tool in more detail and see how they help do agile better.
Following tools are provided by Atlassian:
Confluence is a very powerful collaboration tool. Confluence combines powerful online authoring capabilities, deep Office integration and an extensive plugin catalog to help people work better together and share information effortlessly. Which means that Confluence goes beyond the sharing platform definition and through macros integrates with all the office tools like Ms-Office or Open Office to leverage the capabilities of these tools and make confluence more powerful. Confluence can take RSS feed to consume content from external source (like JIRA) and act as single dashboard/interface for for all sorts of critical information. Confluence is ideal for managing project artifacts, posting announcements and facilitating discussions.
Key advantages of using Confluence are:
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Extremely simplifies the procedure of posting relevant content online, initiate a discussion, make announcements etc.
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Acts as a central repository for information and hence reduces the risk of delivering stale data.
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Confluence can be used as the central location to manage all information related to a project so that the updated information is always available to all stake holders.
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Confluence can help monitor the status of a project. Confluence can integrate with JIRA and display all relevant and critical information related to bugs.
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Confluence (2.10 onwards) comes bundled with macros which helps view and edit office documents on confluence.
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Confluence is highly extensible and configurable which helps customize confluence for custom needs easily.
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Access to all the content on confluence can be controlled via the mature authentication and authorization capabilities of confluence.
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All pages and page hierarchy on confluence can be exported to XML, HTML, PDF format.
To read more about confluence click here.
JIRA - is an efficient bug tracking and project management tool. If there is an activity which is to be taken up by a team, has a workflow and needs to be tracked then JIRA can be a good tool for managing such an activity. JIRA can add other good to have features like automatic notifications, watcher lists etc. JIRA is highly customizable through configuration and easily extensible using plugins which makes it all the more powerfull to suit all custom needs of project and issue management.
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Once customized it becomes very easy to create bugs from a browser, email, even IDE and smart phones.
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JIRA maintains proper history of the bug which makes it very easy to track the exact cause and person. Also it becomes a single point of reference to solve all such similar events.
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JIRA has very in detail filtering and search capabilities which helps track and find issues very easily.
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JIRA provides the capability of linking dependent issues, marking the issues as duplicate against some already existing issue, making some subtasks etc, which helps organize the issues much better.
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JIRA is an extensible platform that can be customised to match to custom business processes.
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JIRA can be used for Project Management through tracking, allocation and reporting on project tasks with real- time statistics.
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JIRA can be used for agile development - ability to estimate, allocate and track the iterations giving rapid delivery of high-quality software.
To read more about JIRA click here.
Each version control system has its strengths, but they all share a common weakness - lack of a descent web-based interface. FishEye provides an efficient, consistent way to view source, diffs, annotations and much more from any Web browser.
Key advantages of using fisheye
- FishEye uses Ajax and gives a feeling of browsing the files on local file system.
- It is easy to reach at the source and do all sorts of stuffs like see diff, see the history of the file, see the change curve, see all revisions and the log message corresponding to the check in. In short, information related to the source which was captured by the version control system is made easily and more informatively available by the tool.
- On integration with JIRA – FishEye takes care of correlating the checked-in code to the corresponding bug if the commit log statement mentions the JIRA issue key. This feature can save lot of effort in trying to figure out the changes which were made to resolve a particular bug, which is generally a very common requirement.
- Fish Eye can also help get a broader view of the project in terms of commit history, the most active committer, the most passive committer or the variation of velocity along the length of one iteration which can help managers derive trends easily.
- Multiple repositories can be added and monitored from one URL which means easy context switch and comparative and related analysis.
- In short it helps us save our time spent in interpreting data to derive information.
To read more about FishEye click here.
Crucible is a intuitive peer code review software to review code changes, make comments, and record outcomes in an efficient, distributed way.
Aim of good quality software can be achieved only if constant code review is an uncompromisable part of the development process. If aforesaid is true then Crucible gives the team an efficient way to benefit from the power of constant code review. Inline commenting, simple workflow, asynchronous reviews, JIRA integration and much more help quicken and simplify the process of code review.
- Inline commenting helps put our comments at the point where correction is probably needed. This helps the author understand easily the intent of the reviewer. And then the author can post the reply in continuation of the review making it more like a conversation.
- As soon as a review is created the intended person can get automatically notified thru emails, RSS feeds or by looking into the crucible dashboard.
- Generally Fish Eye and Crucible come together. In a more informal and open setup anybody browsing through the source using fisheye can find a potential issue and as soon as he does so, he can go ahead and create a review for that issue and assign it to its author.
- Crucible is equally equipped to handle situations requiring more formal review process where the hierarchy and approval process is predefined.
To read more about Crucible click here.
Bamboo - For Continuous Integration
What is Continuous Integration?
- Detecting bugs earlier.
- Providing rapid feedback.
- Isolating the problems.
- Ensuring a consistently reliable build.
More than just a Continuous Integration server, Bamboo integrates into your development environment to provide truly useful linking between build results and your coding and project management tools.
By simply adding JIRA issue-keys to your commit messages, Bamboo can provide greater visibility of the issue tracking cycle by automatically linking JIRA issues to Bamboo builds. Bamboo even allows you to compare across all builds for build results relating to specific JIRA issues.
To read more about Bamboo click here.
Clover is a java code coverage and test optimization tool. Clover goes beyond basic code coverage metrics to help prioritise the time spent in creating new tests.
Clover helps quickly identify
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Complex code which is poorly tested.
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Loss in coverage due to changes made in the code base.
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Precise per test coverage to ensure relevance of tests.
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Top project risks.
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Most complex classes and packages.
- Least tested methods.
Clover code coverage matrix is based on intelligent conclusions and helps write tests that matter. Clover comes with powerful UI support which vividly portrays the poorly covered sections of code which helps focus on right areas without much manual effort. Clover can track the code coverage history and produce graphical reports over the data which can help track the trends in the project.
To read more about clover click here.
Crowd - Single sign-on and identity management
Single sign-on enables users to authenticate (log in) once and gain access to multiple web applications.
Crowd provides you with an easy-to-use framework for single sign-on (SSO) and centralised authentication.
Usage example
Log in 
to one web application (e.g. your intranet), then move between your other web applications without having to log in repeatedly.
With Crowd's SSO capabilities, you can also log out of one web application and instantly be logged out of them all. In addition to giving users access to their behind-the-firewall applications, Crowd lets users gain access to any of their OpenID accounts outside the firewall.
Key advantages of using Crowd:
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Crowd provides an easy to use framework for single sign-on and centralised authentication.
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Crowd provides out of the box directory connectors for popular LDAP servers.
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Managing user, activating/deactivating them, managing their privileges and access becomes easier when they are all in one place and can be managed using Crowd's web based administration console
To read more about Crowd click here.
Team : Pallavi, Shankar
Filed under: General, Uncategorized
