I’m Preethi, a Product Manager on the Confluence Ecosystem team, and I’m excited to share a new initiative our team is launching that focuses primarily on our app developers! This initiative aims to learn more about how we can build better experiences for you!
We would like to better understand your needs as developers so that we can add features that will best support your use cases and drive impactful and measurable releases to our community. We’d love to get some feedback from you about what’s going well and what we can do better regarding the ease and quality of developing on Confluence.
To do this, we’re setting up 30 minute coffee chats where you can talk directly with our team’s product managers and share your thoughts! These coffee chats will run May 26, May 31, June 1, and June 2. If you’re interested, please book some time here. If none of these times suit your availability, feel free to reach out directly at pkandappan@atlassian.com. We plan to run coffee chats every 3-6 months with the same partners to establish a baseline and trend of developer satisfaction. This would be a great opportunity for you to directly share feedback and influence our roadmap, so please don’t hesitate to reach out!
Whatever experience you are going to build, please make sure that it will have Connect support out of the box. If it is Forge only, it will automatically be a very bad app developer experience.
I’m already spending a significant amount of time documenting and reporting issues in Confluence. The reaction from Atlassian is mostly none. Sometimes bugs in Confluence that would take 10 minutes of time and a single line of code to fix are not fixed for 10 years and then closed by Atlassian because they are considered not relevant enough, while each app developer needs to invest 2 days to build a workaround, if there is one at all.
To be honest, your offer to chat with you for 30 minutes every 3–6 months to improve my developer experience by talking with you about the daily problems that developers are facing when working with Confluence does not sound very appealing to me. A much better way to improve my developer experience would be to actually solve these problems, rather than creating yet another channel where I can report them and then see no results.
If you want Confluence to become pleasurable to work with, first eliminate your process of delegating bug reports from one platform to the next until they get lost in the void. Set up one central platform where bugs can be reported and publicly seen and discussed. Implement a policy that all reported bugs should be fixed as soon as possible. Let your developers respond to bug reports, rather than some people who don’t manage to reproduce bug reports because they lack even fundamental knowledge of the Confluence platform. Second, create a complete API that makes most of Confluence’s functionality reusable inside apps. Stop distinguishing between internal APIs that Confluence uses to render its UI and public APIs that apps can use but that no one at Atlassian ever even tries out. When developing new Confluence features, start with a public API that both Confluence will use to implement the feature and that apps can reuse to replicate Confluence behaviour. Third, set up a complete and well-structured documentation for that API.
If you don’t have enough resources to implement these three steps, let us help you. We are working all day with Confluence and would much rather fix the problems rather than building workarounds for them.
I am also waiting for the CustomfieldContextCreated event being implemented on Server/DataCenter. Opened a ticket 10 years ago… And I also had such an experience with a bug in AUI RestfulTable where I could easily provide a bugfix being close after 10 years…
First off, thanks for engaging with the community with your initiative. Could we get some UK/EU time slots available for the meeting please?
One point of feedback:
Could we start talking about product experiences rather than exclusively developer experiences?
I understand that this might be out of scope for this initiative and that the developer community are your core audience but the impact of issues being addressed or not have wider product implications (as per @candid’s comment). This often leads to significant pivots in what we can ship. Limiting improvements to the platform to only cater for the development team misses a load of value/the wider product picture.
Hi @candid, thanks for your detailed response. I understand the frustration with not feeling like your feedback is being heard - the purpose of these talks is to give you the face time and opportunity to directly communicate your thoughts with us and get answers. We are trying to get specific feedback for our team to add to our roadmap beyond the more general channels you may have been contributing to. If you’re willing, we’d love to chat; in the meantime, we’ll continue to address these concerns and aim to provide you with a better experience.
Hi @clouless. I believe you’re referring to a Jira feature to add to Server, which is not something the Confluence Cloud team would work on, but I can help relay your feedback internally. I understand the frustration with bug reporting/delay with responding to bugs and this is something we are hoping to better address as a team moving forward.
