Atlassian Bamboo – continuous development through structured workflows and automated testing

10 Aug 2021

Alice Bakhoff

NB! Please note that Atlassian products are developed rapidly. The product features listed in the article may change over time.

In the following article we will take a look the capabilities of the Atlassian’s CI/CD tool Bamboo, which is also available on Data Center solution since August 2021.

How does Bamboo work?

Bamboo supports software development release management automation through different phases and environments.

The hierarchy of five building blocks make up Bamboo’s pipeline that enable the software deployment workflow:

task - individual operations that comprise the builds – e.g. executing a script, compiling code or running tests. They execute one at a time in the order you specify;
job – ensures that independent tasks are executed in the right order. Jobs in stage execute in parallel;
stage – control the flow of job execution - ensures that all jobs in previous containers have successfully passed before it is possible to move to the next stage. Stages must be in a logical order – code compiling stage needs to pass before the deployment stage;
plan – a set of build steps. Plans can be triggered in different ways e.g. by changes in source control or they can be scheduled to run by certain intervals or started manually;
project – a collection of plans.

Illustrative scheme of a Bamboo's pipeline hierarchy

Illustrative scheme of Bamboo's pipeline hierarchy.

Features of Bamboo Data Center

As follows, we will bring out Bamboo Data Center substantive features:

high availability (clustering) and performance;
building and testing – automated tests (the possible supported standardized test result parsers are Clover, JUnit, XUnit) that run on multi-staged build plans and with the reports it is possible to gain an insight to test results;
project level resources – add and manage repositories and shared credentials on project level without global admin help
configuration as Code – allows the entire configuration of Bamboo plans to be stored as source code;
Jira integration – displays the development panel on Jira issues and enables issue linking between environments;
Bitbucket integration – enables to link builds with commits and trigger builds when commiting to the repository;
Opsgenie integration – enables to inform about build statuses;
Bamboo reports – enable to compare build statistics (duration, successes, fails etc.) across one or more plans.
SAML/SSO authentication scheme (will be available in version 8.1 - November 2021)

Probleemide parandamisele kulunud aja raport

Bamboo's "Time to fix" report.

Bamboo Data Center licenses

Regarding the changes in Atlassian server the sales of Bamboo server licenses will end in September 1, 2021 (end of support in February 2, 2024).

Bamboo Data Center licenses are available from August 2, 2021.

According to Loyalty Discount, the clients who purchased Bamboo server licenses before August 2, 2021 are eligible to a 30% discount for Bamboo Data Center licenses when buying the license between August 2, 2021 – June 30, 2022.