OAKLAND, CA – AUGUST 5: John Heckert wipes his eyes as he uses a computer to fill out paperwork … [+]
At the coder. That’s what they do, but often don’t. We know that software application developers are driven by a passionate need to create great applications and provide users with incredible functionality on smartphones, tablets and desktops (and IoT edge devices) so that users’ lives are digitally transformed. The problem is that the core activity that software developers would like to focus on is ‘code cutting’, i.e. writing command-line instructions to handle algorithmic logic and data, their time is often taken up by administrators, research and headaches associated with everything from compliance to configuration complexity.
All this means that coders often don’t have enough time to code.
Do not interrupt the flow state
According to Stack Overflow’s latest developer survey, more than a quarter of developers spend an hour or more every day searching for answers or solutions to problems. This not only means less time to deliver software applications and intelligent data services, but also interrupts the ‘flow state’ where developers do their best.
The challenges in this space aren’t necessarily getting any easier, even in the new age of artificial intelligence. This is primarily because software development has become increasingly complex. Developers are asked to do everything from resolving incidents and configuring cloud services to navigating the array of microservices and components to complying with niche regulations (for mission-critical environments, or for international markets, etc.) and so on. This is further complicated by increasing cross-functional collaboration between distributed teams.
Team collaboration and productivity software company Atlassian says it’s working to develop its platform with these specific scenarios in mind, bringing disparate information and teams together in one place. By reducing the drudgery of information gathering and coordination, it hopes to help developers get back to doing what they love, which is writing code and learning—okay yes, while also drinking soda and eating pizza.
Simplification of work processes
Looking to help streamline workflows in modern development environments that are increasingly cloud-native, Atlassian is now enhancing functionality on three of its key technology foundations – Jira (for tracking bugs and issues), Bitbucket (a source code repository) and Compass (a DevOps tool which functions as a developer portal providing a unified presentation of all software engineering deliverables in real time).
In terms of new products here, Jira Work Suggestions is a new capability in Jira Software that uncovers bottlenecks that developers need to address across tools to maintain momentum and focus as they move on to their next task. Bitbucket custom merge checks are a software service that allows organizations to create checks that comply with their company’s internal policies to ensure that all merged code meets certain criteria. Compass components in Jira software are designed to empower developers to get a complete picture of health and performance metrics for their services, without switching between tools.
“To limit context switching between tools, we make Compass components available directly in Jira Software. Jira users can connect their issues to their services, APIs, libraries, and other components in the Compass catalog to find information faster,” notes Suzie Prince, product manager, DevOps, at Atlassian. “With Compass Components in Jira, developers can view critical component details, including card health status, standards compliance, ownership information, documentation, and related continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) events for any standalone piece of software that requires owner, such as a service, library, application, data model, and more.”
The development team at Atlassian further reminds us that software application developers are generally always busy with a whole list of responsibilities and activities. However, there are also always activities that were not planned, such as ad hoc ‘pull request’ reviews (when a developer wants to tell team members that they have completed a feature and its code needs to be merged into the project’s main repository), build fixes that are needed pick up for the team to move forward or critical security vulnerabilities that need to be addressed.
Jira Work Suggestions allows developers to see these high-priority items. By identifying potential bottlenecks in development tools and highlighting them in Jira Software, developers can maintain their momentum and focus as they move on to the next task, without constantly switching contexts between tools.
“Bitbucket Cloud is on a mission to become the most scalable cloud Software Change Management (SCM) and CI/CD product on the market. We believe extensibility is a key enabler for large, complex organizations to function effectively in the cloud, and we’re excited to leverage Atlassian’s extensibility platform, Forge, to bring this mission to life,” Price said, speaking to reporters this month. “We are now introducing custom merge checks for Bitbucket Cloud. While our standard merge checks are a static list, with custom checks organizations can build rules that are unique to their organization’s merge rules.”
First experience, then productivity
Obviously, this is all a fairly low-level and under-the-radar topic for a) most business people and b) even some of the team or project managers who may be overseeing a software application development team in any organization. Not many self-respecting CEOs spend time wandering between code sections worrying about the SCM pipeline and the state of code merge checks.
What that CEO might be doing is still related to empathy, albeit in a technical sense. Atlassian openly states that developer experience is more important than developer productivity, simply because the latter drives the former, and no software department will be very productive if their working lives are burdened with project administration headaches and nightmares. We know that a bad worker blames his tools, but the existence of bad tools can be avoided if there is an appropriate layer of software tools on top to control, guide and support.