Atlassian Integrates Tasks Across Its DevOps Platform

There's a clear disconnect between aspiration and reality for DevOps today, according to the Atlassian Survey 2020 on DevOps Trends.

The survey, released on June 2, was conducted by CITE Research and includes responses from 500 developers and IT decision-makers. Alongside the survey, Atlassian also released new features across the Atlassian DevOps platform, in an attempt to alleviate some of the leading concerns that the survey highlights.

"The biggest surprise was the gap between practitioners and executives in how they perceived their DevOps implementations," Tiffany To, head of Agile and DevOps solutions at Atlassian, told ITPro Today.

She noted that IT practitioners are more likely to agree that it is difficult to measure the impact of DevOps progress and success — 62% agree compared with 49% of decision-makers. IT practitioners are also more likely to agree that their organization has no clear way to measure DevOps success — 58% agree compared with 47% of decision-makers. There was, however, at least one pleasant surprise in the study, with nearly half of all respondents reporting an increase in collaboration with non-technical teams after they embraced DevOps practices.

"To us, that's a clear sign that DevOps teams need the right tools and practices in place to collaborate beyond engineering," To said.

Improved DevOps Integration Across Atlassian Services

Atlassian's updates are spread across the portfolio of the company's cloud products, including Jira, Bitbucket Cloud and Opsgenie.

One of the new capabilities added to Atlassian's DevOps platform is enhanced integration of the Jira issue tracking platform into the Bitbucket Cloud code version control system, with a new work dashboard. Bitbucket Cloud and Jira Software have always been integrated, but there have been some gaps, To said; the new work dashboard reduces the number of steps it takes to view assigned Jira issues.

"Prior to this, users would have needed to hop over to Jira to view them, taking the developer out of Bitbucket and waste time checking between tools," she said. "Now, the dashboard has been brought into Bitbucket, so developers can stay in one tool to view assigned work."

Aligning Alerts with Code Development

Atlassian also improved integration with its Opsgenie alerting service. The company's product teams spent the last year improving integrations with collaboration tools, including Slack, to make it easier for teams to respond to and resolve major incidents, according to To.

When an incident occurs, teams can now launch a dedicated Slack channel to collaborate on the issue immediately, she said. All of their communications in the channel are saved on the incident details screen in Opsgenie and can be exported to a postmortem report in Atlassian's Confluence collaboration tool for analysis when the incident is resolved. There is now also the ability for developer teams to directly investigate deployment-related incidents from Opsgenie using the new integration with Bitbucket.

"On the Jira Software side, the user can now open a Jira issue from the incident details screen in Opsgenie and map it to a specific project so the right team members are notified," she said.

Atlassian is now also integrating its Code Insights feature, which enables code scanning for potential vulnerabilities, with Opsgenie in a new Incident Investigation Dashboard.

As an example of how the new integration can work, To explained that when a scan is run with Code Insights and a vulnerability is found, it automatically pauses the deployment. All the vulnerabilities are provided to the developer in a report right inside Bitbucket so they don’t have to go to Jira to find them. They can then turn these vulnerabilities into Jira issues, and when they are resolved they become part of the project history. When all of the issues have been resolved, the pipeline begins to flow again, the deployment is unpaused, and through this whole process the developer never had to leave Bitbucket.

"We aim to provide an easy entry point to those trying to implement DevOps while still providing an open and highly customizable platform for those looking to extend their toolchain and practices in order to ship better quality software faster," she said. "You will see us expand our offerings to fit even more use cases as we look to [more closely] align DevOps with IT and business teams through a common understanding of work."