DevEx Roundup: Join Compass in Vegas, connect Jira to your software catalog, and more new features

[#1]

Compass Communique: March 2023

Hello Compass Community, 

You’ve asked. We’re listening. Over the past two months, we’ve worked quickly to ship dozens of new features and enhancements to Compass, your developer experience platform (log in here if you're already signed up).

This is based directly on the feedback of thousands of platform engineers and developers using Compass to help reduce cognitive load within their teams. We’ve shared some of the highlights below.

We’d also love to meet any of you in-person or digitally in Las Vegas for Team '23, April 18-20. Be sure to register soon to save 50% on your in-person pass.

What’s included this month:

• 🗓️ Join us at Team '23

• How to use Compass APIs: Authentication and GraphQL in minutes

• Bring the whole squad: New identity types for custom fields

• See what’s changed in real-time: Activity feed enhancements

• Cross-product search with Jira Software and Confluence

• Improved global metric definition management

• Build and enforce advanced scorecard policies with regex

• 🔗 Jira Software components link to Compass

Don’t forget to log into Compass today to see your latest health scorecards and metrics.

Join Compass at Team '23

Atlassian Team ‘23, the ultimate event for modern teamwork, is heading to Las Vegas from April 18–20. This is your last chance to save 50% on your in-person pass to our biggest event of the year and enjoy:

• 🤫 Be the first to hear about the latest news about Compass and other Atlassian products

• 🎙️ Keynotes from filmmaker James Cameron, Atlassian founders, and industry leaders

• 📈 Learn how to level up your work and collaboration from industry experts

Can’t make it to Las Vegas? Register for free to get digital content access anywhere. Get your pass today.

How to use Compass APIs: Authentication and GraphQL in minutes

Compass can be extended to work with an organization’s entire toolchain and track whichever metrics and data you deem important. Developer Kairo Phan explains how to get started using our open APIs in this 3-part video series with open-source examples to help you get building.

1️⃣ Authentication: Setup authorization for Compass API requests

2️⃣ GraphQL Examples: Queries and Mutations

3️⃣ GraphQL Customization

Bring the whole squad: Assigning new custom user types

Each component in your architecture maps cleanly to a single owner, right? If only the world were so simple! Now you can capture all the nuance by assigning additional Team owners the custom field type user. Assign specific people to fields like “Owner”, “Escalate To”, “Group Lead”, “Architect” and anything else you can dream up and keep all key parties informed.

1. 🔍 Navigate to your Custom fields settings UI in Compass

2. 👉 Click the Create custom field button

3. ✏️ Define your field’s parameters and choose the applicable component types

See what’s changed in real-time: Activity feed enhancements

The activity feed does the heavy lifting to keep key information about your software up to date in real-time, displaying all relevant activity for a given component and its dependencies in a single view. The Compass events API is completely extensible and by default offers deployment, build, incident, feature flag, alert, lifecycle, push, and custom events. We’ve released several enhancements to help you see changes in real-time:

1. Activity feed on component detail overview page for greater visibility and contextual relevance

2. Display all commit events complete with info & URL links from Bitbucket, GitHub, and GitLab out of the box

3. Environment filter sorts events by dev, staging, prod, or any other desired category

Head over to your Compass homepage and see what’s happening on your activity feed.

Cross-product search with Jira Software and Confluence

We’re making it easier to work across your toolchain, from tracking software health to sprint planning and documentation. Compass, Jira Software, and Confluence are now cross-searchable allowing you to quickly find relevant components directly within Jira and Confluence to help you tie the health of your technical architecture to your sprint planning rituals.

1. 💻 Head over to your desired Jira Software or Confluence workspace

2. 👉 Click on the search bar and select Compass from the product list

3. 🔍 Search to your heart’s content

Track component performance consistently with global metrics

Define it once, track it everywhere! Global metric definitions provide a central mechanism to track component performance consistently across your organization. With Compass' open API you can consistently track any component metrics to a component whether it’s Build Time, Deployment Frequency, or anything else, all your teams will be on the same page.

1. 💻 Navigate to your Compass Health UI

2. 👉 Click on Metrics on the left panel

3. 🩺 Click the Create Metric button and define any metric you like

Build and enforce advanced scorecard policies with regex

1. 💻 Navigate to your Compass Health UI

2. 👉 Click on an existing scorecard and select edit, or create a new one

3. ➕ Add a new field criterion, select “a specific link is added” for validation

4. ✏️ Define your regex

🤝 Jira and Compass component links your sprint to your architecture

We plan to add more data and visual panels, so let us know what you want to see and connect your Jira instance to Compass today.

1. 💻 Head over to your desired Jira Software project

2. 👉 Select an issue from a project board

3. ⚙️ Click the Compass component field in the right panel and add the desired component

Want to share your thoughts or ideas? Let us know with a comment below, or sign-up to chat with a Compass PM! Haven’t tried Compass yet? Sign-up today!

[Adam Setch]

🚀 👏

[John Kinmonth]

Nice seeing all of the latest features listed in one place. Thanks @Wayne Dailey

[Steffen Opel _Utoolity_]

Those are excellent new capabilities, thanks for the great summary @Wayne Dailey!

One question though:

Environment filter sorts events by dev, staging, prod, or any other desired category

As just commented on the introductory post, I cannot yet see anything but production and staging events in our Compass sites - does your mention imply that this a staggered rollout of sorts?

[Wayne Dailey]

Thank you for your question @Steffen Opel _Utoolity_ I'm happy to clarify. You're correct, production and staging are the only environments available at the moment. We're looking to roll others in the future.

If there are any categories that you'd like to see supported please let us know here and I'll share your feedback with the team!

[Steffen Opel _Utoolity_]

Thanks @Wayne Dailey, allow me to quote my comment on the introductory post:

[...] is there a reason why it is still restricted to production and staging and doesn't offer all environment types supported by the API, i.e. including 'testing', 'development', and 'unmapped'?

Notably these match the environment types in Jira Software, and I assume deliberately, so why not just surface them all like the Jira Software deployments view does?

The current limitation also does not align with the 3 environment types hard wired for both Forge environments (which uses 'development') and Bitbucket Pipelines deployments (which uses 'testing').

So given we use Jira Software, Bitbucket Pipelines, and now Compass to develop and operate apps for all Atlassian products supported by Forge, we naturally want to use all environments types that are already part of our Atlassian toolchain in Compass as well.

[Wayne Dailey]

Thank you @Steffen Opel _Utoolity_ that's really helpful feedback. I'll share this with the team!