Item: Atlassian Bamboo
Rating: 4
Author: Jonathan Kempf, UXC

Overall Satisfaction with Bamboo

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As with all Atlassian products, the best part of Bamboo is the integration into their full suite of software. Getting started with Bamboo from a Stash or Bitbucket code repo is as simple as clicking a button, and all downstream changes are immediately tracked and updated. Atlassian has made a huge effort to ensure that the dashboards to monitor build and deployment plans are both useful and informative, and it has paid off in a big way. Users can start, stop, change, monitor, create and delete plans from the push of a single button.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Rapidly setting up build plans
Being a central hub into all activity your company is a part of
Offering an intuitive UI
Allowing power-users to set up powerful CI/CD pipelines
Unit testing FTW

Cons

Extremely hard barrier to entry for non-backend developers
Blackbox makes it hard to customize functionality
The inability to add features without breaking core functionality
No cloud solution
Tasks cannot be put in if/else statements
No clear right way to form build plans

Return on Investment

The ability to deploy code rapidly has improved on our agile velocity.
Business concerns are fixed quicker as a result of being able to get code out to stakeholders ASAP.

Other Software Used

Amazon Aurora, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)

Likelihood to Recommend

Coming from a non-CD/CI company, Bamboo has completely changed the way that my team works, for the better. We used to rely heavily on stress testing and manual QA which was extremely time consuming and error-prone. Now, we are able to commit code and have automated deployments happen, and be assured that we are not breaking anything due to unit testing build into Bamboo. Our deployments have gone from once a week to several times per hour, letting our company be more agile in meeting our stakeholder demands.

Bamboo really falls apart when working in small cross functional teams. Due to the complexity involved in setting up build agents, this product can only work in certain use cases, and with people of certain (high) skill levels. Also, if you want to add any sort of logic or AI to your build and deployment, Bamboo simply can't do that. Not being able to add logic and machine learning to my deployments is a dealbreaker for me, as I count on multiple business use cases to deploy code.

Comments

Please log in to join the conversation

Bamboo is for enterprise, but not for everyone.