6 ways to use Confluence and Apwide Golive to Manage your Releases

If you have been using Confluence to organize your release management, it’s already making things a little easier. Confluence is a great start for keeping everything organized, but there’s so much more you can do to make your release process faster, and more reliable.

Here’s a step-by-step approach to start using or improving how you’re using Confluence for release management. And if you are also using Jira and want to go one step further, we’ll show you how to address more common pain points with the Golive App.

1. Centralize Your Release Documentation with Confluence Pages

The first step in managing your releases effectively is ensuring all your documentation is organized and easily accessible. With Confluence Pages, you can document every detail of your release process, including:

• Release Plans: Outline what features, bug fixes, and updates will be part of each release. In Confluence Cloud, just copy-paste your Jira version URL (Smart Link feature). And if you need to show release notes to Confluence users who don’t have access to Jira, use the “Release notes” button on your Jira Release page, in order to create a new static Confluence page.

• Deployment Procedures: Include step-by-step deployment guides, rollback instructions, and configurations.

• Post-Release Retrospectives: Capture lessons learned and feedback to improve future releases.

By using templates for these types of documents, you can create consistency across all releases. Templates ensure you don’t miss important details and save time on repetitive tasks.

• Manual updates: While Confluence Pages are excellent for organizing information, they rely heavily on manual updates (unless you use the Smart Link feature), which can lead to outdated or incorrect data. Any change in the Jira version content or deployment details requires someone to manually update the page.
  
• Limited environment visibility: Confluence does not natively track the real-time statuses of environments and deployments: you don’t know whether the right version is deployed or if you need to wait another deployment in order to start your testing campaign.

• Real-time environment data: with the Golive App, you can show real-time environment and deployment details in your Confluence Pages using Golive Gadgets. These gadgets give you visibility into which environments are in use for the release, their current status, and any upcoming bookings, changes or blackouts.
  

2. Track Your Releases with Team Calendars

Team Calendars in Confluence allow you to visualize your release and deployment schedule. You can embed a calendar in your Confluence page, which helps keep everyone on the same page when it comes to important dates.

A few key features:

• Sync with Jira: Automatically pull in issues and tasks related to the release from Jira, so your calendar stays up-to-date.

• Custom Events: Add important dates such as deployment windows, maintenance periods, or external deadlines.

• Multiple Views: You can view your calendar in daily, weekly, monthly, or agenda format, depending on your needs.

• No automated conflict detection: Team Calendars in Confluence do not automatically detect conflicts in scheduling, meaning teams must manually check for issues like overlapping environment usage.
• Limited visibility into environment changes: While Team Calendars can pull data from Jira, they don’t provide real-time insights into the status of environments or their readiness for deployment.

• Automated conflict detection: Golive adds conflict detection to environment bookings, preventing overlapping usage of shared environments. If two teams try to book the same environment, Golive will flag the conflict and offer solutions. For more information, check our article about test environment scheduling.
• Real-time calendar updates: Golive's environment timeline integrates with Confluence and Jira, ensuring that any changes in the environment (like deployment or a scheduled blackout) are instantly reflected on the timeline.

3. Integrate Jira for Real-Time Status Updates

Jira integration is one of the most powerful features when using Confluence to manage releases. Since Confluence and Jira work hand-in-hand, you can pull real-time data from Jira into your Confluence pages. This helps your team track the current status of issues, tasks, or sprints tied to a release.

Some ways to leverage this integration:

• Jira Reports: Add reports directly to your Confluence pages showing which issues are done, in progress, or need attention.

• Dynamic Pages: Keep your Confluence pages updated automatically with live Jira data, so your team always has the latest information.

• Jira Gadgets: Use tools like burndown charts, progress bars, or issue lists to visualize the release progress.

• No native environment tracking: While Confluence can display Jira issues, it cannot track real-time environment statuses (like server configurations or which environment is currently in use).

• Static data display: Confluence relies on Jira integration for updates, but for environments, it doesn't track changes like rollbacks or configuration updates.

• Real-time environment tracking: Golive allows teams to view real-time environment statuses, directly linked to Jira issues. You can easily track deployments, environments in use, and their configurations without having to manually update Confluence pages.
• Detailed deployment tracking: With Golive, you can track where and when Jira tickets are deployed, offering a real-time overview of all deployments linked to specific environments.
  

4. Create a Consistent Workflow with Templates and Blueprints

To ensure that your release process is consistent and easy to follow, you can create custom templates or use blueprints within Confluence. This could include:

• Release Notes Templates: Standardize the way you document what’s being released, any known issues, and who’s responsible for each part.

• Deployment Checklists: Ensure that all key steps are followed for every deployment.

• Incident Reports: Create a space to log any issues that occurred during or after deployment, and capture the steps for resolution.

• No automated workflow: Templates help standardize documentation, but Confluence doesn’t automate the workflows for approvals, environment bookings, or incident tracking. This means teams have to follow up manually for approvals or changes.
• Limited tracking of deployment environments: You can’t see if the deployment steps in your checklist are tied to specific environments or if those environments are ready.

• Custom workflows: Golive allows you to create customized workflows for booking environments for your releases. Each of these workflows is integrated with Jira and Confluence, making it easier to track approvals and progress.
• Environment-linked templates: You can link specific environments to your deployment checklists, linking the Environment Detail page available in Jira. That way, you ensure that teams only proceed when the environments are ready.

5. Release Notifications and Updates with Confluence Automation

You can take things a step further with Confluence Automation, which is now available to all Confluence Cloud plans (with usage limits). Set up automation to notify team members when key actions occur, such as:

• New Release Pages: Automatically notify your team when a new release plan is created or updated.

• Deployment Status Updates: Notify stakeholders when deployments are scheduled or completed.

• Limited automation capabilities: Confluence Automation is limited to simple notifications. It cannot automate environment tracking or trigger actions based on environment statuses.
• No real-time environment alerts: Confluence lacks the ability to send real-time notifications when an environment’s status changes.

• Real-time notifications: Golive allows users to subscribe to environment notifications (by email, Teams or Slack). Teams can receive alerts whenever an environment status changes, a new deployment is triggered, or a blackout occurs.
• Environment-specific alerts: Notifications from Golive App are environment-specific, ensuring that teams are alerted about relevant changes without needing to check manually.

6. Hold Post-Implementation Reviews (PIR) after a Release

After every release, it’s important to capture what worked well and where things could improve. With Confluence, you can use the Retrospective template that allow your team to document their feedback. Some points to include might be:

• What went well during the release?

• What didn’t go as planned?

• What can we do better next time?

• No automated environment tracking: Post-release retrospectives may lack critical environment data, especially if environments change or face issues during deployments, which may not have been captured in real time.
• No historical environment data: Confluence doesn't provide detailed logs of how environments were used during a release, which could be important in analyzing issues.

• Environment history tracking: Golive tracks all changes to environments during a release, allowing teams to review what happened in each environment, what issues arose, and how environments were configured. This data can be critical in retrospective.
• Detailed environment logs: Golive’s history feature allows you to review the exact state of every environment during the release, helping your team analyze what went wrong and how to avoid similar issues in the future. The Last Deployments and the Last Status Changes templates are typically used for those retrospectives, and they can be easily embedded into your Confluence Pages!

Conclusion

By using Confluence to organize your release documentation, you ensure that everything—from release plans to deployment steps and retrospectives—is clearly laid out and easily accessible.

Apwide Golive takes this even further by giving your team real-time visibility into the status of your environments and deployments, making sure you’re never working with outdated information. Golive also adds automated conflict detection, preventing overlapping bookings of shared environments, which helps avoid last-minute scheduling issues.

With Golive’s custom workflows, you can automate processes like environment bookings and deployment tracking, improving your workflow and cutting down on manual effort. Plus, after each release, Golive provides detailed logs of your environments, allowing for more accurate and insightful retrospectives to continuously improve your release process.