Bringing Metadata for Confluence to the Cloud – How we started developing a cloud app

Within the next few months, we will be taking you along the development process to bring our Metadata for Confluence app to the cloud. You will get exclusive insights on how our team is working, which steps are being taken, and which perspectives influence the overall result. Learn more about how our team is working and how you – as a customer or partner – can be part of the journey!

Ignition – Why bother developing a cloud app?

With the Atlassian Cloud segment growing constantly, we have been pondering over creating a cloud counterpart for our Metadata app for quite a while now. With more and more customers using cloud-based products and apps, the need for organizing and bringing structure to your Confluence became more and more obvious to us.

Thus, we starting phase one of the development process after the spark has jumped off so to say, which is to create the concept for the app.

Conceptualization – Outlining the apps foundations

The team started gathering feedback from the following resources:

• There’ve been several meetings with Communardo consultants and their prospective customers. The goal was to gather their requirements and make sure that with the cloud version of metadata, clients from our services business would be supported in their use cases nevertheless.
• Additionally, we scheduled sessions with many customers who use Metadata for Confluence on Server or Data Center. Together, we had a look at their main use cases and their most important functionalities. With this, we made sure we will still support their use cases with our cloud app. We also briefly presented them with an approach for our cloud app and get their opinion first hand.

After gathering the requirements and our consultant’s and customer’s feedback, we went on identifying the most important users (personas) and their key activities using Confluence and the app, resulting in the creation of a story map*.

Hitting the keys

Having the story map set up, a kick-off meeting with the development team took place, where we presented the concept of the app and asked for their commitment. Fortunately, they were all in 

After having the commitment of the team, we started with a first sprint.  The developers did a workshop to decide on the architecture of the new app, including discussing the topics of data storage, security, etc, resulting in setting up a so-called “walking skeleton”.

After that, the team started implementing the first features. In a first review session, the features have been presented to a group of stakeholders to get valuable feedback on how to proceed.

Curious on how the story will unfold? Keep tuned for the next part of the “Bring Metadata to the cloud” series.

Or do you like to take part in the development? Sign up now as a beta tester!

 * Story map: “Story mapping is a top-down visualization or roadmap method for the product backlog. The story map starts with a certain goal or functionality, which is then broken down into different user stories. A story map is created in tree format e.g. either physically, using post-its on a wall, or digitally. Story mapping gives the team and stakeholders a big picture view of the product backlog and the prioritized user stories that need to be completed.” – agile-academy.com