Atlassian Cloud Changes

[Mathew Lederman]

How do you keep up with the Cloud Release Notes? The weekly email they send out has 808 updates, 782 if you exclude Bitbucket and Compass. How are any admins supposed to keep up with this type of volume that's not summarized or packaged in any way? 

I feel like trying to actually keep up with this is a fool's errand but this is the only comprehensive list of changes coming to our instance. For example: The recent Assets change to the new nav separate from the entire instance wasn't announce anywhere except in the release notes.

I'm trying to keep up with any changes relevant to my org, but I can't find a list of changes that is both comprehensive and functional.

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Mathew Lederman 

I agree: there are too many diverse (and sometimes contradictory) sources to monitor for updates and issues.  One possible approach depends upon how much time you want to invest...

For example, you could develop your own schedule to check various sources, and perhaps divide-and-conquer this with your admin peers, gathering weekly to brief one another.  Here is a sampling schedule I try to use:

• turn off email notification of the change blog, etc. and only subscribe to incidents on the status pages...then use a pull versus push model with...
• listen to your own customers for problems they see in the ecosystem products
• daily review of the status pages: https://status.atlassian.com/
• daily review of the known security incidents: 
  • https://confluence.atlassian.com/security/security-advisories-bulletins-1236937381.html
  • https://www.atlassian.com/trust/data-protection/vulnerabilities
• daily watch the community for articles that indicate new / modified features as these sometimes appear here first
• daily watch the community for "canaries" indicating an outage (or broken feature) impact is spreading
• weekly review the cloud documentation blog, searching on the page for the text "new this week": https://confluence.atlassian.com/cloud/blog
• monthly check the open defects and suggestions for the products you use, saving your desired filter for reuse: https://jira.atlassian.com/issues/?filter=-6
• monthly quickly re-read / scan the documentation pages for products use to see changes; sadly, most of the doc pages still do not have a "last updated" date or changelog
• monthly check the cloud roadmap: https://www.atlassian.com/roadmap/cloud?status=future;comingSoon&
• monthly check the JPD roadmap: https://atlassian-product-managers.atlassian.net/jira/discovery/share/views/a0af4caf-5f1b-42be-8c57-24d1080122bc
• as needed, review the platform changelog for specific changes / dates: https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/jira/platform/changelog/#
• as needed, check the developer community for RFC in areas of interest: https://community.developer.atlassian.com/
• as needed, look deeper for symptoms in the ecosystem backlog: https://ecosystem.atlassian.net/jira/projects?page=1&sortKey=name&sortOrder=ASC

Kind regards,
Bill

[Mathew Lederman]

@Bill Sheboy appreciate the detailed response, as always.

To be honest, I'm not as concerned with incidents. I have the statuspage for each tool we use sending updates to a public Slack channel, so all our users can join that if they want to see status updates.

I'm concerned about functionality changing in our environment with no advanced notice like the new Assets home. We got the new Assets view that looks similar to the new nav, even though we're on the bundled release tracks and there was no mention of this change. According to the Atlassian Team this wasn't part of the Release Tracks because, "it fits into the category of changes not included in the bundled track, i.e. "a significant visible change that rolls out over a longer period of time." 

I'll definitely bookmark and keep any eye on the New This Week cloud changes. And for the rest, I guess we just do our best and scream if anything awful comes out.