Supercharge your workday with these efficiency tips for Bitbucket and Bamboo Data Center

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No matter which stage of development you’re working on, there’s nothing worse than wasting time on repetitive tasks, rewriting code, and scrolling through software just to get the job done. Work smarter, not harder, with these 5 tips designed to boost productivity when working in Bitbucket and Bamboo.

1. Store your build plan configuration as code with Bamboo Specs

2. Improve your continuous integration practices in Bamboo

3. Integrate your Bitbucket instance with Jira Cloud

4. Collaborate with confidence by commenting on pull requests in Bitbucket

5. Make informed and efficient decisions using code insights for Bitbucket

Tip 1: Store your build plan configuration as code with Bamboo Specs

If you’re managing large Bamboo instances with hundreds of plans, save valuable time with Bamboo Specs. With Bamboo Specs, you can store your build plan configuration as code for more straightforward automation, change tracking, and validation.

Bamboo Specs enable reusability, allowing you to quickly populate and promote changes to your code. For example, you can use Specs to add one line of code to all builds without changing it in every plan, keeping you from duplicating work. This boost to flexibility and efficiency allows you to reuse existing configurations without working through the Bamboo user interface or wasting time rewriting code.

Learn more about Bamboo Specs.

Tip 2: Improve your continuous integration practices in Bamboo

Take advantage of the features included in Bamboo to improve your team’s CI practices and develop more efficient workflow habits. These tips will not only help keep Bamboo performant, but also ensure your work remains coherent and consistent.

• Run plans more efficiently in Bamboo with repository caches. While the initial clone of your repositories will take some time, keeping warm copies of your repositories uses caching to help you work faster.

• Regularly review the code that generates logs during builds to remove any non-essential information. Verbose logs both slow your instance and slow your work as you sift through unnecessary content. Though regular reviews may take a bit more time initially, you’ll save yourself countless hours in the long run with streamlined logs.

• Send your artifacts directly from agents to dedicated external storage (e.g. using SCP/SSH artifact handler, S3 artifact handler) rather than to your Bamboo server. This helps to prevent builds from simultaneously processing too many files, overloading the server and hampering efficiency.

• Don’t treat your Bamboo server as long-term storage for production files. Remember that Bamboo is a build tool, not a storage tool. Transfer your important files to a dedicated repository and be aggressive with build results expiration in Bamboo. Note that if you keep production files in Bamboo, you can’t expire results holding them, because that would delete the files. Further, when you keep your files on a dedicated repository, you can leverage additional features like mirroring, faster drives, and backups. These not only help you work faster, but also keep your Bamboo instance powerful.

Tip 3: Integrate your Bitbucket instance with Jira Cloud

Integrating your Bitbucket instance with Jira Cloud allows you to take advantage of Jira Cloud’s efficiency features such as automation and reporting without leaving Bitbucket Data Center. With seamless integration of issues and code, you’ll be empowered to:

• Surface repository activity: Jira issues automatically update to show repo branch, commit, pull request activity, and—if you have Bamboo or Jenkins integrated with Bitbucket Data Center—your builds and deployments will appear in Jira.

• Get Jira issue views in Bitbucket: Understand the core details of Jira issues without having to switch applications. Instead, easily view Jira issues from anywhere in Bitbucket, including commit messages, pull request comments, and the branches page.

• Automate Jira workflows: Take advantage of Jira’s productivity features, like synching workflows with repo activity to update automatically as you work.

Read more about how to integrate Bitbucket Data Center with Jira Cloud here and here.

Tip 4: Collaborate with confidence by commenting on pull requests in Bitbucket

Don’t waste time and risk confusion by taking conversations about code outside of Bitbucket. Rather, if you are reviewing a pull request in Bitbucket, simply suggest small changes to the code by leaving a suggestion right inside the comment or task itself.

To save even more time, users with write access to the source repository can even commit the suggested change directly in the pull request without further action. Learn how to comment on pull requests.

Tip 5: Make informed and efficient decisions using code insights for Bitbucket

When you’re working on a project, every bit of time counts, even time spent deciding how best to develop and build. Leverage code insights for Bitbucket to give you the information you need to make informed, efficient decisions without switching between tools. Code insights use the third-party integration of your choice to surface information relevant to a pull request, improving the quality of your pull requests while boosting efficiency. Code insights empower both the author and the reviewers to make informed decisions about development with information about:

• Static analysis reports

• Security scan results

• Artifact links

• Unit tests

• Build status

Learn more about code insights for Bitbucket.

If you have other tips that have helped you take advantage of workflow efficiency in your Bitbucket and Bamboo instances, please share them below!