Does compass support a component hierarchy or subcomponents?

[Leo Hart]

I am evaluating Compass for a number of reasons including visualizing dependencies between services/components and the health of services/components.

One feature I was hoping to come across was business capability modeling/mapping. For example, I'd like to represent our product/platform as a capability model:

• Account Management
  • Add Account
    • Add Account Type A
    • Add Account Type B
  • Update Account
    • ...
  • Disable Account
    • ...
• Report Management
  • Generate Report
  • List Reports
  • Publish Report

I would then link components, test cases, bugs, stories, etc to get all sorts of insights into the health of these capabilities.

I see that Compass does have the concept of capability, but it seems to be a flat list vs a hierarchy.  I can somewhat hack together something using labels and dependencies, but it does feel like a hack and none of the default views seem to support a view like the above.

A couple of questions:

1. Am I even looking at the right tool to solve this problem or is Compass the wrong tool.  If Compass is a poor fit, any suggestions on what else to look at?  I'm already heavily invested in the Atlassian suite.
2. If Compass' intent aligns with what I am doing above, does anyone know if hierarchy support is on the roadmap?  Has anyone found a different way to get to the outcome I stated above?

Thanks!

[Andrew Boyagi]

Hi Leo,

Creating a hierarchy for components is a commonly requested feature and something that the Product team is working on.

Here are two options you can use while the team work on releasing heirarchy:

1. Labels - you can create a label called Account Management and add that to all relevant components. This will enable you to search and filter for all associated components
2. Dependencies - you can create a component named Account Management and make Add Account Type A and Add Account Type B dependant on Account Management. This way you can visualize the dependencies in the dependency view, as well as get a view of all events in the activity feed.

Hope this helps!

Andrew

[Jeff Madison]

We use dependencies, although we reverse the order: the Capability depends on the Components, and parent Capability depends on each of its sub-Capabilities. The idea being you can't do Account Management without Add Account Type A, etc.

[Peter Suyderhoud]

Hey Andrew - just curious what the timeframe for implementation of this feature would be? We're evaluating buying a Jira plugin like Octo vs. using Compass. I'd really like to use Compass, but Octo has the one feature that seems to be missing from Compass (subcomponents/hierarchy) when it comes to software bill of material management.

[Jeff Madison]

A basic software BoM capability in Compass would be a great addition, even if that's just a new relationship such as "Subcomponent of" between components, in parallel with the existing Dependencies relationship. (I think the uber flexibility of Jira's "linked issues" feature would be too much and asking for trouble, though.)

[Andrew Boyagi]

Hi@Peter Suyderhoud and @Jeff Madison, @Katie Silver is our Product Manager on Compass working on this - Katie do you mind sharing an update? 

[Katie Silver]

Hey Andrew thanks for the tag! 

I'm scoping out requirements for the first version of hierarchical dependencies right now, along with a new component type called Domains that is purpose built for that use case. Hope to have this out in the next couple months! 

[Jeff Madison]

Oooh, Domains will be great, and another thing high on our wishlist. It will be great to retire our Domain custom field.

[Peter Suyderhoud]

Thanks @Katie Silver ! Sounds like we'll move forward with Compass with these new features coming. One small ask for the Domains concept, it'd be nice for admins to be able to limit which components can be selected by users when creating issues. The use case would be that UI/UX would be the "parent" to a bunch of subpages/components that we'd want folks to allocate their work to instead of the high level parent.

[Katie Silver]

Got it @Peter Suyderhoud and so glad you're moving forward! I have heard that request before - to filter or restrict the components that are selectable on a Jira issue. Let me think about how we could fit that in, if it can't come with the first release then I'll keep it in mind for a future iteration. 

[Jeff Madison]

@Katie Silver , we also like the idea of the Jira component field dropdown filtering to just the "relevant" components (e.g., only if the Compass Component has a link to the issue's parent Jira Project), we also know that sometimes life is messier than that, and so we still need to ability to link any issue to any component. Making the 90% case easier but the 99% case still possible is probably tricky UX-wise. Good luck! :-)

[emre]

Hi @Leo Hart  ,

       I would like to tell you about our solution for the feature you want. Create subcomponents with using components and folders, then assign them to issues and search the parent subcomponent or folder with our custom JQL function and find the child issues to which the child components are assigned. Our application is Configuration Management Toolkit. However, that application supports JIRA components, not Compass components. 

1- Create your Subcomponents Hierarchy(You can also add component into another component or you can add folder to another component).

2- Assign your component to an issue with using our custom Subcomponent Version Picker Custom Field(If you want you can assign component with JIRA's components field). Example issue summary: 

  

3- Write our custom JQL function subcomponentsOf then see your child issues. Below, the first input is the key or name of the project and the second input is the compressor folder. In the subcomponentsOf function, it calls the children of the compressor folder and their children and finds all sub issues. You can also use this function for components and their subcomponents.

4- You can also see the assigned component's hierarchy and assigned versions on issue view screen.

Disclaimer: I work for the vendor who developed this application.

[Michael Quan]

I have built a three tier model back in 2008 because there wasn't anything available in the market. It shouldn't be difficult for the Compass team so I hope it get released soon.