Today Atlassian unveiled the new version of Bamboo, a continuous integration and release management tool. Most notably, version 4 brings better support for distributed version control systems like Git and Mercurial through automated plan branches. It also adds a test quarantine feature and makes a few user interface improvements.

“We thought we did a good job on CI, but there was a gap in distributed version control.” says Atlassian’s Giancarlo Lionetti. “Branching essentially means that developers are coding in isolation. We need to create a way for developers to merge branches into trunk without causing problems.” Bamboo can now automatically detect branches and test them before automatically merging them back into the mainline.

Lionetti says that since Atlassian uses both Mercurial and Git, both are first class citizens in Bamboo. Support for both is built natively into the product. Bamboo also supports traditional version control systems like Subversion, Perforce and CVS.

Test quarantining allows users to isolate a broken test so that it can be fixed later without affecting the current build. Once fixed, the quarantined test be reintroduced to a build with a single click.

Lastly, there have been a few UI tweaks, including the ability to toggle the plan navigator to keep it out of the way of the interface and improved navigability of the build shortcuts.

Bamboo competes with a number of other CI tools, including the open source Jenkins and TravisCI. But commercial support and deep integration with Atlassian’s other products such as JIRA, BitBucket and Fisheye make Bamboo an increasingly popular choice.