Atlassian is trying to improve the developer experience across several of its products — including Jira, Compass, and Bitbucket — with its latest round of updates.
The first update is the ability to connect Compass components to Jira Software. This provides developers better visibility into health and performance metrics of their applications without needing to switch tools.
It provides visibility into things like health scorecard status, compliance with standards, information on ownership, documentation, and CI/CD events.
The company believes that by allowing Compass components to be accessed from within Jira, it will reduce context switching for developers.
“According to the latest Stack Overflow Developer Survey, more than a quarter of developers spend an hour or more each day searching for answers or solutions to problems. That not only means less time shipping great software but also breaking the flow state where developers do their best work,” Atlassian wrote in a blog post.
Next, Jira Software has introduced Jira Work Suggestions, which identifies bottlenecks that developers face when transitioning from task to task and is another way the company plans to ease the burden of context switching.
According to the company, developers may plan their work in Jira, but then they get sidetracked when other unexpected tasks — like pull request reviews, build fixes, or security vulnerabilities to address — come up that are managed by other tools.
Now, Jira provides visibility into those tasks that are managed by other tools, providing a central place to look to determine what needs working on.
Finally, custom merge checks were added to Bitbucket, enabling developers to easily ensure that their code merges are meeting company policies.
Normally, Bitbucket’s checks are a static list, but the new custom checks will allow developers to adjust them based on their company’s specific policies. For instance, it could be updated to require specific security scans to be run, require that code can’t be merged after hours when no on-call staff are available, or require a minimum level of test coverage.
“Together, these improvements across Jira, Compass, and Bitbucket help development teams streamline information and bring teams together, to improve experience and focus on the work that matters most,” the company wrote.