Atlassian Adds DevOps Metrics to Jira - Enhanced Visibility

Atlassian is releasing an enhancement to its widely-used Jira issue and project tracking platform today—specifically, the Jira Software Cloud edition—introducing several new capabilities for visualizing and assessing the progression of code throughout the development process. This allows project managers and developers to gain more comprehensive understanding of the code their teams are developing and its current stage within the deployment pipeline. Users of Jira Software Premium can now also monitor deployment frequency and cycle times directly within the platform.

“Many teams, while striving for valuable ‘insights,’ mistakenly believe that simply combining tools equates to having control. However, the core issue isn't the quantity of tools used, but rather how effectively they are connected,” explains the Jira team in their announcement today. “No single provider can offer every product an agile software team requires, so the responsibility of integrating these tools still rests with the team itself.”

Image Credits: Atlassian

Atlassian contends that this update assists teams in achieving this integration. Jira already serves as the primary hub for documenting all work items for most teams. While some of this work occurs within Atlassian’s own suite of tools, the majority takes place within third-party services. The goal is to consolidate this DevOps activity and offer increased visibility and insights into a company’s development pipeline status.

This release includes four distinct updates. The first, “code in Jira,” doesn’t mean you can now write code directly in Jira, but rather provides visibility into which repositories in Bitbucket, GitHub, GitLab, or through Git Integration for Jira are currently being actively worked on. The new “deployments” feature offers users a live view of all deployment data across CI/CD services such as Bitbucket Pipelines, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, Circle CI, Octopus Deploy, and JFrog.

Image Credits: Atlassian

“If you’re a product manager wanting to see which features have been deployed to specific environments, or a team leader aiming to determine the average time your team takes to move from concept to production for a given project, you’ll find the information you need in the Deployments in Jira tab,” the company states.

The final two features, exclusive to the more advanced and costly Jira Software Premium, will soon deliver more detailed metrics regarding deployment frequency and cycle times. The intention is to simply provide additional data points to help teams better analyze trends and pinpoint anomalies in their workflows.