Atlassian just launched 12 new features with the goal of making developers' lives easier and allowing them to focus on shipping better code, instead of worrying about updating the status of their projects.
These features, launched Tuesday, are a sign of Atlassian's shift towards building more "DevOps" tools, a term that combines development and operations.
Atlassian, which currently has a market cap of about $46 billion, built these new features after its product managers spent time with customers and gathered feedback on the parts of their work process that had the most friction. Customers often complained about spending too much time on procedural work, instead of writing code, says Tiffany To, the company's head of Agile and DevOps solutions.
"[Customers] are vocal about what's working and not working," To told Business Insider. "They are honest about how they want developers to spend more time coding and less time switching between tools."
The new tools help engineers keep projects up to date
Atlassian added more integrations between Jira Software Cloud, Atlassian's product for software project updates, and Atlassian's Bitbucket Cloud, GitLab, and GitHub, all of which developers use to add code to projects they're working on. For example, thanks to these new integrations, developers can configure the product so that when they update code on Bitbucket, Jira will automatically update the project's status as well.
Similarly, Atlassian's incident management platform Opsgenie will also now integrate with Bitbucket and Jira's cloud software, so that when an IT incident like an outage happens, an operations team can immediately see how the code changed over time and what may have caused the incident.
Atlassian launched these products because developers were having trouble keeping the status of their projects up to date, often having to check five different tools, To says.
"I personally saw this at a number of startups where the tools were changing quickly all the time," To said. "As you can imagine, the last thing that developers want to do is spend a bunch of time reporting on the status of their work."
Atlassian wants to help teams collaborate
Developers also have the challenge of collaborating within their teams. To address this, Atlassian is adding a new dashboard right in Bitbucket Cloud that shows code changes, action items, and feedback from other developers. Bitbucket will now also have additional new features that scan and test for security vulnerabilities, and will highlight services that may be at risk.
"It's a pretty powerful thing" To said, adding that she sees security being integrated into the development process "a lot more over time as people recognize that security is such a critical piece of code quality."
Going forward, Atlassian plans to integrate more third-party tools into its products and continue to build more DevOps features. This has only become more crucial as developers are now working remotely, To says.
"When you're remote, it becomes more important than ever for the status of everything to be up to date," To said. "Additionally that collaboration across tools becomes more important."
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