Atlassian opened its Las Vegas Team ’22 event this week with products designed to help management understand projects – and help developers understand what’s really going on.
The timing of the launch is a bit awkward: Atlassian is experiencing significant ongoing outage, with Jira, Confluence, and Opsgenie being unavailable for some customers. Trello and Bitbucket remain operational.
What’s also unfortunate is that the things to be revealed on Wednesday will all have to do with communication and project monitoring. The three new products, in various stages of early access, are Atlas, Compass and Analytics.
The first, Atlas, is all about helping teams communicate better. While questions such as ‘what are we doing’, ‘who is doing it’ and the inevitable ‘why’ are easy to do with colleagues, answering them is a bit more complicated.
Atlassian’s vision is to start with a shared project homepage to detail what the project is about and populate it with links to documentation to explain developers what it means to contribute and what its goals are. Those links could be to Google Docs, Loom or, unsurprisingly, Atlassian’s own Confluence.
Next up is Compass, which consists of three elements: Components, a map of all the parts needed to build software, from shared components to documentation. Scorecards, a health scorecard generation tool that helps developers evaluate architecture against measures, including security and compliance requirements. The final element of Compass is Apps, an extensibility engine that allows developers to use a variety of software-as-a-service developer tools.
Overall, Compass’s goal is to map out a project’s architecture and catch problems before they take root. And, as you’d expect, it’s compatible with Forge, Atlassian’s cloud application development platform.
Compass is currently an alpha product, with a beta on the way, and Atlas is currently in beta and will be generally available in the second half of the year.
More interesting for executives interested in the Big Picture is the Atlassian Data Lake: in effect, it brings together information from the Atlassian portfolio of apps, accessible through an SQL query. Unsurprisingly, Atlassian is happy to make some reports available with project stats and potential blocks, but it will be the ability to create SQL visualizations, use no-code options, and combine other resources that will appeal to leaders considering the state of their projects.
Atlassian Analytics and Data Lake are early access products and, unlike Compass and Atlas, are aimed entirely at the company’s Cloud Enterprise Jira Software or Jira Service Management subscribers.
Assuming, of course, that the tech giant’s services stay upright long enough to get that bigger picture.
