Top 5 New Add-ons for Atlassian Dev Tools – First Quarter 2016
As usual, our team keeps track of what’s new on the Marketplace for Atlassian Dev Tools and every quarter shares the selection of top 5 new add-ons. If you haven’t read earlier posts in this series, you can take a look at:
- Top 5 New Add-ons for Atlassian Stash – First Quarter 2015
- Top 5 New Add-ons for Atlassian Stash – Second Quarter 2015
- Top 5 New Add-ons for Atlassian Dev Tools – Third Quarter 2015
- Top 5 New Add-ons for Atlassian Bitbucket – Fourth Quarter 2015
So let’s see what new plugins Bitbucket and Bamboo users can try to add even more value and functionality to their code management and continuous integration platforms. From 9 new add-ons for Bitbucket and 17 new add-ons for Bamboo that appeared on the Marketplace in January-March 2016 we thought the following 5 would be the most useful for our readers:
- My Branches for Bitbucket by Johannes Heger
- Branch Author Plugin by Hiroyuki Wada
- Favourites by Scandio GmbH
- Zephyr for JIRA Add-on for Bamboo by Zephyr
- Bamboo SBT Task Plugin by Atlassian Labs
My Branches for Bitbucket
With My Branches for Bitbucket you get a list of branches across all projects, in which you have recently made commits and can quickly delete branches that are not used and not needed any longer. The add-on brings in a new icon in Bitbucket header. It shows the number of branches that you have lately contributed to. When you click it, you see the list of branches with little graphs showing the latest commits.
You can easily tell which of the commits shown on the graph are yours, as their nodes are the larger ones. Smaller nodes represent commits made by other contributors. As you hover over a commit node, you can see commit details. And clicking a node takes you to the corresponding commit.
To clean up a bit, you can mark and delete the outdated branches. Easy, but safe. The add-on checks all project, repository and branch permissions. If a user has no permission to delete a particular branch, the delete checkbox will not be displayed.
Another handy tweak is the capability to exclude projects, repositories and branches from the searchable branches using regular expressions. Plus on the add-on page in Bitbucket Administration admin can set how many most recent commits will be shown when a user clicks the add-on icon in the header. By default the commit count is 4 and you can modify it to some other value from 1 to 9.
Pricing: My Branches for Bitbucket is available for Bitbucket Server and is free at the moment.
Branch Author Plugin
Branch Author Plugin adds a new column with the name of branch creator on the Branches page in Bitbucket repositories. It allows you to easily find out who the author of each branch is and refer to that person if needed.
Also when getting a list of branches via REST API branch author will be fetched as branch metadata.
It’s a pretty simple, but a nice-to-have add-on.
Pricing: Branch Author Plugin is available for Bitbucket Server and right now it is free.
Favourites
Favourites makes it possible to mark projects as favourites and browse the list of them in your user profile. It helps users get a quick access to the projects they spend most time working on or need to keep track of. When you install this add-on, you’ll get a new link ‘Favourites’ in Bitbucket header that leads to the add-on page in user profile.
Initially the Favourites tab only shows the list of all projects a user has read and write permissions in. To mark a project as favourite, you need to find it on this list and click the star icon. After that you’ll see a new section, ‘My project’, with the project you starred. To remove a project from favourites, click the star icon one more time.
Pricing: Favourites is available for Bitbucket Server and is free at the moment.
Zephyr for JIRA Add-on for Bamboo
This plugin integrates Bamboo and a test management add-on for JIRA called Zephyr for JIRA Server, which means you need to have the JIRA add-on installed on your JIRA Server to benefit from this integration. Zephyr for JIRA Add-on for Bamboo creates test cases and publishes test results in real time in Zephyr for JIRA Server for test cases in Bamboo.
To get started, it will be necessary to add your JIRA Server(s) in Bamboo settings and create and configure a test plan in Bamboo. Alternatively you can use one of your existing plans.
Next is adding and configuring the “Publish Test Results to Zephyr for JIRA” test task.
Once you enable and run the build plan, you will be able to see results in Bamboo and have test cases created in the JIRA project you chose while configuring the Zephyr build task. Then these test cases are assigned to the corresponding test execution cycle and Bamboo executes the tests.
Zephyr for JIRA Server comes with various options that you can use to track test progress and analyze test related stats:
- Summary stats and graphs for each project
- Test execution progress per cycle and statuses of each test in test cycles
- Gadgets with multiple testing metrics for JIRA dashboards
Pricing: Zephyr for JIRA Add-on for Bamboo is available for Bamboo Server and is free. The commercial license for Zephyr for JIRA Server costs 750$ for 25 users; 1500$ for 50 users; 3000$ for 100 users.
Bamboo SBT Task Plugin
It’s another integration for Bamboo. This plugin adds a new Bamboo task, SBT task, and allows you to integrate your Scala projects with Bamboo.
SBT is an open source build tool similar to Maven or Ant that is widely used for Scala projects.
While configuring SBT task, you need to select executable, target and build JDK. It is also possible to specify other environment variables. Once the task is executed, you will be able to view test results on the Build Result screen in Bamboo.
Pricing: Bamboo SBT Task Plugin is available for Bamboo Server and is free at the moment.
