Atlympic event - Partnership: Slack + bitbucket integration that helps QAs stay on top of their game

[Nikki Zavadska [Appfire]]

If you’ve ever worked as a QA you know how much time you spend refreshing the page to see if someone approved PR so you can merge it. Or to see if the developer pushed new code that you’re so desperately waiting for.

Before I go into how Slack and Bitbucket integration helps us with our remote collaboration it might be useful to understand how is our team structured. Our team works fully remote. The majority of us actually never met in real life! Despite that, we’re a well-rounded and friendly team that is able to work together in the most efficient way thanks to the tools like Jira, Slack, and Zoom.

To save us all this time that we can spend on more important things we use Bitbucket and Slack integration. Because we develop many apps, each app has its own Slack channel so we can keep conversations about the apps separate. Also, each of the apps has separate repo in Bitbucket.
After installing and setting up Slack-bitbucket integration we then settled up notifications for the following actions:

• PR was raised
• PR was updated
• New comment
• PR was reviewed or declined
• PR was merged

We also use pipelines in bitbucket where our QA can easily run pipelines to create their test environment in AWS and deploy any branch they need. We also have pipelines to update our staging environment before we’re releasing to production and the production release pipeline itself. All these can be run by team members who have correct permissions in place and all magic happens in AWS automagically. 🪄

This makes our QAs more autonomous which is important because they’re in a different time zone than the developers.

Every time one of the pipelines starts, finishes, or sometimes fails it sends the notification to the app channel. That way was devs and the rest of the team are also aware of what is currently being deployed and where.

Simple but efficient! Without this, we would be refreshing the pages instead of doing some real work 😄