License requirements:
This feature is available to teams on the Automation Enterprise tier.
What is a bundle?
A bundle is a group of features that are combined together at a single, nominated environment earlier in your pipeline, typically the first point where parallel work streams converge. Rather than re-resolving individual feature conflicts, validating, and promoting each feature separately at every environment from that environment onwards, you combine the relevant features into one early bundle and move them down the pipeline together.
Who should use this feature?
We recommend bundles to teams who:
Have multiple parallel work streams, teams, or projects in the same pipeline that converge at a central or integration environment, with a logical set of related features that needs to move forward together, whether that's one team's sprint or epic, or a set of features that heavily depend on each other.
Are at a scale where the resulting volume of PRs means you experience pains related to individually re-resolving the same merge conflicts, bottlenecks from validating and promoting features one by one, and/or manually tracking the promotion of related features due to dependencies between them.
How do these differ from the current Release/Release Candidate functionalities?
Releases and release candidates are both intended to represent what's moving to production, that is, the final scope of features for the next production release. A release is created directly on your final environment, whereas a release candidate is the same functionality made available one environment earlier so that you can rehearse the release before it reaches production.
A bundle is different:
It's created at a single environment earlier in your pipeline, typically one where parallel work streams converge (e.g. a central integration or QA environment). This cannot be your release or release candidate environment.
It isn't representative of everything going to production, only the subset of features you've chosen to combine at that environment.
It's promoted down your pipeline like any other single PR, and can eventually become part of a release candidate or release later in the pipeline, alongside other features, bundles, and/or projects. The bundle itself doesn't become a release candidate or a release.
See more information about releases here.
How do these differ from Long-Term Projects (LTPs)?
LTPs solve a different problem to bundles:
An LTP isolates a large, slower-moving initiative from BAU delivery, so it can run on its own cadence without blocking day-to-day work.
A bundle instead combines a logically related, ready set of features at a single early environment, so they can move forward through the pipeline together.
See more information about LTPs here.
How do I enable bundles on my pipeline?
To enable bundles creation, click the cog icon on your pipeline screen and select 'Edit pipeline details'. Within the 'Releases' tab, switch on the toggle for bundles and choose the environment where you want to create bundles:
Choose the environment where you want to create bundles. This cannot be your release or release candidate environment:
Save your settings. Now, you'll be able to create bundles at this environment.