Developers: What if someone said you’d never have to meet with marketing again?

Atlassian has extended the automation it acquired from Code Barrel in 2019, and has run in Jira for most of the time since, to its Confluence collaboration environment.

The Jira project tracking tool is widely used by software development teams and Atlassian acquired Code Barrel to automate chores like handling issues or dealing with support tickets.

Which is generally appreciated by developers.

Forgive us now, dear reader, as we riff on the airline magazine mantra that every business these days is a software business, and that means folks well beyond the software team are keen to know when code lands so they can play their part in delivering it to customers.

In conversation with The Register, Dilani Kahawala, head of product for Atlassian’s automation platform, offered the scenario of a software team completing work on a new release that will be the subject of new release notes, a blog post, and needs its own branch in a Git repository or Atlassian’s own BitBucket.

The company has extended automation from Jira to Confluence to make that sort of thing easier: finishing the new version would auto-create the new branch, see the release notes posted for approval, and marketing alerted it’s time to publish that blog post.

Developers might not have to explain themselves ever again!

Automation could then extend to managing the lifecycle of those actions, so the next version sees the old release notes shuffled down the stack.

Atlassian has done this because it believes organizations want automation that isn’t dedicated to siloed functions, and may even be ready to replace automation tools focused on particular functions with collaborationware capable of linking wider teams.

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Of course Atlassian would say that, because as Confluence has grown from an enterprise Wiki to a more comprehensive collaboration platform, it’s used by more teams.

Automation for Confluence won’t cost customers any more beyond their current commitments, and will be a native feature of the product. It quietly debuted in the Premium and Enterprise versions of the suite a few days ago, and at the time of writing should be available to all paid up users. ®