Seeking Feedback: How do you use the Components field?

[Katie Silver]

Hi Jira Software community,

Do you use the Components field in your projects? I want to hear from you!

I’m Katie from the Compass product management team. Compass is a new Atlassian developer experience platform. Compass helps you track your software components and integrate your existing toolchain to create a one-stop-shop view of your software architecture and how it’s performing.

On Compass, we use the word “Components” to describe a standalone piece of your software architecture: services, applications, libraries, APIs, data pipelines, anything your software relies on to operate.

We know many of you have been using the Components field in Jira for a variety of different use cases. Even within Atlassian, we use Components in many different ways - sometimes to categorize support tickets, sometimes to set up auto-assignment, sometimes to track projects… it’s a big, varied list.

So:

How do you and your team use Jira Components? Why did you choose Components for your scenario?

I’d love it if y’all left comments on this post, or if you’re up for a conversation, book some time on my calendar. Thanks in advance for your feedback!

Katie

Senior PM, Compass

Want to learn more about Compass? Check it out here. We’re currently in Beta with a commitment to go GA. Here's a recent announcement of all the features we launched at Team ‘23.

[David Harper]

Hey,

We use Jira Components as a way of defining sub-areas of a product, as a Jira Project represents a single product or library for us.

One Bitbucket Repository = One Compass Component = One Jira Project = Multiple Jira Components

[Katie Silver]

Interesting, thanks @David Harper ! Would you mind giving me an example, maybe outlining the difference you currently have between Compass and Jira components? 

[David Harper]

Hey @Katie Silver ,

For us, a Compass component represents a piece of software, be that a service that we run (web application or API usually), a library, a bit of code we plugin to something else or cloud resources. These all typically have their own repositories and build processes in Bitbucket.

A Jira Project maps to one of these components and within that a Jira Component, will break it down into domain-language sections of the application, such as "Authentication" or "Clients" section or "Feature Flags" or "Search".

[Katie Silver]

Got it, that makes sense! So perhaps a Jira Component in your current setup could theoretically align to something like a Capability component type in Compass. We typically use Capabilities to describe user-facing functionality (so like a shopping cart, for example, with order management service, subscription service, invoice service, etc rolling up to it.) 

This is very helpful :) Thanks again!

[Michael Villis]

The component field was the original, customizable drop down field that could be updated by Project Admins without talking to a Jira Administrator! This has meant that there's many creative use cases for the field :-) 

In our company a Jira project is a team/squad which looks after one of many products/components. Components become a list of these components for the squad. This is mostly high level components. It's possible what we call a Component in Jira is slightly higher level (ie. One component may be one or many repos which would be multiple components in Compass).

[Katie Silver]

Thanks @Michael Villis

You're right, the components field has a long and storied history 😅. Appreciate you taking the time to respond. 

[Krishnakumar Kesavan]

We use component field of JIRA to represent the different layer of software product which helps us to segregate  Let say we created the FrontEnd,,BackEnd as components and used it