Last updated Apr 26, 2024

Get started using Compass

Learn how Compass works

Compass is a developer portal that provides a unified representation of the engineering output in one place.

Compass helps you track the things your engineering teams build — we call these components. Compass also helps you track components you may rely on, and naturally compliments Jira, which tracks the effort of your engineering teams in building those components.

Components

Compass provides a component catalog where all your services, libraries, applications, and other components are tracked and managed.

Manage components manually in Compass or via config-as-code (YAML configuration file) with an external component manager like Bitbucket Cloud.

Teams

Compass also brings your team into one place to manage the components they own and to understand the dependencies and information about other team’s components.

Scorecards

Scorecards help you establish best practices without slowing down your team. Build and use scorecards to give teams autonomy to create new components while ensuring best practices are followed. For example, the service readiness scorecard helps you prepare services to be tracked in a production environment. Create different scorecards and apply them to different components.

Apps and integrations

Manage your components with config-as-code, a compass.yml file managed by an app like Bitbucket Cloud. More apps are coming soon to help you sync your existing components with Compass.

Add components

Select Create in the top navigation to add components. You can also add components via the API. Once a component is added, it’s managed in the Compass UI or, optionally, via a compass.yml file which is managed alongside the component and syncs with Compass.

Learn more about how to add a component or how to use config-as-code in Compass.

Set up your team

A team in Compass is a collection of Atlassian accounts – an Atlassian team. Atlassian teams have members, a profile, work, and resources. The team members collectively work towards achieving a common goal.

Start a team to get your teammates into Compass to share component information and ownership. Teams should take ownership of components their team owns so that there’s a defined way for others to get more information or help with a particular component. Owner teams are defined on each individual component, or teams can assign components from their team’s dashboard. Learn more about what you can do on a team’s dashboard

Discover components

A component is an output artifact of your engineering team. It could be a service, a library, an application, or something else.

A component’s catalog listing in Compass is the unified view of all information about the component.

Browse the component catalog to see what components your organization has already added to Compass. The component catalog is organized by component type, so be sure to explore the different component types using the left side menu.

Use the Compass search bar to search for components by name, team, or description. When you begin typing in the search field, you’ll see results organized by component type.

Teams can add different information to their components, such as defining an owner team for that component, chat channels, on-call schedules, and details like the relevant repository, documentation, dashboards, projects, and other links.

Get started with config-as-code

Configuration as code (config as code) allows you to manage Compass component data via a YAML file that is stored in a git repository. Config as code requires the Bitbucket, GitHub, or GitLab app to be installed and configured on your Compass site. With config as code, you declare component details in a compass.yaml file that sits alongside the source code or configuration for the component itself. The component then becomes a managed component in Compass. You can manage existing components this way or create new components in Compass by simply committing a compass.yaml file. Learn more about how config as code works.

Config-as-code enables Compass to be the single source of truth for your component management because your YAML files will automatically sync with Compass when updates are made to a component’s data. Learn more about managing components via config-as-code

Get started with scorecards

Check out the Readiness scorecard under Health to get an idea of how a scorecard can help build organizational best practices. This scorecard is used for preparing services to be tracked in a production environment. You can edit this scorecard to address your specific readiness requirements for service components or create new scorecards.

Custom scorecards enable you to:

  • Define company-wide standards and policies. Ensure that your teams are aiming for the same standards when it comes to things like security, etc.

  • Define team standards. Apply scorecards to the components that your team owns, besides the company-wide standards.

Apply your scorecards to components and you’ll see your scorecard and the current percentage of completion displayed on a component’s details page. Learn more about scorecards and how you can use them in your organization

Get help with Compass

Get help in the Atlassian Community for Compass

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