So that’s a wrap for here in Berlin. Atlassian Unleash was a blast for so many reasons, including having a chance to present with Appfire on reducing tech debt, so lets break it down and see what we learnt. Atlassian wanted the Unleash event to deep dive into the agile & DevOps experiences within the ecosystem. We saw the keynote focus on some of Atlassian’s newest adventures in the form of Jira Product Discovery & Compass. Some other announcements were made though. Jira Work Management will be free with every purchase of Jira software until 2024.

Product Discovery 

Jira Product Discovery is continuing to be developed in Beta and has seen the “highest customer satisfaction rate of any of the Atlassian products” states Atlassian. It gives product managers & their teams to have a proper way of managing ideation within Jira. Features during the session showcased how your teams can score effort and time and how the formulas that we can create help display the importance of the request. You can show our roadmap in a timeline view or Kanban style board and can even have this information displayed to users not in Jira by sharing links creating better transparency with your customers.

All great products started with a great idea. Using Product discovery, we can now track the original idea next to where the work is done, creating a better contextual path for helping the developers understand why.

 Compass

Compass, another product in Beta, has been spoken about for a few events now. It is continuing to get new features and the development time it needs. In the age where applications no longer running on monolith code bases, instead developers spend their time creating micro services that, when all pulled together, make the application. Compass aims at helping track the complete picture of how things are therefore made up, from the libraries to the applications themselves. With many companies ideologies of you build you fix, we need the catalogue to show us which team owns it, how to contact them and their important documentation.

Compass’ latest feature are announcements and checkops. We have all been in scenarios where a service your team look after is Impacted by changes made on services further up the stream which we depend on. Announcements now provides teams to let all teams be aware of upcoming changes that may affect them. It gives the user the ability to detail the change. Once ready, at the click of a button all downstream teams are notified, reducing the chances of unknown incidents.

CheckOps, was developed to help improve developer fulfilment, not productivity. How do we make it a more enjoyable time when looking after the products we create? A question which I believe is a constantly changing landscape. It becomes a journey and not a destination. But, the practices here definitely could make some teams feel more fulfilled that with less surprises, and better handoffs. If you want to learn more, I’d recommend checking out THIS VIDEO.

Breakouts & networking

Away from the keynote, breakout sessions offered us a chance to understand dealing with tech debt in the Atlassian world, a chance to improve your DevOps infrastructure, how Atlassian manage security, how to invest in the right engineering culture as well as many more.

Personally I love the breakout sessions more. This is where minds from far and wide can come to share their knowledge & experiences to better assist others. Unleash’ sessions were on the whole pretty good. Turnout and quality were really good. With more time and possible bigger turnouts, these events will be even better.

So what does this mean for the future?

Personally I think the events like Unleash, Velocity & worklife will continue to grow in popularity. They provide better opportunity to Atlassian to have the right people in the room as well as more focused talks for all of us attendees. I think the events have a high chance of getting more focus then the large conference Team.

Away from the event itself, Atlassian is truly living up to their potential of a full open DevOps lifecycle. Providing all the opportunity for each and every customer to utilise their toolchain & the best of breed products with Atlassian. With improvements in their new products, this only helps their case.