It’s been a busy year so far for the Bamboo team, and with the recent release of Bamboo 6.1, there are no signs of it slowing down any time soon. I recently sat down with Bamboo Product Manager, Syed Ghouse Masood, to find out more about what the team’s been up to, what new features were added in 6.1, and where the product is heading.
Before we dive in, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
My name is Syed Ghouse Masood (SG for short), and I’m the Product Manager for Bamboo at Atlassian. I have been in the software development world for about 16 years, and I love delivering great products and solving real user needs. I love all aspects of product development, especially when it comes to productizing obscure technology and making it accessible to a wide variety of people. Outside work, I am busy learning Polish, which is an interesting challenge. I’ve been with Atlassian for a little over 6 months and so far it’s been an awesome ride!
What excites you most about working on Bamboo?
Bamboo is easily one of the most exciting products I have worked on. As an enterprise-ready continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) tool, our users expect us to satisfy a wide variety of complex use cases out of the box, without depending on a bunch of potentially unreliable plugins.
Bamboo has deep integrations with Atlassian products like Jira Software and Bitbucket, and also a wide ecosystem of third-party tools. At the same time, we have to build these integrations with enterprise-grade security and scalability in mind. Effectively prioritizing the sheer number of use cases is an interesting challenge from a product management perspective.
In recent customer interviews, have you heard any interesting or unique use cases?
I love how the team at JAMF Software, who work on simplifying IT management for the Apple platform, brought Bamboo in as part of their DevOps transformation. Or how organizations like Mercy Ships use the entire Atlassian suite and Bamboo specifically for automated testing, to provide healthcare to people in developing nations. It’s a really powerful motivator to hear how teams across the world use Bamboo to create incredible things.
What did we ship this year that excited you the most?
So far this year we’ve shipped a whole lot of great features but I am most excited about Bamboo Specs, which lets you define your build and deployment plans as code. Bamboo Specs helps end users manage their plans more easily and reuse parts from plans elsewhere. Enterprise administrators can now scale more effectively by setting configuration for a whole bunch of plans, through code. This is something our users were asking for and we were thrilled to deliver it and bring modern CI workflows to the enterprise.
And with the most recent release, Bamboo 6.1, build engineers and developers can do even more with Bamboo Specs. All of the features and customizations you’ve grown to rely on like deployment projects, plan dependencies, or permissions, are now available via Bamboo Specs.
Apart from Bamboo Specs, we improved the Bamboo integration with Bitbucket Server by adding several performance enhancements, and a new in-progress build notification. We want to keep developers and build engineers informed and focused on the tasks at hand which is why building strong integrations across products is so important.
We also shipped Git Large File Storage support and native xCode and Fastlane support for iOS, OSX, and Android developers.
Can you tell us a little about what you’re working on?
Our goal is to continue to make Bamboo the modern CI/CD solution for enterprise organizations with a focus on easier administration and scale.
Throughout the year you’ll see more enhancements to Bamboo Specs, especially when it comes to Bamboo reacting automatically to changes in plans stored in a Bitbucket Server repository. Integrations are really important for our users so you can expect to see more improvements to our existing Bitbucket and Jira Software integrations, as well as more, and better quality add-ons available through the Atlassian Marketplace.
And we’re excited about all the possibilities that containerization presents. We’re planning to work on enhancing our support for Docker to solve CI/CD problems in a novel way.
The DevOps transformation happening today has really pushed our thinking and our roadmap. Features like Bamboo Specs, integrations, and containerization will play a key role for teams looking to improve how they work by adopting DevOps practices.
Take a look at Bamboo’s release notes for more on what we’ve shipped this year and stay tuned for more exciting releases to come. If you haven’t given Bamboo a shot yet, give it a try starting with 6.1 today.