I am very excited to announce that Atlassian is welcoming the San Francisco Bike Kitchen to the neighbourhood by donating $2000 to their relocation effort.

I live in a condo in San Francisco's Mission District, so space is definitely at a premium. And as an avid cyclist, this really doesn't help when it comes to bike maintenance and repairs. Thankfully, The Bike Kitchen helps many local cyclists like me by providing tools and parts in order to keep things running smoothly.

When I found out through my local cycling club, Mission Cycling, that the Bike Kitchen was moving right next door to the Atlassian office, I was stoked! When I found out that they were still raising money to make it happen in January, I immediately contacted our founders to see what we could do..

Atlassian was recently awarded with an honourable mention as a Bike Friendly Business from the League of American Bicyclists, and as part of our continued effort, support and encouragement to our employees and to our community, to bike to work, we donated $2,000 to the Bike Kitchen.

We applaud the Bike Kitchen's efforts to make biking accessible to all San Franciscans by providing training as well as keeping down the costs of maintaining a safe and reliable bicycle transportation option for us all.

Please support the Bike Kitchen!

Soon to be located in a great space at 18th and Alabama streets, just one block from the San Francisco office, the Bike Kitchen is a cooperative, do-it-yourself bike repair shop. They provide all the tools and parts you need to fix or build a bicycle with a staff of volunteer mechanics available to give advice and answer questions.

They still need all the support they can get, so I encourage you to help if you can. Doesn't have to be money.. time and parts help just as much.

There will also be a Bike Kitchen Benefit Party on Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 6:30-8:30pm at Rickshaw Bagworks, 904 22nd St @ Minnesota (near 3rd).

When we launched Clover 2.4 a few weeks ago, those of you familiar with Atlassian may have noticed something a bit different.. something a little strange. Being an Australian company, Atlassian has always used the Queen's English, otherwise known as Standard English in literary circles or i18n English in the technical community. This all changed when we announced Test Optimization, the newest feature of Clover 2.4 enabling you to dramatically reduce the time it takes to run your builds and automated test.

It's always been the Atlassian way to use i18n English (EN) consistently throughout our products, our documentation, our website, and all of our PR materials. But in this ever-globalising economy words, especially technical terms, cross borders freely to create a common language. Not surprisingly, Google helps play a large role in determining our common language thanks to its "did you mean" feature. Probably one of my favourite and most relied upon features in both Google and Confluence search.

What did you mean?

In preparation for the launch of Clover 2.4 we did some search engine optimisation work on the Test Optimization feature. Some of the stats that we found were quite interesting.. For example, searching Google for the terms Search Optimisation and Search Optimization provided wildly different results:

• The term Search Optimisation averages only about 165,000 searches monthly worldwide. But doing so asks you:
  Did you mean: Search Optimization
• The term Search Optimization averages about 1,000,000 searches monthly which is more than 6x. Interestingly though, Google suggests no other spellings, even if you are located in Europe or Australia or if you are setup with a different language preference
• Not surprisingly, in the US alone the difference is even greater.. over 25x!!

• Even the regional trends are pretty fascinating

It's clear that the spell checker used by Google's Did you mean is not concerned with the "correct" spelling of a word, but more so with the "common" spelling. Trying to get details on the secret sauce Google uses is quite difficult, but unconfirmed reports suggest that "Google develops its own spell-checking algorithms based on sophisticated machine learning methods, using cues from aggregated user input, Web documents, and many other sources. The algorithm provides a 'best-guess' alternative suggestion that we think might improve the search results, and is completely generated without human input. It can be thought of as a suggestion offer, rather than a definitive answer."

So what'z in a name?

When we discussed branding the Test Optimization feature internally, a lively debate started around the use of an 's' or 'z'. Needless to say, both sides were correct in their justifications, but we eventually had to settle on a single term to reference consistently.

So in the end, we decided it was important for us to get the word out to as many people as possible -- clearly since our desire is to help developers and testers everywhere.. not to mention the economic upsides ;) -- and the numbers don't lie:

Almost 10x more people searched for "Test Optimization" as compared to "Test Optimisation" in the month of October alone.

I guess 'z' is not dead.

Just in case you missed it, earlier this week we held a webinar to talk about the new features in Clover 2.4. I was joined by Brendan Humphreys, the lead architect for Clover, and he discussed how the new Test Optimization feature has already had a significant impact on our own FishEye team by reducing the total amount of time they spend running their builds and automated tests.

Brendan also talked about how Clover's per-test coverage can help you understand your test suite and provide you the insight you need to test smarter. He even went through a live demo of the HTML reports, Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA integrations.

Watch it now!

More information

At the end of the video, we had a great Q & A session which you can review along with all the other webinar materials.

For more info on Clover and Test Optimization, check out the videos on our website.

We are pleased to announce the latest version of Clover which now adds automatic Test Optimization capabilities to our award-winning Java code coverage tool.

The Clover 2.4 release takes advantage of the "per-test" coverage data already being tracked in order to automatically optimise your testing. This means you spend less time running your builds and automated tests, and more time cranking out quality code.

We have also packed in several enhancements to make the integration with your existing development tools, like Ant, Maven2, Eclipse, and IntelliJ IDEA, that much easier. For all the details on the over 40 major issues and bugs fixed in the this release, check out the release notes.

Failure never tasted so sweet

For developers, the only thing more frustrating than waiting 15 minutes to find out you have broken the build is waiting another 15 minutes to see whether your fix actually worked. With Clover's Test Optimization, each optimised build will selectively run the tests that cover your changes. Test Optimization will also re-order those tests to ensure the ones most likely to fail go first.

"If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate." Thomas John Watson, Sr., Former President of IBM

Our own Brendan Humphreys explains how to avoid testing too much and leverage Test Optimization to increase the frequency of the tests that matter. Also, check out why failing fast is actually a good thing:

Check out more Clover videos!

Easy integration to the tools you use

Whether you are using Ant or Maven2, Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA, Bamboo or other CI systems.. running Clover 2.4 has never been easier:

* Ant users, just add two lines to your build.xml
* Run the maven-clover2-plugin as part of the default maven2 lifecycle
* Get instrumentation, in-line annotation, quick navigation and reporting right in your favourite IDE
* Automatically generate coverage reports from Bamboo

Want to see more?

Join us for a webinar next week to learn more. Just click on the time below to register:

Tues, Nov 11, 2008 8:00 AM - 9:00 AM PST/16:00 GMT
Tues, Nov 11, 2008 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM PST

Check out all of the details about what's new in Clover 2.4 including more videos!

The Firebird Project just announced they are using Atlassian's FishEye to track their commits. Now it's simple for the 60+ Firebird developers to keep tabs on the Firebird repository through a powerful web UI with search and notification capabilities.

Firebird is a relational database offering many ANSI SQL standard features that runs on Linux, Windows, and a variety of Unix platforms. Firebird offers excellent concurrency, high performance, and powerful language support for stored procedures and triggers. Firebird has been used in production systems, under a variety of names, since 1981.

The Firebird Project is already using JIRA for their Firebird RDBMS Issue Tracker. And now it's even easier for developers to search, share and keep up to date with the Firebird Project using FishEye.

Running an open source project?

Your open source project could benefit from source code insight like this..

Atlassian has given out over 1200 free open source licenses and we'll hook you up with FishEye and JIRA too. Contact us to find out more!