Atlassian’s journey with developer experience | Preeti Kota (Atlassian)
Oct 18, 2023
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Preeti Kota, Head of Engineering for Compass at Atlassian, discusses Atlassian's journey with developer experience and their newly released internal developer portal, Compass. They cover topics such as measuring DevEx, investments in improving developer productivity, metrics for self-serve documentation and dependency maintenance, survey programs, centralized teams, and the introduction of Atlassian Compass to solve information search for developers.
Atlassian's commitment to developer experience is championed by its CTO and influences the organization's culture and decision-making.
Atlassian invests 10% of team time in improving developer productivity, resulting in significant improvements in key metrics such as deployment frequency.
Deep dives
The Journey to Improving Developer Experience at Atlassian
Atlassian's journey towards improving developer experience began with the arrival of their CTO, Rajiv, who prioritized building a world-class engineering organization and believed that developer joy was key to achieving this goal. The company experienced significant growth over the years, which brought about complexities and challenges. They identified three main areas of improvement: reducing friction in development processes, empowering teams with autonomy, and addressing the fear of breaking things. To gauge developer satisfaction, they conducted surveys and obtained insights from developers. Atlassian's strong commitment to developer experience is championed by Rajiv and influences the organization's culture and decision-making.
Investing in Developer Productivity
Atlassian is fully committed to investing in developer productivity, driven by the belief that it unlocks sustained productivity and the endorsement of their CTO. They allocate 10% of team time for individual teams to focus on improving their own productivity. This investment is intentional and accountable, ensuring that it is not merely a best effort but a commitment backed by planning and data. With a combination of qualitative and quantitative metrics, they track and measure the impact of these investments on cycle time, documentation, dependency maintenance, and more. The results have shown significant improvements in deployment frequency and other key metrics.
Tackling Developer Experience at Atlassian
At Atlassian, developer experience is a multifaceted concept that encompasses tools, autonomy, and engineering culture. They have a centralized developer productivity champions program that drives centralized investments while disseminating learnings and best practices to engineering teams. This program identifies and funds centralized investments, such as optimizing remote development environments, supporting mocking for shared services, and improving documentation and dependency maintenance processes. At the same time, Atlassian emphasizes team health, clarity of work importance, and team connectedness. They use surveys, health playbooks, and team rituals to gather data and insights, foster engagement, and continuously improve developer experience.
Introducing Compass: A Developer Experience Platform
Compass is an internal developer portal and a developer experience platform developed by Atlassian. It addresses the challenge of developers spending too much time searching for information and struggling with efficiency. Compass offers a centralized component catalog that provides comprehensive information about services, APIs, and more. It incorporates health and scorecards to provide insights into architecture and team health, ensuring developers have the necessary information for better decision-making. Software templates promote consistency across projects, and the platform is designed for extensibility, allowing developers to tap into its power and integrate with other tools. Compass is available as a free tier for all users, with enhanced capabilities offered at a reasonable price.
This week we’re joined by Preeti Kota, the Head of Engineering for Compass at Atlassian. Preeti walks us through Atlassian’s journey with developer experience: including how they measure DevEx, and how they drive improvements through efforts at both the organization and team levels. Preeti also talks about how this journey has led to the development of Atlassian’s newly released internal developer portal, Compass.