By Ravi Sagar | Tea with the Sparks – Weekly Atlassian Insights
Welcome back to another edition of Tea with the Sparks—your weekly dose of insights, opinions, and updates from the Atlassian ecosystem.
If you’re new here, I cover the latest happenings around Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, and more—
Let’s dive into the latest highlights! ☕👇
🧠 Bitbucket Pipelines: Monthly Office Hours + Roadmap Insights
Atlassian’s Bitbucket might not be as widely known as GitHub or GitLab, but it’s quietly evolving—and I’ve been watching it closely.
🔹 Atlassian is now organizing monthly office hours (last Friday of each month) specifically for Bitbucket Pipelines.
🔹 These sessions are hosted by Atlassian’s product team and aim to gather community feedback, answer questions, and showcase new features.
💡 My Take:
We’ve been using Bitbucket at Sparxsys for years. It’s powerful—and these sessions could really help teams unlock its potential. I’ll be attending and I suggest you do too!
🔗 Explore Bitbucket roadmap items like:
- Pipeline YAML variable templating
- Enforced signed commits
- Docker image registry support
- Robo chat integrations
📦 Major Shift: "Products" Will Now Be Called "Apps"
Yes, you read that right. Atlassian is renaming products to apps across the admin UI and system-wide terminology.
Here’s what’s changing:
Old Name New Name
Products Apps
Product URLs App URLs
Product Admin App Admin
Product Updates App Updates
They’re also calling existing Marketplace plugins "Connected Apps" or "Third-party Apps".
💬 Why this matters:
It might sound cosmetic, but this is a fundamental change that affects how admins assign access, configure permissions, and communicate with users. Expect this shift to appear gradually.
📊 Jira Align: OKR Hub + New Roadmap Features
I’m not a heavy Jira Align user myself, but Atlassian recently introduced OKR Hub—a centralized dashboard showing progress, objectives, and metrics for large-scale programs.
They also published a Q1 roadmap for Jira Align with updates like:
- Custom filters
- Team hierarchy navigation
- Deep linking and Smart Links
- Atlassian rich text editor integration
If you work in scaled agile environments, these features are worth exploring.
🎟️ Upcoming In-Person Atlassian Event in Kyiv
If you're in or around Kyiv, there's an Atlassian event happening the week of April 21. While there's no specific theme announced, it's expected to be a Team '25 follow-up gathering.
👋 If you plan to attend and want to meet up—let me know!
🧮 Dev vs QA Story Points: Sprint Estimation Strategies
An age-old debate—should development and QA tasks have separate story points?
This question recently came up in the Atlassian Community, and I addressed it in my latest video. The short answer: It depends on your team’s process and how you structure your sprints.
🧾 Confluence Tip: Changing Page Ownership
Last but not least, we published a blog + video on how to change page ownership in Confluence—a surprisingly common question among teams.
☕ Wrapping Up
That’s it for this week’s updates from the Atlassian universe. From Bitbucket’s strategic push to renaming products and boosting Jira Align’s capability—there’s a lot happening!
Let’s keep learning and exploring together. Until next time—take care and happy collaborating! 🚀
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