DevEx Roundup: Recapping Unleash - open source innovation and Atlassian’s DevOps journey

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Compass Communique: February 2023

Hello Compass Community,

February has been a huge month for Compass (log in here if you're already signed up). More platform engineers than ever are using Compass to reduce cognitive overhead, improve service health, and promote a better developer experience for their organization’s dev teams.

Catch up on this month’s news, tips, and integrations for your developer experience platform and software component catalog from Atlassian:

• Office Hours: Got a question? Get an answer.
• Improve open source security and application health with Compass + Tidelift
• Unleash recap: Atlassian’s Journey to Microservices with Sr. Technical Evangelist Andrew Boyagi and Head of Product Taylor Pechacek
• Unleash recap: Engineering culture in a distributed world with Head of Engineering Preeti Kota
• Compass featured on platformengineering.org
• Best practice: 4 steps to reduce cognitive overhead in your catalog
• Coming soon! Weekly health email

Got a question? Get an answer - At office hours!

This month, we introduced a new way to connect live with the Compass Team during our weekly office hours. Meet with the product and engineering teams that built and use Compass, discover best practices, ask questions, and share feedback to shape the feature roadmap. Curious to find out what we covered?👇

👋 Meet the team and ask questions

Attendees met with our Heads of Product and Engineering, PMs, and engineers to learn how Atlassian uses Compass everyday. You asked us to provide enablement materials to aid your adoption journey, to share how Compass compliments other Atlassian products like Jira and Atlas, and how to organize and associate components using labels and types.

⚙️ Learn from live demos

We demonstrated Compass from zero-to-hero to help you get up and running within minutes, shared how Atlassian teams rely on their Compass component catalog to understand complex software changes, and how to use custom scorecards to achieve better outcomes.

🧭 Influence the future direction of Compass

We take your feedback seriously - attendees loved customs fields and want even more options like dropdowns, along with enhanced Jira integrations and reporting functions for a holistic view of your sprints. Be on the lookout as we build these into the feature roadmap.

Have a topic you’d like us to cover? Leave your ideas in the comments or Slack us in #office-hours.

Join us at a future session - we’re excited to meet you!

👉 America (AMER) friendly 11am PT | 1pm CST | 2pm ET Register here

👉 Europe (EMEA) friendly 7am PT | 3pm GMT | 4pm CET Register here

👉 Asia-Pacific (APAC) friendly 11am AEDT | 8am SGT Register here

Improve your open source security and application health with Compass + Tidelift

Keeping up with vulnerabilities and outdated open source components remains a major concern for most software teams. Modus Create partnered with Atlassian and Tidelift to help organizations stay on top of the open source components in a central location. Available in the Compass app UI, the integration enables you to:

• Review your application’s open source health for violations, vulnerabilities, and denied packages

• Determine if you need to remediate issues in an upcoming sprint

• Quickly highlight the most impactful areas to improve application resilience and security

Here’s how you get started:

1. Install the Tidelift integration from the “Apps” page

2. Follow the configuration process and add your first Tidelift Team

3. Connect a component to Tidelift and enjoy metrics, project health, and more on the overview page

Log into Compass to see it in action, or read the full case study from Modus Create here.

Discover Atlassian’s DevOps journey, and Unleash your own

Thousands of engineers joined us in Berlin on Feb. 9 at Atlassian Presents: Unleash to discuss agile & DevOps best practices, real world stories, and ways to collaborate from discovery to delivery. Didn’t catch us at the event? We’ve got you covered with on-demand content:

Microservices + platform engineering: The Atlassian Compass journey: The advantages of a distributed architecture are well-known — performance and resilience at scale, faster delivery with less risk. Happy days…right? Not quite! Join Senior Technical Evangelist Andrew Boyagi and Head of Product Taylor Pechacek as they share how Atlassian created Compass for the challenges of a you-build-it-you-run-it world and our journey adopting it.

Evolving engineering culture in a highly distributed world: It’s no secret - devs want to write code and solve problems, not play detective in repos and logs. Preeti Kota, Compass Head of Engineering, reveals how the Compass team’s practices and tools transformed Atlassian’s engineering culture to keep devs happy and empowered to do their best work.

Compass featured on PlatformEngineering.org

Atlassian’s developer experience platform and software component catalog was recently included in the Platform Engineering community’s featured platform tooling options.

Connect with the largest community of platform engineers in the world, discuss real-world DevOps best practices, and check out the tools to help you build toolchains, workflows, and governance to enable autonomy and velocity for your developer teams.

Compass gits down to business at App Week

Atlassian invited over 100 developers to extend Compass and other Atlassian products at App Week in Berlin. Attendees took full advantage of Compass' open APIs, the Atlassian Forge serverless developer platform, and open source examples and sample apps. Our partners enjoyed the power of derived metrics, the ease of sending events using our tutorial and sample apps, and how quickly we could publish their apps to the in-product marketplace. Some of the updates we hope to release soon include:

LaunchDarkly - Feature flags will be viewable on the Compass activity feed, with related metrics planned next

Azure DevOps - Starting from the open source GitLab app, the Move Work Forward team built an MVP integration with metrics and deployment events

Code with AWS - Utoolity built an MVP bringing events and metrics from AWS CodePipeline and CodeBuild to Compass

Have an idea of your own? See how to extend Compass and leverage our examples & open source projects.

🤷 Whose service is it anyway? 4 steps to reduce cognitive overhead with Compass

Understanding who owns what is one of the biggest challenges we hear from engineering teams.

To help, we've made it easy to assign ownership of a component in our built-in software component catalog to reduce cognitive overhead, improve service health, and promote a better developer experience for your teams.

✅ Assign ownership in four quick steps:

1. 🔍 Navigate to the Components UI within Compass and select "no owner team" in the default filters

2. 👉 Select any component without an owner

3. 🚀 Click "add owner team" and select an existing team. Or, create a new team, and invite new users via the Teams UI in the top nav

4. ✅ Once you've added an owner team, you'll see an increase in service readiness and DevOps health scores associated with the component

Component ownership is a great way to promote cross-team collaboration, reduce MTTR and confusion, and improve governance, so aim to have an owner assigned to components as soon as they’re created.

For questions or to learn more about how to use Compass, attend or invite your team to our regular office hours.

Coming soon! Get weekly service health delivered right to your inbox

Atlassian’s own engineering team uses CheckOps as a regular team ritual that unites engineering data with continuous improvement, empowering you to turn insights into tangible actions.

Coming soon, every engineer associated with a software component in Compass will receive a weekly digest update so they can understand what’s changed within services they own at a glance, including:

• Number of deployments, incidents, and components (along with what changed over the week)

• Software component scores to understand DevOps health and service readiness

• Dependency updates for the components owned by your team

• Team mood based on your CheckOps survey responses

The best part? Your team will automatically be receiving these updates in March. To share these with more of your organization, invite users directly within the Compass Teams UI.

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!

[Jan-Hendrik Spieth]

Thanks @Wayne Dailey for summing up the news, and thanks as well to @Preeti Kota , @Andrew Boyagi and Tayolor Pechacek for the talks @ Unleash.

I found these sessions quite interesting, because I now have a much better feeling on the purpose of Compass, and why certain things have been built they way they are.

Also, it's kind of easier for me to see why I'm struggling to match Compass to our needs: we don't have a supersprawl of own micro services, but a sprawl of third-party dependencies (= no repos, no deployments, ...).

So our "service journey" is just fundamentally different from Atlassian's, and again, the sessions somehow made that much clearer to me than any documentation or forum post that I read before.

Recommended watch! :-)

And I'm pretty sure Compass will become a very useful tool for many of us users out there :-)