How Many Build Agents Does My Project Need? (a.k.a. “The $16,000 Question”)

<sirMixALotMoment> I like big builds and I cannot lie. But you other builders can't deny when a curl comes in with an itty-bitty trace* and dependencies out of place your build's hung! </sirMixALotMoment> I like big builds even better when they're running efficiently and giving the team fast feedback on changes.  Lately I've been thinking a lot about build agents and how to use them most efficiently --thoughts that I'll no doubt share in future posts.  But today I want to take

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Coming Soon: the New & Improved Bamboo OnDemand!

It's been quite a while since Bamboo OnDemand was upgraded, and the wait is almost over!  Later this month we'll be bringing the hosted offering to be current with the latest offering for download, Bamboo 4.1.  I sat down with Douglas Butler, product manager for our OnDemand universe, to get the scoop.  SGD: First, tell me briefly what it means to be the product manager for Atlassian OnDemand.  What are some of the projects you work on? DB: There's a ton going on at the moment. At all moments,

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Building Ruby Projects with Bundler and the Bamboo Ruby Plugin

This is a guest blog post by Mark Wolfe, developer of the Ruby plugin for Bamboo.  Mark is a Melbourne-based developer/systems engineer specializing in Java development in UNIX and Linux environments, with a focus on using REST and web services to enable communication between heterogeneous business systems.  (Wow, that's a mouthful!)  He also has a keen interest in Ruby along with web development, and in his spare time contributes to a range of open source projects.   The latest release of the

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Get to Know Bamboo’s Build Expiry & Labels

There's a little gem of a feature in Bamboo that I bet goes unnoticed by a lot of users: in-app management of all the data left behind by builds.  Artifacts, logs, stats... the whole kit'ncaboodle.  I love this. "Back in my day..." See, in my "former life", I was a test automation engineer and we used Hudson as our CI server (this was in the pre-Jenkins era, before Oracle and Kohsuke's relations devolved into pistols at dawn)*.  We ran Hudson on a re-purposed tower unit that sat underneath

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Getting feedback on the Atlassian product documentation

This is a post written by Paul Watson, an Atlassian technical writer, as part of an ongoing series written by the technical writing team, exploring the latest techniques in technical communication. We’ll write about our projects, experiments and ideas, and we’ll share the techniques we use to give our customers the sweetest documentation in the world. Getting Customer Feedback There’s no question that getting feedback is a good idea – a law of nature even. Think survival of the fittest.

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Satisfying Build Engineering Customers (Pt 2)

I'm excited! Back when I talked about Satisfying the Customers of BuildEng team I talked about ensuring that we communicate to our customers that we've seen the issues that they have created by Triaging those issues quickly. This is really important, it provides our customers quick feedback on the issue that they have raised so they don't feel that it has fallen into a dark hole that no one is watching. During the triage process we set their expectations on whether the team has committed to

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