Confluence Induction

Confluence can help development teams get new new members up to speed quickly so that they're fixing bugs sooner and detracting less from highly productive members.

Add a new child page to this page by going to the Add menu and selecting Page. Then look for the child page in the Children section at the bottom of this page.

This induction handbook follows on from the Global Induction. Please also review the New Employee Checklist first before proceeding.

Induction

Congratulations, you have been chosen to become a part of the Confluence team! How exciting is that?

On second thoughts, don't answer that.

By now you should have a desk, a chair and a computer running your operating system of choice. If you don't, grab somebody because you've missed the first couple of stages of your induction. Otherwise, make sure you are sitting comfortably and we'll continue.

Ergonomics Warning
If you are not sitting comfortably, please sign an occupational health and safety claims waiver form immediately.

About The Confluence Development Team

The Confluence Development Team is responsible for the development of Confluence, the enterprise wiki. Imagine a gigantic funnel. Thousands of feature and improvement suggestions and bug reports pour into the top, and a top quality enterprise wiki comes out at the bottom. You're sitting in the middle.

Administrivia

What hours do I need to work?

You are contracted to work an 8.5 hour day, including one hour for lunch. We're pretty relaxed about when you start and finish work each day, so long as you:

put in the hours
show up for scheduled meetings (including the daily 10am stand-up)
let your team leader know in advance if you're going to be gone at some time you'd normally be expected to be around

We also do a lot of pair-programming, so if you know you're working with a pair and one of you habitually works 8-5 and the other 10-7, you should probably work it out between yourselves to show up at the office at the same time.

Procedures for sick leave and annual leave should already have been explained to you as part of your company induction.

Confluence Resources/Bookmarks

The Confluence team uses many different resources and tools to go about their various functions including:

Staff Contact List - photos and contact information of all Atlassian staff
The CONFDEV space
The documentation, discussion and extensions spaces on confluence.atlassian.com
Charles' Poker Corner – explains where half the team vanishes to on Friday lunchtimes
The Communication Methods page contains some RSS feeds you should subscribe to, including the Atlassian del.icio.us feeds.

Configure Confluence Systems

As part of your induction, you should have received logins for all the various Atlassian systems. Now would be a good idea to check them out:

http://confluence.atlassian.com – check this out particularly.
http://jira.atlassian.com
cvs.atlassian.com (And Fisheye)
svn.atlassian.com (And Public Fisheye)
Bamboo on keg.sydney.atlassian.com (Unit test CI)
Bamboo on panda.sydney.altassian.com (Functional test CI)

\\RESCHES\DEVFILES (including the vitally important entertainment directory)

What Do I Do Now?

Set up your development environment

Read our 'Setting Up a Confluence Development Environment' instructions, which show you how to grab Confluence from version control and get it compiled and running inside IDEA.

Your first important task at Atlassian is to help us maintain this document. Anywhere you find it unclear or inaccurate, ask a nearby developer what you should be doing then fix the wiki page.

Set up other parts of your computer

You may want to install OpenOffice (or NeoOffice if you are on a Mac, which can be found on DEVFILES\software\apple) in order to be able to view DOC and XLS files sent to you by random people.

Learn More about Confluence

Once you have Confluence installed, play with it. Look at the source code. Read the documentation. Get a feel for the bugs and feature requests in JIRA. Get more familiar with the core Open Source components of Confluence, especially Hibernate, Spring and Lucene

The First Few Weeks

Confluence is a reasonably big codebase, and the nature of the application is such that there are a lot of different subsystems with complex interdependencies. As a result, it can be a little hard to get into. We've found the best way to get started is to fix bugs: they're isolated, well-defined problems with a clear point of completion.

When your confidence grows, you'll be eased into bigger things.

You might also be curious to read our 'The Confluence Development Process' document to find out how we develop software.

Warning: Sample Content
This is sample content that comes included with Confluence for the purposes of demonstrating how the product can be used.