Introducing Atlassian Compass

Today, software development is a collaborative yet complex process involving increasing responsibilities, tools, and processes. If left, complexities can hinder productivity and prevent teams from achieving agile.

Over time, developers have become responsible for more than building and operating software, as they must now ensure maintenance and uptime as well.

According to the Atlassian State of Developer Survey:

More tools equal more responsibility with no single place to track work, leading to unhappy and overworked developers, which create major blockers for businesses to innovate and move faster.

How Compass solves this problem

Compass is a Point A product — an Atlassian program for creating new apps in collaboration with customers and is comprised of:

• A components catalog that provides developers with a map of shared components, documentation, and important information in one place to assemble software and the teams that own and collaborate around them.
• Scorecards – a DevOps health tool allowing developers to measure and evaluate their architecture based on the baselines, security, or compliance requirements.
• Apps – an extensibility engine allowing you to install apps and add info across a wide variety of developer SaaS tools to give teams both alignment and flexibility across work.

As part of the Point A program, Compass will continue to evolve with customer feedback so that results meet customer needs and solve their challenges.

How Compass helps teams master the complexity of distributed software architecture

Components provide a unified interface to track technical architecture and related teams as they evolve.

The catalog makes it easier for developers to find what they’re looking for as it understands dependencies between components and their owners. Incident remediation is improved by having the latest information about what has changed to a given component and any relevant dependencies in one place.

Scorecards to define and improve development and operational health

Scorecards can be viewed at any time and help teams set baselines around specific operational, security, and compliance requirements. They provide insights into components that need attention and changes that have happened over time, helping teams reduce the impact of incidents by showing the probability of them occurring in the first place and improving their architecture.

On average, businesses conduct one or two audits a year on software components, which isn’t enough. With Compass, auditing goes from once or twice a year to in near real-time with health scorecards displayed on components.

Health scorecards inform developers of any issues and their resolution. They offer best practices that improve teams’ operations over time.

Regular assessments built into Compass enable teams to identify operational problems, reflect on component performance and health, and create action items to address identified issues.

Apps in Compass - a powerful extensibility engine

Apps is the given name of the powerful extensibility engine in Compass, which allows users to extend and customize their experience. Atlassian’s open-toolchain approach combines information across disparate SaaS tools such as code, CI/CD, observability, incident management, APM, and security into Compass.

Compass is fully compatible with Forge, a Cloud development platform designed to revolutionize the way Atlassian Cloud products are customized, extended, and integrated. This simplifies the building of secure, reliable, and scalable apps.

Forge’s integrated Functions-as-a-Service platform means that teams can extend Compass with minimal setup via Atlassian-operated compute and storage.

Get started with Compass

Compass provides a holistic view of software development components as they evolve and the teams that build and collaborate around them.

With components, scorecards, and apps, we’re excited to see how Compass will help teams. Compass is available in alpha, with a beta coming soon.