Atlassian today announced it has added four features to Jira Software Cloud that allow developers to visualize and measure progress across DevOps workflows.
Suzie Prince, head of product for DevOps at Atlassian, said rather than organizations having to acquire and deploy separate tools to track DevOps metrics, Atlassian is moving to incorporate those capabilities in a platform that is already widely employed to manage application development projects.
Two capabilities being added to the standard edition of Jira Software Cloud are Code in Jira, which makes it possible to view the most recently active repositories in Bitbucket, GitHub, GitLab or Git Integration for Jira from within Jira Software Cloud, and Deployments in Jira, which makes it possible to similarly view in real-time at what stage any deployment is on any continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform.
The Premium Edition of Jira Software Cloud is gaining tools to track both deployment frequency and cycle times to provide more insight into how application development teams are maturing in terms of their overall DevOps proficiency.
These tools eliminate the need for analytics tools that otherwise would be required for each DevOps platform an organization employs, noted Prince. Jira Software Cloud also exposes a REST application programming interface (API) through which DevOps teams can integrate the Atlassian platform with other DevOps tools.
It will be up to each organization to determine how they may want to employ the insights surfaced within Jira Software Cloud. However, Prince said most IT teams should identify areas of weakness where there is an opportunity to coach DevOps teams on how to improve.
There is, of course, a lot more focus on improvement as application development projects have accelerated in recent months, thanks mainly to the increased focus on digital business transformation. Organizations of all sizes are trying to maximize investments in application development at a time when the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic is forcing IT teams to make difficult tradeoffs. Metrics, of course, are critical when it comes time to prioritize one project over another.
At the same time, Prince noted that many teams are trying to keep the number of tools and platforms incorporated into a DevOps toolchain to an absolute minimum to limit costs and minimize complexity. Many DevOps teams have been employing Jira software to manage application development projects for years now, so Prince said these new capabilities are a logical extension of the company’s project management software.
Of course, the best metrics are the ones that manifest themselves automatically. No project manager relishes having to badger developers to enter data into a project management application. The more the data residing in a DevOps platform can automatically populate a project management application, the happier all involved will be. After all, the goal is to head off as many issues as possible today before they become major problems tomorrow.
