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Atlassian adds Analytics, Atlas, Compass to line up

One hopes they can stay online long enough for customers to evaluate

Atlassian opened its Las Vegas Team '22 event this week with products aimed at giving management an insight into projects – and developers an insight into what is actually going on.

The timing of the launch is just a little awkward: Atlassian is suffering a significant ongoing outage, with Jira, Confluence and Opsgenie unavailable for some customers. Trello and Bitbucket remain operational.

What's also unfortunate is the stuff unveiled on Wednesday is all about communication and keeping an eye on projects. The three new products, in various stages of early access, are Atlas, Compass, and Analytics.

The first, Atlas, is all about getting teams to communicate better. While flinging questions, such as "what are we doing," "who is doing it," and the inevitable "why," at coworkers is simple to do, answering them is a little more complicated.

Atlassian's take is to start with a shared homepage for projects to detail what the project is all about and fill it with links to documentation to explain to developers just what the thing they are contributing to involves and its goals. Those links might be to the likes of Google Docs, Loom or, unsurprisingly, Atlassian's own Confluence.

Next is Compass, which comprises three elements: Components, a map of the all the bits and pieces needed to assemble software, from shared components to documentation. Scorecards, a health tool to generate scorecards allowing developers to evaluate architecture based on measures including security and compliance requirements. The last element of Compass is Apps, which is an extensibility engine allowing developers to bring in a variety of developer software-as-a-service tools.

All in all, the purpose of Compass is to map out the architecture of a project and catch problems before they take root. And, as you'd expect, it is compatible with Atlassian's cloud application development platform, Forge.

Compass is currently an alpha-grade product, with a beta on the way, and Atlas is currently in beta and due to reach general availability in the second half of the year.

More interesting for managers interested in the Big Picture is the Atlassian Data Lake: effectively, this brings together information from the Atlassian portfolio of apps, accessible via a SQL query. Unsurprisingly, Atlassian is more than happy to make available a number of reports showing project metrics, and potential blockers, but it will be the ability to create SQL visualizations, use no-code options, and blend in other sources that will appeal to leaders pondering the state of their projects.

Atlassian Analytics and Data Lake are early access products and, unlike Compass and Atlas, are aimed squarely at the company's Cloud Enterprise Jira Software or Jira Service Management subscribers.

Assuming, of course, the tech giant's services remain upright long enough to get that bigger picture. ®

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