Announcements and CheckOps on the Compass Home Page

[#1]

Thanks everyone for diving into our new Home Page dashboard! We’ve gotten great feedback about it so far and we’re excited to ship even more. Today I’ve got a couple more sections on the Home Page to tell you about: Announcements and CheckOps.

Consider: you’re a developer. Maybe you’re nervous about your first overnight on-call shift in a while, or you heard a rumor that a team you depend on is making some suspicious changes. This is understandably stressful!

Luckily, you have Compass. You can see Announcements from your upstream dependencies, so you’re aware of any changes coming down the line that might impact you. Since your team completes CheckOps weekly, you also know what open actions there are so you can get them done before your on-call starts.

Keep an eye on your Compass home page, and let your stress melt away.

Happy Holidays and let us know what you think!

[Robin]

Very nice! :) I'm liking where Compass is going. It is starting to provide a lot of the things we are looking for in an Internal Developer Platform application. Keep it going! :) 

1 Thing of feedback about Announcements: It would be fantastic if those could bubble all the way through the dependency tree. 

Consider Components A -> B -> C, being dependent in that order. If "A" has an Announcement, those of "C" don't know about it. If "B" is a project in maintenance mode, does not have a team assigned, or any other reason someone is not actively looking at it, the Announcement (of let's say: "BC break being released soon"), might break "C" if "B" is not updated in time. 

There are multiple ways of dealing with this bubbling of messages, such as: 

- "A" announces and sets checkmark "1 level only"

- "A" announcement bubbles to all depending on it, to be acknowledged/handled by each Components' Team

- "A" announcement bubbles to all depending on it, until 1 dependency (per fork of "depended by") 'claims' it. This auto-acknowledges it for further dependents. ("auto-acknowledge" could 'remove' for further dependents or have it be 'archived' - the latter can turn into a lot though)

Some ideas about Announcements. 

Anyway, keep up the work, following it with eager eyes! :) 

[Katie Silver]

Thanks @Robin ! Love this idea. I'll chat about it with the team :) 

[Christopher Robinson]

I've been testing Compass lately and have a similar desire. Wondering if this is still being considered. I work on a platform team where we work with Capabilities and under the capabilities lie the platform components that make it possible. We then have product team component dependent on our platform. 

Assume I have a Platform Capability A and it depends on 3 underlying components to "realize". At the same time I have a product team component B dependent on Capability A. It would be great if the announcements rolled up to the Capability level whenever an underlying component has an announcement. 

Perhaps my configuration upstream / downstream is wrong, but in any case it seems I'm required to make Product Bs component dependent on the capability A as well as all underlying components so that announcements are visible. It could also be that I'm adding too much complexity here.