Customising your developer experience with Compass
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Customising your developer experience with Compass
Jason Spriggs
11th September, 2024
7 min read
Jason Spriggs
11th September, 2024
7 min read
In this blog, we will explore how Compass by Atlassian enables custom environments through its extensibility features.
In a world where technology continually changes, organisations must keep up with the demands of a shifting market. Your software can support your mission, foster innovation, and help your teams deliver software and do their best work now.
While a ready-made software solution provides off-the-shelf convenience—plus great benefits like being easier and quicker to implement and more cost-effective—these solutions can struggle to meet advanced use-case requirements or scale with your business as it grows. With that said, it's important you can quickly extend and customise your platform—something that can also impact your developers’ happiness and satisfaction or your developer experience (DevEx). But Atlassian’s developer experience platform, Compass, provides a solution your developers can customise and tailor to meet their needs. If you missed the first blog in the series, Compass is Atlassian's developer experience platform that brings distributed software architecture and the teams collaborating on it in one place. It uses key functionalities like its software catalogue, templates, and metrics and health scorecards. You can catch up and read more about Compass's features here.
But today, we'll explore another of Compass' key capabilities: extensibility. Here, we examine how Compass' open APIs and integration with popular tools allow organisations to create a custom environment.
Why is having an extensible software system important?
Let's recap why an extensible software system is a good idea.
In software engineering, extensibility measures how easy or difficult it is to extend a system and allow additional functions and capabilities. Adding these new features through extendable and customisable software empowers your teams to keep pace with a rapidly changing market. One of the main characteristics of a cloud-based platform like Compass is extensibility.
In software engineering, extensibility measures how easy or difficult it is to extend a system and allow additional functions and capabilities. Adding these new features through extendable and customisable software empowers your teams to keep pace with a rapidly changing market. One of the main characteristics of a cloud-based platform like Compass is extensibility.
Build a world-class DevEx
Built with publicly accessible application programming interfaces (APIs) and backed by GraphQL, a query language and server-side runtime for APIs, Atlassian's open toolchain approach with Compass enables you to connect information and craft a unified experience that improves developer productivity and happiness.
Compass is built with extensibility at the forefront, with an open, extensible marketplace around it so that you can integrate your developers' internal or third-party tools. The platform includes easy integrations with popular tools like AWS, GitHub, GitLab, Slack, BitBucket, and Snyk. Integrating your tools in this way brings together scattered information across the toolchain, making finding information easier and reducing context-switching for your developers. In addition, upcoming integrations are planned for platforms like DX, a developer insights platform that helps organisations measure and improve their DevEx.
Open APIs allow you to customise
Compass offers the best of both worlds: a supported SaaS product that provides a core offering of components, teams, templates, and scorecards and the flexibility to craft an experience using an open, extensible marketplace.
The platform's open toolchain approach means developers can work with their preferred tools by connecting their observability, CI/CD, testing, collaboration, and source code management tools. This allows your developers to effortlessly surface the relevant data from an organisation's software toolchain without the productivity drain of switching between tools.
Plus, your 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 catalogue.
Seamless integration and customisation for positive DevEx
Compass integrates seamlessly with other Atlassian products, including Jira. This allows teams to track their work comprehensively, enhance collaboration and visibility, and align information on project status and progress. Let's look at how teams can integrate and tailor Compass to build a customised environment and a better DevEx.
Linking disparate data
Compass gives your teams a central system to consistently identify and link disparate data across tools, eliminating endless searches. Thanks to automated integration apps, your teams can set up the component catalogue in minutes if they use GitHub, Bitbucket or GitLab for their source code management.
Optimise team and process health
Organisations use different benchmarks to monitor their services' operational health and speed. With Compass, teams can customise metrics via scorecards that are automatically tracked across the architecture. This helps create an environment of transparent, easy-to-monitor, real-time insights. And when combined with Jira, teams can proactively address and resolve issues as they arise. Plus, when used with Jira Service Management, Compass gives teams more visibility into the infrastructure that supports critical services and access to relevant information from the tool stack.
Additionally, Compass has a team dashboard that empowers each team member to work autonomously. It allows all development teams to link information across Atlassian products and highlights which teams are responsible for which components. This transparency and openness promotes faster problem resolution when incidents happen.
Automate development
Through templates, teams can automate much of the creation of new services, connect their preferred CI/CD deployment pipeline, set up automatically provisioned cloud infrastructure, and integrate all relevant details—including ownership, documentation, and repositories.
Integrate teams' preferred tools
Every team and organisation has their unique approach to development. Compass also uses open APIs that allow many aspects to be customised. This open toolchain approach hands teams the freedom to craft their own user experiences using the many marketplace apps. It allows teams to connect data from their favourite tools and platforms like AWS, GitHub, Slack, LaunchDarkly, CircleCI, and Snyk. If there isn't a suitable existing solution, the cloud app development platform Forge is available to create new integrations. Alternatively, teams can pull data and metrics from the solutions in their specific catalogue using Compass' GraphQL API.
Ready to elevate your developer experience with a custom solution?
Let Compass be your guide to a seamless, efficient, and innovative development environment. Contact us today to explore how Compass can be tailored to meet your unique needs and empower your teams for success.
Read the other blogs in this series
Atlassian Compass: enhancing the developer experience
Explore the challenges of managing complex software environments and how they drain productivity, create security risks, and cause workflow delays.
Empowering autonomous teams with the Compass team dashboard
Learn how Compass' team dashboard empowers teams to work autonomously and why that can be beneficial for your organisation.
Written by
Jason Spriggs
Consulting Team Lead
Jason, an award-winning DevOps consulting team lead, providing architectural vision and technical expertise. At Adaptavist, Jason and his team implement a wide range of industry-leading technologies and processes for clients.