Tech debt, caused by scale and the necessity to quickly ship new features, is a common challenge for software teams. Teams take on tech debt ship quickly, but too much leads to decreased velocity in the long term. Atlassian Compass, an internal developer platform (IDP), gives teams a centralized software catalog so developers can find information faster and understand the health and performance of their software. By linking Jira issues to your catalog and health measures in Compass, teams can identify and reduce high-impact tech debt when prioritizing their backlog while shipping new features with consistent speed.
Technical debt is outstanding work promised but not delivered to the customer, defects in the code, or work items that hurt agility.
Dan Radigan, Atlassian
Build, measure, learn - fast. Agile software teams ship code with incredible speed. The tradeoff is technical debt, an unavoidable phenomenon that increases code fragility and slows teams down. How well does your team understand its technical debt? What insights inform how to prioritize your backlog to reduce technical debt while continuing to deliver innovative new features? Read on and learn how to assess Jira backlog priority and tackle your team’s technical debt for faster software delivery.
Teams are under constant pressure to deliver new features quickly. At the same time, as products and teams grow, complexity increases and organizations experience a proliferation of services and software sprawl. Ownership becomes unclear, knowledge silos form, and finding information becomes a greater challenge. As product complexity grows, codebases become larger, and teams continue to prioritize shipping new features, the likelihood of bugs and performance issues increases. The stats are staggering:
Companies have to move fast to remain competitive, and successful companies will grow in size, revenue, and breadth of products, so virtually every organization must learn to manage technical debt effectively. How well does your team comprehend its technical debt?
At Atlassian, we use Compass to maintain a centralized catalog of all services, libraries, APIs, and other software components built and operated by our teams. With Compass, teams use the software catalog to easily track service ownership, connect data from across the organization, and reveal the health of our software. These insights empower teams to effectively prioritize their work, move fast, and maintain a high code quality bar. Using these insights to address the right tech debt now leads to higher velocity in the future.
In this article, we’ll show how Atlassian uses Compass, our developer experience platform, to reduce technical debt and prioritize our Jira backlog.
Compass is Atlassian’s developer experience platform, also commonly known as an internal developer platform or IDP. Compass was created to aid Atlassian’s microservice journey and streamline our developer experience. Compass reduces day-to-day friction for developers by helping them find information and insights faster, and speeding paths to production:
Compass components give teams a centralized way to catalog and understand their software. Components are anything that lives in a repo - a service, library, ML model, etc. You can natively link these in Jira so that issues in your backlog connect to the real pieces of software they impact. This helps teams understand the impact of their work and how it relates to the big picture of their software.
Atlassian’s platform engineering team relies on Compass to centralize information, standards, and practices that help us maintain a good developer experience and engineering culture. That means autonomous teams, clear standards and practices, clear service ownership, and less time searching.
You can get started with Compass in minutes by following a few simple steps: (1) import your components, (2) assign Teams to own your components, (3) configure scorecards.
For most teams, that means connecting a Source Code Management (SCM) tool, like Github or Bitbucket, or importing repos linked to your Jira projects. You can also import components from a CSV file or any combination of these methods to quickly build a comprehensive catalog of everything your developers build and maintain.
You can get started with Compass in minutes by importing your components from wherever they live today. For most teams, that means connecting a Source Code Management (SCM) tool, like Github or Bitbucket, or importing repos linked to your Jira projects. You can also import components from a CSV file or any combination of these methods to quickly build a comprehensive catalog of everything your developers build and maintain.
Generally, each component should have one Team assigned that’s primarily responsible for its operation. Adding an owner Team to each component reinforces a culture of autonomy, helps developers stay on top of relevant information, and expert coverage of each component even if an individual or lead is unavailable. Compass uses Atlassian Directory for Team definitions, so any existing teams you’re using in Jira are already available.
With the component catalog, developers across your organization can quickly find documentation or recent CI/CD activity associated with any service or library. This boosts developer productivity by reducing time spent searching for information and eliminating interruptions for information that can now be self-serviced.
When an SCM is connected, Compass automatically detects events like deployments and aggregates them in the Activity Feed. Based on the events from your repo, Compass automatically calculates several key metrics out of the box, like deployment frequency and build success rate. You can set up DORA metrics and even track custom data, like the number of security vulnerabilities outstanding for a given component.
With your catalog populated and metrics flowing in, it’s time to start using scorecards. Scorecards are used to build standards and apply them to components across your organization. Scorecards can use any desired targets for component metrics and field data. This helps you ensure your software components are healthy and teams are following the recommended practices. Compass comes with a few default scorecards out of the box with metrics we recommend you track, such as Component Readiness and DevOps Health, and you can create your own custom scorecards. When you see what scorecards are failing for your components, you know what technical debt you need to address!
To continue with the example above, let’s tackle security with a custom scorecard that will fail if there is more than one open security vulnerability at a given time. Security vulnerabilities are a classic example of tech debt. First, create a metric to track Security Vulnerabilities and configure it to pull from the correct source on your various components.
Next, go to the Scorecards tab under “Health” in the top navigation bar. Click “Create Scorecard,” fill out the details, and make sure to add the Security Vulnerabilities metric you just created as the scorecard criterion. Let’s say the scorecard will fail if there is ever more than one security vulnerability open at a given time. This is a good choice for Tier 1 services that are critical to the operational state of your software. Set the operator to “less than or equal to” and the value as one. Set the weight to 100%, click Create, and now you have a centralized way to track security-related risks and give teams clear actions to improve the health of their software.
In practice, you’ll configure multiple scorecards to measure a variety of standards to get a comprehensive view of your technical debt.
Now Compass is configured, we have everything we need to begin identifying and tackling tech debt. First, make sure your Jira project is opted into Compass components by clicking “Components” in the left-hand navigation bar, and checking the drop-down field on the top right. If you’ve opted in, it should say “Compass components.”
Next, go back into Compass and examine your scorecards. Identify areas where scorecards are either at risk or are already failing, and based on your team’s priorities, determine the most important problem to solve. You can view a specific scorecard from the “Health” UI, and see how all applicable components measure up. You can filter further by owner team to understand exactly how your own components are scoring and identify the technical debt that requires your attention.
Let’s consider another example using the DevOps Health built-in scorecard. You are reviewing your team’s components and you notice that several are failing the Deployment Frequency criterion. The scorecard is defined so that if there are fewer than five deployments per week, you notice that some of your components only have one or two deployments per week. This is a potential issue that needs investigation. Perhaps there is a problem in the build process or deployment pipelines, or maybe your team is struggling with the technical difficulty of their task. Either way, it’s technical debt that is worth addressing.
Return to your backlog and see if there are existing issues that address this problem of slow deployments. If not, you can create a new issue directly from the Scorecard page in Compass. Make sure those issues have the correct Compass components tagged on them so you can stay organized and directly track the impact of your backlog.
From there, you can confidently incorporate those issues into your next sprint or add them to your Kanban board. You know these issues are high-priority technical debt, and you know that the work you’ve done will impact your software architecture’s performance. After your team resolves the issue, you can go back to your DevOps Health scorecard and see the history of how you improved deployment frequency over time. This is a great visual to show leadership and to show your team as you discuss the value of your work.
Technical debt is inevitable in modern software delivery, but effective teams know how to prioritize high-impact technical debt to maintain a high level of reliability while shipping innovative new features with consistent velocity. Linking your Jira issues to a centralized Component catalog in Compass gives teams insights on work impact and allows them to make effective tradeoffs between tech debt and feature delivery with just a few steps:
Quickly setup your software catalog in Compass by connecting your SCM, importing repos from Jira, or importing them from a CSV file
Start with built-in scorecards, then build your own with metrics and other data sources to track software performance against your organization’s standards and practices and identify high-priority tech debt
Make Compass part of your weekly rituals as you move tech debt from “Backlog” to “Done”, preventing incidents while consistently delivering new features
Get started with Compass for free.
Wayne Dailey
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