Best practices for Bamboo plans and release tags

[vegarwe]

Our release process looks like this:

• We have a Bamboo plan running on SVN trunk doing all steps necessary for release
  • Build, run tests, create report, store artificats
• When we are ready for release we create a release branch and do release specific changes there
• Clone the original Bamboo plan and run the release branch with the specific changes
• If green, create release tag, point the cloned plan to the tag and run the plan again (and now we have a release)

This approach works fine, but we get a lot of cloned Bamboo plans (one for each release). So I'm wondering what other people are doing and what the best practice is for handling release branches and release tags in Bamboo.

Our release process is a bit rigorous, so running the plan on trunk and calling that a release is not acceptable.

[Przemek Bruski · Accepted solution]

Assuming that your Bamboo is recent enough, you can use the Plan Branches feature. In this way, you can use the same plan definition for multiple branches and tags.

[vegarwe]

How 'pleasant' is the Plan Branches to work with? I feel some of the features in Bamboo are clunky to work with, but if this feature is well integrated it might just solve this problem.

We don't have a recent Bamboo, but I will tell IT to upgrade.

[Przemek Bruski]

How 'pleasant' is the Plan Branches to work with?

Don't ask me :-) I am one of the guys who developed that feature - of course I'll always tell you it's easy to use and pleasant ;-)

[vegarwe]

Nice, I'll let you know once we've upgraded then.