Eficode ROOT: What’s new this December?

What’s in store for Atlassian in Q4?

It’s that time of the year again: ROOT’s quarterly Atlassian rollout, of course, the fourth and final one to get closure for this unusual year.

Without further ado, this is what’s going to happen:

• Bamboo is updated to version 7.1.3,

• Bitbucket to version 7.7.0,

• Confluence to version 7.8.3,

• Crowd to 4.2 and, finally,

• Jira and Jira Service Desk to versions 8.13.1 and 4.13.1 respectively.

Find out our recap and highlights of this release below!

What’s new in Bamboo?

The Bamboo update this quarter is just a minor one, from 7.1 in Q3 to its third revision, the 7.1.3. There are a number of fixes and some useful improvements, such as the possibility of non-admin users linking Jira issues to test results. Now users with BUILD permission can do both, Quarantine an Issue and Link a Jira as well.

See the Bamboo 7.1 Release Notes at atlassian.com for details on all changes in this release. 

What’s new in Bitbucket?

As always, find our highlights for Q4 below, or check out Bitbucket Server release notes at atlassian.com for full disclosure. 

Automatically decline inactive pull requests

Bitbucket 7.7 introduces a new feature which will allow you to reduce unwanted clutter by automatically declining inactive pull requests.

The feature is on by default and after the upgrade is applied, it will automatically decline all pull requests which have been inactive for over 4 weeks. The configuration is customizable on system, project and repository level, and the feature can also be turned off for your whole Bitbucket instance, if needed.

Check out the Automatically decline inactive PRs documentation at atlassian.com for more information on using this feature.

Batch and publish comments for code reviews

When doing reviews on pull requests you can now draft multiple comments on code and files during the process and then release them all at once, instead of typing and adding them one by one. This will save you time and potentially some unnecessary back and forth correspondence with the pull request author.

Customizable default branch name

Atlassian introduced two new ways for defining the preferred default branch name of a Git repository.

Users can now decide when creating a new repository how the default branch should be named. Admins can also set a system wide custom default branch name for all new repositories.

Emojis! Emojis everywhere! 

Oh great, this is just what we needed 😅 No need for ye olde typewriter nonsense anymore, just respond with a smile(y face). Or one of the other familiar emojis. Splendid.

Improved accessibility for the diff view

When you’re in a code diff view it is now possible to toggle the new color accessibility feature on (or off). This lets you switch to an accessible color option which uses blue and yellow for highlighting, instead of the usual red and green.

Optimizations for CI/CD integration

Bitbucket 7.4 (in our September rollout) added the fantastically useful Integrated CI/CD feature for 3rd party CI/CD tools, such as Jenkins. With our Q4 release Atlassian has further refined the experience by optimizing the way you can access the new Builds page and tab. Now, clicking on a build status icon anywhere in Bitbucket will take you straight to the most relevant build view.If you have integrated Jenkins with Bitbucket, you can now access the builds’ logs and artifacts relevant to each build via direct links in Bitbucket.

Rendering of Jupyter notebooks

Bitbucket now supports rendering of Jupyter notebooks. Simply commit a .ipynb file to a new or an existing repository and Bitbucket will automatically take care of the rest. Hop right back into the Bitbucket UI and -- there it is!

What’s new in Confluence?

Our Confluence release this quarter is not as jam-packed with features as some of the earlier this year have been: going from 7.7 to 7.8 is focused towards refining and stabilizing the overall Confluence experience via various fixes and enhancements. From the Confluence 7.8 release notes at atlassian.com you’ll find more insight into the changes pertaining to this update.

All-seeing eye of audit log captures more activities

Data Center only

User searches can now be logged in the audit log. The event captures search terms entered in the regular search field, advanced search or in additional search macros such as Page Tree Search.

If you don’t want to collect search term data, this audit log event can also be disabled.

Other things worth a mention

Disabled macros can now save the macro body content. While in the earlier versions macro contents were deleted, they will now be saved and the page will show “Unknown macro” placeholder.

Label limit for the Page Properties Report has been increased from 20 to 60.

What’s new in the Confluence ecosystem?

Refined for Confluence

Admin delegation

Two new admin levels have been added: Refined Admin and Site Admin. Refined admins can configure everything Refined related without being a full-on Confluence Admin, whereas Site Admins can perform administrative tasks within the realm of their site.

Announcement banners

Communication is the key! It is now possible to create neat announcement banners directly in Refined. Banners can be scoped to be global, site, category or space specific with three different importance levels.

Deprecated Advanced Theme Editor is removed

The previous deprecated in-app advanced theme editor has now been removed. From now on using an external IDE is recommended.

Refined Toolkit for Confluence

Version 2.3 of Refined Toolkit introduces a fresh new look for the UI macros.

Team Calendars for Confluence

Share calendars

Using the Share button in a single calendar or space calendars view, you can share a link to your calendar via email by entering any Confluence user, group or an email address. See the Share Calendars documentation at atlassian.com for further reading.

Support for additional third party calendars

In addition to the existing Google, Outlook and Teamup calendar subscription support, you can now add calendar events from Apple, OpsGenie and PagerDuty as well.

What’s new in Crowd?

Customizable look and feel

This release of Crowd will allow you to customize the appearance of the login screen. Using your own logo, selected coloring and a custom welcome text, you can make your Crowd look like your own. Be it either your company’s branding or simply something unique, perhaps with a dash of raspberry, it is now possible.

Passwords to external systems are encrypted

For improved security, all passwords to external systems which have been stored in the Crowd database in plain text until now, will be encrypted starting from Crowd 4.2. Passwords will be automatically encrypted upon upgrade, so there’s nothing you need to do.

What’s new in Jira?

Much like with Confluence this quarter, the Jira release isn’t new-features-bonanza, but rather an update to stabilize things and slash some bugs encountered in the previous release. One of them being the rather annoying problem where the Sprint field was not populating properly. Fortunately this has finally been remedied.

See the Jira release notes at atlassian.com for complete details. 

Improved user picker

The behaviour of the single user picker custom field has been improved to help in identifying the correct user. Now the picker displays users’ full name and avatar in the same fashion as your default system fields like Assignee or Reporter do too.

Performance and scalability for Jira indexing

Data Center only

Indexing times can become an issue when Jira grows larger. With the new Document-Based Replication feature, Atlassian has been able to mitigate apps’ impact on indexing time and thus prevent index inconsistencies in Jira Data Center, regardless of the time apps need to index data. With the feature enabled, Jira Data Center is much more horizontally scalable than before. As a result, the more nodes there are in the cluster, the better the overall throughput is while maintaining search consistency.

What’s new in Jira Service Desk?

As Jira Service Desk is growing into being much more than just a service desk, it has been given a new name to better reflect its current state as Atlassian’s complete IT Service Management (ITSM) solution.

This is why the next generation of Jira Service Desk will from now on be called Jira Service Management.

Not a Jira Service Desk user yet? Check out the Jira Service Management announcement blog at atlassian.com! 

Managing Opsgenie incidents in Jira Service Desk

Opsgenie can now be integrated with Jira Service Desk. It is possible to set up incident management for individual projects.This helps service desk agents to view ongoing incidents as well as create incidents and alert the Opsgenie Team of an incident.

Using Confluence Cloud as your knowledge base

It is now possible to use Confluence Cloud as a knowledge base on Jira Service Desk for Jira Server.

This is great news, as providing users with documentation is much easier using a dedicated Confluence Cloud instance. Traditionally we have had two options — either the Confluence space has anonymous access (and for that reason the Confluence itself) or the user account of a Jira user must exist in Confluence as well in order to enable them to log in to Confluence as well. 

We have preferred to block anonymous access to Confluence to stay clear of all the potential security implications that may arise. Hosting the knowledge base in the cloud has its benefits: it is always available and can be separated from internal documentation. When the public documentation is in a separate Cloud instance, we can safely allow anonymous access to the documentation or simply invite the users to the knowledge base using their Atlassian cloud credentials.

For globally distributed customers who serve their end-users using Jira Service Desk, we recommend using both Jira Service Desk and Confluence in cloud. This makes the systems more reliable and robust since the usual problems encountered in Jira -- often caused by network problems or imports gone wrong -- are not as severe when the development system and customer service systems are separated.

What’s new in the Jira ecosystem?

Refined for Jira

Confluence Cloud as Knowledge Base

As we mentioned earlier in the Jira Service Desk section, it is now possible to use Confluence Cloud as the Knowledge Base for a Jira on-prem (Data Center, Server) instance.

Refined does also support this, but there are technical limitations to be aware of: the Knowledge Base Articles module and the Search Highlight module with custom settings will not work with the Confluence Cloud Knowledge Base. The Search Highlight does work when default settings are selected.

Xray Test Management for Jira

Configurable Test Runs List Gadget columns

It is now possible to configure the columns for the Test Runs List Gadget. Columns can be freely selected from the fields available and it is also possible to remove the default columns from the gadget.

Updating existing Issues using Test Case Importer

With this release it is now possible to update existing Tests by importing Test Cases from a CSV file. In order to do this, you will need to include the appropriate issue key in your CSV data and add Issue Key mapping in Test Case Importer when configuring the import.

See the Test Case Importer documentation at getxray.app for detailed instructions. 

What’s new in the Eficode product line?

Root Team Management’s early Christmas with version 1.5

We have done an extensive analysis of the RTM user interface and done a usability and visual overhaul. In general, you should expect a clearer and more intuitive experience as well as a renewed look and feel.

There’s now a support for announcement banners for the RTM UI, more responsive user search field, improved API documentation and much more.

Check out our Introduction to Eficode ROOT Team Management 1.5 for a complete overview of the latest RTM release! 

Audit log has been revamped

RTM’s Audit log feature has gotten some major upgrades in this release: there’s more performance under the hood, overall usability and filtering options have been improved and the user interface has received the same fresh look and feel as the rest of the tool.

What else is going on in ROOT?

GitLab gets an update to version 13.6

The folks at GitLab deliver like clockwork, with over 60 new features and improvements, such as AWS EC2 support for Auto DevOps (without Kubernetes), improved visibility to code quality and security testing, improvements to GitLab Workflow VS Code extension and much more.

As always, the GitLab 13.6 release post at gitlab.com contains all the details you could possibly ask for.

Helix TeamHub gets a minor bump to 2020.2

This release of Helix TeamHub will provide some security and bug fixes, as well as improvements to Jira hook.

Jenkins receives the usual monthly treatment

Jenkins core is updated to version 2.249.3 LTS along with a bunch of plugins and add-ons.

As we warned last month, there will be a breaking change in Google Play Android Publisher plugin. Please ensure your configuration is up-to-date if you are using this plugin.

Please contact your ROOT support for a complete list of plugin updates applicable to your ROOT Jenkins instance.

JFrog Xray is updated to 3.11.2

The Xray Reports feature introduced in release 3.8 receives another addition in the form of a Violations Report. The Violations report can provide a detailed report on security and license violations for each component within the scope selected for reporting.

There are also enhancements to Ignore Rules functionality along with other fixes and improvements.

See the Xray Release Notes at jfrog.com for a complete overview of the changes for Xray 3.11.

Other updates worth mentioning

• Anchore Engine, an open-source, centralized service for inspection, analysis and certification of Docker container images, receives a minor update to version 0.8.2. 

• GitHub Enterprise on-prem gets a minor version update to 2.22.4.

• Rancher 1.6 and 2.x are updated to versions 1.6.30 and 2.5.2 respectively.

• SonarQube gets a minor update to version 7.9.5 LTS.

SonaType Nexus IQ receives the monthly level-up to release 102.