Are you building a cloud version of your server app? We’re here to help

[CaitlinMcCurrie]

Hi, developer & partner community,

We need your input to ensure our cloud migration roadmaps for the coming calendar year aligns with your needs so that we can support you to move your apps to cloud.

Since announcing the end of sale of Atlassian server licenses in October 2020, many of Atlassian’s largest customers are moving to cloud and want to take their favorite apps with them. As a community, we’ve made big strides towards cloud over the past two years - many popular apps now have comparable cloud versions, first customers are starting to use automatic app migrations, we identified and fixed security issues and more - and the results start showing with rapid growth in the Marketplace cloud business this quarter!

However, we’re not yet done. Whether you’re building in Atlassian Connect or evaluating a move to Forge, we understand that the journey of creating a cloud app on the Atlassian Marketplace is not an easy one. We also see our enterprise customers demanding increasing capabilities from both Atlassian products and Marketplace apps - from data residency to backup and restore, advanced admin controls, and compliance certifications.

As a platform we strive to make it easier to serve enterprise customer needs in cloud and a better understanding of your apps helps us focus on accelerating the positive impact they can have. We invite you to complete this questionnaire, so that we can understand your challenges to building cloud apps and your development plans.

I understand surveys aren’t everyone’s favourite activity (obviously, as a researcher, they are my favourite pastime). However, if you take the time to share your feedback here, I will carefully review each response and ensure the feedback is given to the relevant Atlassian product and engineering teams as input to our platform roadmap. We intend to update/adjust the Trello roadmap as key areas may get reported to the survey. The teams and I are actively working on ways that we can better surface the impact your feedback has on our product roadmap.

You can take the survey here → https://surveys.atlassian.com/jfe/form/SV_9mgbZwnwjnffU3A

Thank you for your time and all your input in our programs of work.

Caitlin,
Lead Researcher

[anton2]

Hi, @CaitlinMcCurrie!

What time is required to complete the survey?

[CaitlinMcCurrie]

Hi @anton2! Depends on how many apps you would like to respond for, currently takes about ~5 minutes per app according to my data so far
You can always come back to the link and complete it later also, the progress is saved.

[sopel]

Hi @CaitlinMcCurrie,

I would love to fill out this survey, and I used to do this with most surveys Atlassian has sent me in the past.

However, as argued a few times over the last years, you are using the meanwhile prevalent and IMHO questionable 'no navigating back’ survey style, which makes it close to impossible to give correct and consistent answers (see e.g. Marketplace Vendor Survey Email - #3 by sopel and Atlas Camp 2018 Feedback - #6 by sopel for more detailed explanations), and it also seems to foster confirmation bias in many cases (likely doesn’t apply for the topic at hand of course).

Can you still enable the navigate back button for the survey at hand to ease filling it out?

Many thanks,
Steffen

PS: I’ve never received any actual answer to my resp. feedback btw., so given surveys are your ‘favourite pastime’ as a researcher, can you maybe briefly explain what the thinking behind this approach is, which seemingly contradicts statistics 101? External references fine of course, I do not want to derail this important topic with an unrelated discussion

[CaitlinMcCurrie]

Hi @sopel! You possibly haven’t had a response to your feedback previously because the researchers that design the survey aren’t in the community. Our quantitative team work in a centralised team within Atlassian, rather than embedded with our product teams. Now, fortunately, I work only with the ecosystem so I can answer your question directly
The reason we generally don’t have a back button is that we carefully design the survey flow (the experience of answering the survey including the order with which you see questions). We design to avoid framing and order effects. Where we enable the back button, essentially this negates the benefits we gain by designing question order as we effectively allow people to alter their own experience of question order. In some cases, it’s actually not possible for the tool to enable a back button where we have very complex study designs. For example, where we pipe in meta-data (we might do this to help avoid completing redundant questions).

I’m not sure I quite understand your concern about confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is where someone looks for data to support an existing claim or belief, often overlooking other conflicting data. I’d usually expect that to apply to the researcher (and I absolutely try to avoid that!) In this case, I could see how the absence of a back button would avoid potential confirmation bias. We would want to avoid people re-evaluating their answers as they progress through a survey to narrow in on a certain idea. Back buttons let people revisit their gut instinct answer, which is the answer we actually want. This is particularly important when combined with our survey flow considerations - we design so that the order doesn’t create bias by putting questions that might generate bias later on. Hope that clarifies our survey design ethos.

I had a read of your other answers and appreciate the frustration around open-ended questions. I agree that it’s best to keep surveys light on these style questions, they can be difficult to answer via survey. In general, I would much rather just have a conversation with you 1:1 to get that sort of feedback. My calendar is open btw: Calendly - Caitlin McCurrie.

Now, back to the matter at hand. This case is indeed unusual in that the information we’re asking is more objective (how does your app work) rather than subjective (how do you feel about this thing), in which case the order effects that we worry about in psychological studies are far less relevant. I very much appreciate your concern in getting us accurate information, I’ve put the back button on for this study so that you can give us that information. Thanks for your involvement in our research!

[izymesdev]

Thanks for setting this up. It seems to me the survey is geared towards Confluence/Jira apps. We’re looking into creating apps for Bitbucket cloud. So far my experience is that BB cloud app development does not get a lot of TLC. I have asked questions w.r.t BB cloud app development in numerous community feeds, asked Atlassian staff via developer community DM and even via LinkedIn DM. While I fill out the survey to the best of my knowledge questions like

are hard to get ‘right’.

@CaitlinMcCurrie I would like to use this opportunity to ask to include Bitbucket into the spectrum of apps and more importantly to signal in your survey outcomes report that

a) Clients that transition from Bitbucket server/DC to cloud need ‘their’ apps - which we as developers are more than happy to provide
b) Awareness and community support from Atlassian for such Bitbucket app development is sparse to non-existent and thus requesting missing features and removing blockers becomes impossible.

With kind regards, Ulrich
Izymes.

[CaitlinMcCurrie]

Thanks, Ulrich @izymesdev, you are totally right that this is geared toward Confluence and Jira. I appreciate that you still answered to the best of your abilities given this limitation. I’m sure you know that these products have been the priority areas for the ecosystem teams.
You’re not the first person (partner or customer) to share with me some frustration about Bitbucket apps. Myself and the rest of the ecosystem research team are pulling together the data we have on this topic to share with the product teams. Of course, I can’t promise any outcome, but I can tell you that we will help the teams understand the need.

[UlrichKuhnhardtIzym1]

Thanks for the update.

If it is within the your powers could you please share or PM a dedicated contact for the BB cloud developer ecosystem to be able to have a direct link.