🔌 Plug into Jira: Reduce cognitive load and improve backlog planning with Compass
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Compass is a developer experience platform that reduces cognitive load and toil to help teams focus on building software. We show how using Compass alongside Jira Software helps teams plan and execute their work more effectively in these three use cases:
Read on and give Compass a try today! |
Hi Atlassian Community,
Welcome to this bonus episode of our Plug into Jira series where we’ll share how Compass, Atlassian’s developer experience platform, helps teams better understand the operational state of their software and plan their work in Jira Software more effectively. Compass helps teams balance the prioritization of operational tasks with developing new features to ship great software.
What is Compass?
Compass is a developer experience platform that helps teams build a world-class developer experience and manage complexity:
Software catalog - Reduce cognitive load by tracking your software architecture and the teams that collaborate around it
DevOps health - Apply engineering best practices at scale and keep your architecture reliable, performant, and secure
Templates - Speed up and standardize software component creation with reusable, customizable templates that integrate best practices and standards
Extensibility - Connect information across your toolchain into a single, unified developer experience
High-performing teams toil less and build more with reduced cognitive load and operations insights
Deliver high-quality software, fast - it’s one of the most common goals for any engineering organization. Organizations rely on Jira Software to break their projects into actionable pieces of work, with clear scope, ownership, and progress tracking. However, in a “you build it, you run it” world, finding a balance between delivering new features and the operational work required to maintain software health and performance can be difficult. Visibility of needed health and performance work has traditionally been a challenge during prioritization rituals, which sometimes results in operational work being de-prioritized.
Compass gives teams visibility into engineering health and performance, enabling better sprint planning and reduced cognitive load. With Compass, Jira Software users have a clearer understanding of the potential problems looming in their backlog, just waiting to cause an incident. Instead of using best-effort guesses or waiting, teams can be one step ahead by leveraging Compass' metrics and scorecards to identify where action is needed.
Teams use Compass and Jira Software together to understand both how work gets done and what work to prioritize to keep their software healthy and performant. Here are three ways using Compass alongside Jira Software helps you do just that:
1. Focus on building code - reduce cognitive load with contextual component information
You planned your work, assigned your Jira issues, and know what needs to be done to move issues into the “Done” column. But what about how those changes will affect other teams and software components? When picking a new feature, developers are more likely to rely on and affect software components outside of their direct team via APIs, shared libraries, and other means.
Understanding those implications becomes more difficult as organizations become larger and software increases in complexity. Compass helps teams navigate this complexity with contextual information about their software. Developers experience reduced cognitive load so they can assemble their software and focus on building the core business logic, rather than detective work figuring out who is the right expert to ask for help. Compass' software catalog provides information on ownership, on-call schedules, documentation, and anything else your organization deems important in one unified location.
2. Communicate code changes and keep everyone informed
In modern engineering organizations software is assembled using components owned by many teams. Identifying and notifying owners of dependant software components is critical to safely shipping high-quality software at speed. Linking Jira issues with components in Compass provides developers with the context they need to notify the right teams that a change is coming.
This becomes especially critical for highly leveraged services. For example, almost every software team in Atlassian relies on some functionality from the Atlassian Identity system. When they change something, it’s important to quickly notify all the consumers of the service that is changing so they are informed and can plan the work, if required, to update things before there is a problem.
In Compass, you can then create announcements for your downstream dependencies notifying them of upcoming changes. Teams can acknowledge that they’ve received these announcements. Informed teams can then determine what needs to be done, and plan that work effectively in Jira Software.
3. Prioritize effectively and balance innovation with technical debt
Choosing to invest effort between innovative new features and addressing technical debt is a difficult balancing act. Compass gives teams insight into the health of their software components so that growing issues can be addressed early and efficiently, allowing teams to prevent incidents while also shipping new features.
Compass scorecards track key indicators that reveal underlying issues, allowing you to efficiently triage problems and even work to prevent future incidents. Create metrics using data from external applications and observability tools, define custom criteria, and measure how your components score against your organization's standards and policies. Teams can use this information to determine which components need attention and work proactively and efficiently on their technical debt.
The best part? It’s super easy to get started
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Sign up for Compass. It’s free and in public beta for all users.
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Populate your catalog. The fastest way to build that catalog is to import your repositories from your source code management tool. If you’ve linked your Bitbucket repositories in Jira, you can effortlessly import those into Compass with just a few clicks.
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Assign owner teams to components to encourage accountability and improve failing scorecards.
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Link Jira Software issues to their related components to track and prioritize work against your software architecture, and switch seamlessly between products to find the information you need.
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View automatically provided metrics and your DevOps health and service readiness scorecards. Track deployment events and incidents in the activity tracker, and leverage weekly health emails to improve your team’s operations over time and stay accountable week over week.
What’s next for Jira and Compass?
Jira and Compass are better together, and we’ll be enhancing the integration between both tools. In the coming months, we’ll add enhancements such as:
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Create issues in your Jira backlog directly from Compass so your DevOps rituals are actionable and effective
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Import Jira Software repos from additional SCM tools so you can quickly build your software component catalog using your toolchain
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Assign multiple Compass components to a Jira Software issue to capture complex work for greater clarity during sprint planning
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More metrics and dashboards to help you bring operations insights and software health to your Jira Software projects
Have you tried Compass alongside your Jira Software projects? Give it a try today or sign-up to chat with a Compass PM!
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Wayne Dailey
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