Last week at Unleash, Atlassian presented Compass – an amazing new product for teams building and managing distributed software architectures. At Polymetis Apps, we have been using Compass in its beta stage since April and we are 100% sold. It is fantastic and helps us to keep up with our own sprawling architecture. And just like other great Atlassian products, such as Jira or Confluence, Compass gets even more useful with apps. This post is about an app we made for Compass and that went live last week while Compass was presented on stage at Unleash. The app is called Enterprise Architecture for Compass and it is available to all users of the current Compass beta today.
Enterprise Architecture Manager enables you to group your application components into Business Capabilities. A Business Capability encompasses a function that a business might be able to carry out and lists all IT applications required to execute that function. Adding a layer of Business Capabilities allows architects to answer novel and different questions about the general software landscape. For example:
-
Is application X a good fit for its purposes?
-
How widely is application Y used?
-
Which areas of our business would be affected by replacing or sunsetting application Z?
While Compass components can show an architect what exists today, architects cannot use it to answer questions like:
With Enterprise Architecture Manager, we record how well an application is suited for a Business Capability. This allows architects to see how well different parts of an organization are served from a technical point of view.
Today, the Enterprise Architecture Manager already includes reports on application health (based on aggregated scorecard scores) and application fitness depending on the corresponding Business Capability. In the future we aim to include more and configurable reports, to give organizations an even better overview of the software architecture their teams manage.
Additionally, since Compass components can be generated from code and metrics are typically gathered on-the-fly, an architect using Enterprise Architecture Manager can be reasonably sure that application-level data and below are sound and up-to-date. This minimises the data quality issue that you typically encounter with completely detached enterprise architecture tooling.
How to get started with Enterprise Architecture Manager for Compass?
Getting started with the Enterprise Architecture Manager is quick and easy. All you need to do is to set up Compass (if you haven’t done so already) and then install Enterprise Architecture Manager from the Apps menu. And that’s it. If you have any questions up-front or want help getting started, book a slot of my time and you’ll be up and running in no time!
Have you already given Compass a go? What was your experience like?
0 comments