Software development teams face more complexity than ever. The rising expectations of developers to manage security vulnerabilities, configure cloud services, automate testing, implement observability instrumentation, and more, has created an environment where DevOps toil often outpaces time spent writing code and shipping new features.
In addition, the explosion of microservices, APIs, distributed teams, frameworks, and more, add fuel to the fire as engineering leaders struggle to understand points of friction within the developer experience that slow down software delivery and introduce risk.
With this increasing technical complexity, building world-class engineering teams is not just a technology problem—it’s a collaboration problem. Over the past two decades, we have helped engineering teams work better together. Now, we are solving this growing challenge to unleash the potential of engineering teams within our 260,000+ customers and beyond.
Compass is now generally available
Today, we’re announcing the general availability of Compass, Atlassian’s new developer experience platform to empower engineering organizations to bring all of their teams and technology together to promote a healthy engineering culture, improve risk management and reliability, and increase developer velocity.
Compass helps engineering teams of all sizes improve their developer experience with the following default capabilities:
- Unified software component catalog: Reduce time spent searching and untangle your technical architecture with an easy-to-setup, centralized catalog to track all of your services and relevant data—in one place.
- Health scorecards, DORA metrics, and more: Establish and track software delivery and team health metrics to identify points of friction for development teams and improve reliability for existing services.
- Software templates: Remove guesswork and automate consistency for developers creating new services with best practices, policies, cloud provisioning, and deployment pipelines baked right into customizable templates.
- Extensibility: Connect all of your favorite observability, CI/CD, testing, collaboration, and source code management tools to prevent context switching and see relevant data for all of the services you own.
Since the beta launch of the product, world-class engineering organizations, such as Dropbox, KFC UK&I, ExpressVPN, and Boden, have already turned to Compass to improve their developer experience and engineering velocity.
Software component catalog: Untangle your architecture and track everything in one place
Keeping track of all the different elements that go into your codebase is a herculean task, especially at scale. Previously, teams needed to build, maintain, and host their own internal developer portal. Now, with the launch of Compass, every engineering organization can easily track, search, and discover technical architecture, critical component metadata, and related teams with a centralized software component catalog that they don’t need to manage.
Compass provides a single, consistent identifier to connect disparate data across tools and improve collaboration. This means developers no longer need to spend countless hours looking for information, including dependencies, errors, deployment history, on-call information, and more. They can self-serve all the information they need, helping them to move faster and be more productive.
The best part? Any engineering team using GitHub, Bitbucket, or GitLab for their source code management can set up their software component catalog in minutes using one of our automated integration apps.
Health scorecards and DORA metrics: Optimize your developer experience with security, performance, and reliability scorecards and metrics
Every organization tracks different metrics to measure the health of their services, and how they’re progressing towards different milestones. With Compass, engineering teams can monitor the operational health of their services and software delivery velocity with both default and custom scorecards to keep architecture reliable, performant, and secure. Compass improves the developer experience by accelerating feedback loops, so developers can return to solving more fulfilling, complex challenges.
Health scorecards in Compass enable engineering organizations to better surface the impact of technical debt on their reliability and software delivery performance. Compass also includes default DORA metrics, such as how often an organization deploys code, how long it takes to commit code to production, the percentage of deployments causing a failure, and the time it takes to fix things when they go wrong.
Teams can personalize their health metrics through scorecards, which are automatically tracked across their entire architecture. This gives teams transparent, real-time insight into components that need attention to easily monitor progress and regressions in component health. When paired with Jira Software, teams are empowered to proactively address and fix problems as they arise. And together with Jira Service Management, Compass will provide IT operations teams greater visibility into not just the infrastructure that supports critical services, but also relevant information from software development tooling, about all the engineering components that these critical business applications and services depend on.
Finally, Compass has a team dashboard to empower every engineer to work autonomously. The dashboard allows all engineering teams to more easily connect information across Atlassian cloud products. It also outlines which teams are responsible for which components. This empowers teams to problem solve more quickly as they have better visibility into who to engage when incidents arise.
Software templates: Reduce friction and automate consistency when creating new services
Developers and engineering managers are always looking for ways to minimize time spent on repetitive tasks. That’s why we’ve introduced software templates to automate the creation of new services for developers with best practices, policies, and tooling orchestration baked right in.
Engineering teams can integrate their preferred CI/CD deployment pipeline, cloud infrastructure provisioning, instrumentation, and relevant details including ownership, documentation, and repositories. Software templates provide a starting point for developers, allowing them to save time and focus on writing the unique parts of their code without worrying about the initial setup. They also serve as a learning resource, especially for junior developers or those new to a specific technology stack. By incorporating best practices, templates help improve the quality of the code and include predefined configurations for CI/CD tools and cloud services.
Extensibility: Integrate your developers’ favorite tools to reduce context switching
Compass brings together information scattered across the organization’s toolchain, and ties it to relevant services and teams.
Atlassian’s open toolchain approach allows developers to work with their preferred tools without the productivity drain of switching between them. Compass connects data from popular tools including Amazon Web Services, GitHub, Slack, LaunchDarkly, CircleCI, and Snyk. In addition, Compass is planning to add popular integrations such as DX, a developer insights platform which helps organizations measure and improve developer experience.
Everyone has unique aspects about their own internal developer experience, which is why our open APIs allow you to customize as much as possible. We focus on the core offering – components, teams, templates, scorecards – and you craft an experience around that. We believe this brings the best of both worlds—a supported SaaS product with an open, extensible marketplace around it. Developers can further extend Compass using Forge, Atlassian’s cloud app development platform or use the Compass GraphQL API to connect any data or metric to their unified catalog.
Try Compass today for free
Join companies such as Dropbox, KFC UK&I, ExpressVPN, and Boden already using Compass to improve their developer experiences. Get started by setting up your components catalog today. Sign up here and learn about our editions here.