Labels Magic: Getting Labels to Work for Your Confluence Deployment Anthony Pelosi, San Francisco Atlassian User Group

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2. Labels Magic
Using Labels in Confluence to Manage Information
for a Release Cycle
Anthony Pelosi, San Francisco Atlassian User Group
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3. Searching Confluence
• One of the biggest issues in Confluence (or any Wiki) is how do I find
the information I am seeking.
• Common Approaches
• Search
• Sometimes successful
• Need to know page name
• Navigate the Pages
• Tough to enforce standards
• Info may span multiple pages
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4. Related Information in Confluence
• But if you are an author and you know some of the more common,
general questions ahead of time, you can bring that information to the
user.
• For Example,
• "Where can I find all of our monthly Google Analytics news item reports?"
• "Where can I find all design documents for our application architecture?"
• And today we will focus on, "Where can I find all information related to a specific
Software Release Cycle?"
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5. The Inflexible Approach
• Place all pages with content related to the
release cycle under a parent page.
• Inherent issue - page can only have one
parent.
• If a featureʼs development spans two
releases (3.0 & 3.1), where do you place
the specs page for that feature?
• Increases likelihood of moving pages as
features are re-prioritized or de-scoped.
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6. The Flexible Approach
• Organize pages per business unit (Product Management, Support,
Development, Quality Assurance, etc.) or some other non-time
sensitive structure.
• Use labels and the contentbylabel macro to pull in all pages related to
something time-sensitive such as a release cycle.
• For example, create a page called Release Cycle 3.0 as a child page
to Release Cycles that contains information specific to that release
(overview, key dates, team members, jira filters) and the
contentbylabel macro to pull in related pages located elsewhere.
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7. Release Specific Information
• Overview of features/goals/initiatives for the release.
• Important dates such as release cycle kickoff,
contract meeting, code freeze, etc.
• Team members and focus for each team.
• Lead (and possibly rotating role) assignments.
• Links to Jira filters for the release or place a
jiraissues macro using a Jira filter for the release on
the page.
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8. Related Pages
• Related pages include child pages of
Product Management, Development,
Quality Assurance, Support, etc.
• Do you best to establish a hierarchy
standards for each of those business units,
but it ultimately doesn't matter for
purposes of building a release cycle page.
• Child pages for release specific items such
as weekly demos, retrospectives, etc.
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9. Label the Related Pages
• In order for authors to "get" their documentation on the release cycle
page, have them add labels to their pages.
• For example, "bpe_3-0", and "support" if you want to further organize
the related pages by business segment.
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10. Display the Related Pages
• On the release cycle page, either place a
contentybylabel macro for the release
("bpe_3-0") or one per business segment for
the release ("bpe_3-0" and "support",
"bpe_3-0" and "development").
• {contentbylabel:bpe_3-0,development|
operator=AND|type=page|...}
• It is OK to add instructions for the authors to
the release cycle page - this is not something
you are going to show to customers!
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