What modern development practices are at the heart of how your team delivers software?

[Claire Maynard]

Hey Community mates!

Claire here from the Software Product Marketing team. We all know software development changes rapidly, and it's often tough to keep up. But from our research, we've found the highest performing teams actively pursue change as a method of improvement. 

That's why we're researching what modern software development practices teams are adopting to improve their delivery performance. We want to hear from YOU: what development practices does your team use to help you ship faster, with better quality, or improve your customer satisfaction? Are you practicing continuous delivery? Are you building microservices? Are our products helping to facilitate these practices? 

Let us know and give us the details! We'd love to hear from you. 

[T. Klingenberg]

* Remove layers of indirection for deployment speed

* Deploy from CLI - That is provide CLI tools for your applications to standardize commands, scripting and automation for deployments.

[Former user]

Hi Claire,

we are employing CD and I gladly provide some feedback here.

One of the major hurdles we have is how to manage the Jira configuration in different environments.

For example, as part of our CD pipeline, we run automated integration tests via Bamboo in a Docker container.

First problem already here: there seems to be no official Jira Docker container (see https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Official-Atlassian-support-for-JIRA-on-Docker/qaq-p/568641)

Now when we run this isolated Jira in a Docker container, our integration tests require some specific Jira configuration (e.g. projects with certain workflows / custom fields etc.). The only way we found to do this is by injecting a prepared home directory into the container. This works, but there are some challenges maintaining and sharing this home directory archive.

For example, in a larger team developers work on features independently in separate Git branches. Multiple developers might now have the need to extend this configuration archive. For this, they need to be careful, as they cannot do this in parallel. Therefore, if anyone wants to extend this configuration, they report it in the daily and nobody else can make changes in the meantime.

What I would have expected from a modern, CD-ready product would be the ability to setup an entire Jira configuration from a YML file. So you could declare what you want to have and it would be a simple text file:

- This text file could be handled in Git and it could be reviewed via Bitbucket Pull Requests normally

- Would greatly simplify the entire setup procedure within the integration test phase, but also when installing our plugins at the customer site.

- Would be awesome documentation of the needed Jira configuration

Regards,
Alex