How to Release with Next-gen Jira Projects

February 28, 2020
#How To#Jira
2 min

Using next-gen Jira projects can be convenient for small, autonomous teams that are new to agile. These projects don’t need much configuration, and you can set them up in five minutes. These projects don’t need much configuration, and you can set them up in five minutes. If you want to recall how to do it, watch our handy tutorial.

When next-gen projects first appeared in Jira, you could not find the Releases option. After 14 days of having the status Done, your issues were simply removed from the board and archived. There was nothing else you could do to control your releases and versions. Sounds frustrating?

But here is the news: from the end of November 2019 you are able to use the Releases&versioning feature in next-gen Jira projects. The tricky moment is that this feature is disabled by default. So, you need to enable it manually. Go to the Project Settings tab → Features → Releases&versioning.

feature release in Jira

Now you can find the Releases tab in the project menu and assign/create a fix version for your issues right from the Jira issue view.

releases tab in Jira

Let’s check the Releases tab. Here you can see the list of all your versions along with their statuses, current progress, and release dates.

release hub in jira

Note that after your version is released, the related issues won’t dissappear from the project board immediately. You still have to wait: the board will be automatically cleared in two weeks.

Atlassian Team Playbook: Monitor Your Team’s Health

February 23, 2018
#How To
8 min

Atlassian development and collaboration tools definitely help us monitor the health of our projects. But have you ever thought about checking the health of your team?

If you track your team health, you can understand what factors affect the mood and engagement of your team members. This way you can ensure that your team has a healthy culture and can function as effectively as possible.

Atlassian shared their best practices guide called Atlassian Team Playbook. They developed the Team Playbook to provide teams with a set of team building activities that can be vital in getting and keeping great business results.

In this blog post, we will tell you more about the step-by-step instructions suggested by Atlassian. You can use this information to get your team on track towards achieving your goals.

Health Monitors

The Atlassian team recommends to start with Health Monitors. This way you can define where your team is at the moment, why and how you got there, and what next steps to take.

The first thing you need to do is to identify your team type and choose the Health Monitor workshop accordingly:

These workshops contain direct guidelines that will give you a better understanding of your strengths and weaknesses as a team, and will provide you with the insight into how to manage them up.

For example, if you choose the Leadership Team Health Monitor, you will need to gather your team together for a one-hour meeting. Share the Health Monitor grid with the eight attributes of healthy leadership teams. Divide the participants into small groups and ask them to rate all the attributes. When you receive the results, you can go through each attribute one by one, and ask the groups to explain their rating.

This approach will help you to assess the team’s health and focus on the things that really matter.

During the workshops you will need Atlassian blueprints that will help you to document your team’s health during the Health Monitor workshop. You can get Atlassian Team Playbook blueprints for Confluence Server or download the apps for Confluence Cloud depending on your team type:

The Health Monitor workshop allows you to take a closer look at the performance of your team.

Plays

Now when you know the major bottlenecks that are slowing down your productivity, you can choose the appropriate play that will show your team how to work better together.

For example, sometimes it is difficult to understand the real needs of your customers. In this case the Customer Interview play can help you. And if you want to get peer feedback from teammates and stakeholders, you may try the Sparring play that will help your team take your project to a new level.

For all the plays and the Team Playbook activities you will definitely need a rubber chicken! Do you want to know why? Check the Atlassian blog.

These techniques allow you to determine the root cause of your problem and find the best solution to solve it. The plays suggested by Atlassian will help your team unleash its potential.

Game Plans

Not sure which play to run? Use the game plans. They will provide you with the go-to recommendations and examples for specific use cases.

Choose the topic that fits your pain points:

To achieve better results, combine all the techniques described in this blog post. These step-by-step instructions can help you address issues, make changes, and improve engagement of your team.

What about your team?

If your employees are not enthusiastic about the work or being on the team, no process or methodology will help. So encourage your team members and keep them motivated. Do your best to identify problems early to create a healthy work environment in your organization.

Please, tell us about your way to check and evaluate your team engagement. Let us know if you find this blog post useful. You may also ask us any questions you have about Atlassian Team Playbook. Feel free to comment below.

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    How to Boost Security, Performance, and Administrative Control of Your Atlassian Cloud Applications

    December 14, 2017
    #News
    6 min

    Atlassian solutions help small teams and large companies to accomplish their goals by bringing communication, tasks, and ideas to a new level. Atlassian team is working really hard to give teams more freedom when using their tools.

    There is no limit to perfection and every year we are looking forward to the exciting announcements Atlassian representatives make during Atlassian Summit.

    In 2017 Atlassian gave us an unprecedented opportunity to visit two summits a year. This means that we got twice as many pleasant surprises this year:

    Today we will tell you more about another brand new offering from Atlassian announced this fall – Identity Manager. This solution is a must have for the teams that have fully adopted Atlassian Cloud products.

    In this blog post, you will learn how Identity Manager for Atlassian Cloud improves security audit and administrative control of your enterprise.

    Identity Manager features

    When Atlassian asked their clients what are the major blockers for adopting their Cloud offerings, topics like user administration, single sign-on, and security improvement always came to the top of the list. At the same time Server and Data Center customers noted the benefits of Crowd that integrates all Atlassian products and provides users with one simple single sign-on (SSO).

    Thus, Identity Manager became one of the main steps Atlassian took to make its Cloud products more appealing for the enterprises. It offers enhanced authentication for Atlassian Cloud applications in accordance with high security standards.

    So let’s check out the key features of Identity Manager.

    • SAML single sign-on is compatible with popular identity providers including Microsoft Azure, Centrify, OneLogin, and Okta.
    • Two-step password verification that enforces security control.
    • Password policies to help administrators check the strength of user password choice.
    • Priority support to resolve critical issues as soon as possible depending on priority (within one hour or 24 hours).

    At the moment most of the features are available for Jira, Confluence, and Stride. Bitbucket currently supports only password policies but will soon have the missing features.

    Identity Manager availability

    Atlassian Cloud customers can enroll in the free Early Access Program till the end of 2017. At this time you can try out almost all capabilities of this solution. Priority support for Atlassian Cloud will be available in the paid version in early 2018.

    Note that only site administrators can opt into the Early Access Program. You must be an administrator of one of the Confluence, Jira Software, Jira Core, Jira Service Desk, or Stride applications.

    You just need to open the Administration section and click the Organization button to create your organization and begin the domain verification process.

    If you are already using the SAML single sign-on beta or password policies today, you will be automatically enrolled in the Early Access Program. When Identity Manager becomes generally available for purchase, you will need to pay for Identity Manager to continue using it.

    Try Identity Manager and share your experience

    The Early Access Program is a great chance to test Identity Manager and safeguard all of your applications in a few clicks.

    Atlassian strives to add as much flexibility as possible to their products. So you are more than welcome to share your feedback about your experience with Identity Manager. There might be changes to Identity Manager once it is generally available due to the feedback received during the Early Access Program.

    In this blog post, we outlined the most important information about Identity Manager. We do hope that you will enjoy using it. You can share this blog post with your friends and colleagues and bookmark it to keep everything in one place.

    You may also ask us any questions you have about this solution for Cloud applications. Feel free to comment below.

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