How do we do Changelogs and Release Notes like Atlassian does?

[Melanie Pasztor]

I am looking into a Changelog slash Release Notes solution that can be used with any Jira project, and not limited to Jira software version. I keep admiring the release notes and changelogs on some of the Atlassian sites, and I am wondering how to recreate such in Confluence and/or Jira? :)

Like admin.atlassian.com > Products > Product updates and https://developer.atlassian.com/platform/forge/changelog/

Why is Atlassian hogging some of the cool stuff and not making available to paying licenses? :p

[Jens Schumacher - Released_so]

Hey @Melanie Pasztor 

We felt the same frustration! And we found none of the existing tools integrated well enough with Jira. That's why we built one, it's called Released. 

You can find Released on the Atlassian marketplace.

To summarize, Released can take any Jira tickets (not limited to versions) and generate great looking release notes for you. You can publish them with a click of a button to your website, app, Slack or Confluence. 

Here is what our own changelog looks like: https://released.so/changelog

Let me know if this is what you are looking for.

[Dugald Morrow]

Hi @Melanie Pasztor,

Thanks for your feedback on our changelog solution. I understand your frustration, but to give you a sense of why this is a challenge, here’s an overview of our changelog solution:

• Within Atlassian, we have defined a domain model, rules and guides relating to extensibility. We call this our “Extensibility Standards”.
• Within Extensibility Standards, there is a concept of “API group” and a registry of all of our API groups. Every API maps to an API group. Each changelog entry maps to one or more API Groups.
• Within Extensibility Standards, there are rules and guides defining how changelog content should be entered (e.g. choosing the right type of changelog entry, tone of content, what to put in the Description and More details fields, etc)
• Changelog entries are captured as Jira issues in a project (project key = CHANGE) that is configured with custom fields to capture changelog specific concepts like the API Groups and the announcement date.
• Within Atlassian we have a platform that runs our microservices. Several microservices run developer.atlassian.com (DAC) and one of these is a microservice responsible for changelogs. It integrates the Jira CHANGE project with DAC.
• We developed a Forge app called Changelog helper which provides UI within CHANGE issues that surface Extensibility Standards rule conformance info and other useful info to help changelog entry authors.
• We also have a number of Jira automation rules that run against CHANGE issues to help ensure authors provide correct information and maintain their CHANGE issues in the lead up their announcements. These automation rules link authors to the relevant Extensibility Standards rules and guides.

You can see from the above, there are some concepts and tools that is generic and could be shared, but there is also Atlassian specific components that are less valuable to share.

I should mention, however, there are changelog apps in the Atlassian Marketplace which you may like to check out.

Regards,

Dugald

[Logi Helgu]

I suggest creating a template for your releass (with some label like "release-notes") and then a page properties (macro) (table) for the key info you want in the overview (i.e. Date, Name, Goal...)

Then have the overview page display the key info with the page properties report (macro) so you have an overview of all releases.

Then you can pick up things from Jira as needed with macros.

This will enable you to have an overview of releases in much more flexible and human readable way than Jira gives you.  Sure it is more manual work, but I also suggest that you treat your release (notes) as the valuable document it is (maybe the most valuable part of the release?) and give it some love ;)

[Chris Pierson]

It's probably just a Confluence page with some of their page elements. Open up a Confluence page, add your title, then in the body, hit forward slash and then look at things like "Filter by label" or "Live search" as well as "Insert excerpt" to give you an idea of what you can do.

My guess is that they are creating each date and chunk of data as an Excerpt on another page, then using the Insert excerpt on the changelog page to bring the data in.