I'm here in Amsterdam this morning at the historic former stock exchange, Beurs van Belage, to get an update on where Atlassian is going on its journey to fully enable DevOps and developer experience (now the newish trendy acronym, DevEx) in the cloud for the developer world.
Atlassian's long-time trajectory has been one of steady growth and innovation in supporting agile software development. A fan-favorite of the developer community, the company's early products were built on the principles of open source software and collaboration. The company has stayed true to this ethos and it continues to be a core part of Atlassian's culture.
Over the last two years, Atlassian has continued to invest its growth and innovation. The company has also made several acquisitions, including Trello in 2017 and Opsgenie in 2020. These acquisitions have expanded Atlassian's product offerings and strengthened its position in the enterprise software market.
Atlassian has also made significant investments in its cloud business. The company's cloud-based products, such as Jira Software, Jira Service Management and Confluence, are now its fastest-growing segment. Atlassian is also investing in new cloud-based products, such as Jira Product Discovery and Compass. With Atlassian's release of Compass, it arguably unveiled its most strategic product, aimed at helping organizations build the most effective overall development experience possible, using data-based insights, and now artificial intelligence, drawn from its Atlassian Intelligence capability.
The Atlassian Unleashed Amsterdam 2023 show floor at the historic Beurs van Belage on December 11th, 2023: Photo Crediit: Dion Hinchcliffe
Atlassian Fine-Tunes DevEx with Metrics, AI, and Integrations
The Unleash event here in Amsterdam kicked off with Atlassian's product head of agile and DevOps, Matt Schvimmer, who noted that research conducted by Google shows that organizations that invest in a healthy dev culture have a 30% higher organizational performance, which translates directly into better bottom line results. Matt also repeatedly beat the drum throughout the session on the whole point of DevEx is to produce "customer value", a mantra that organizations who invest in cost software development efforts are sure to appreciate.
Atlassian's Matt Schvimmer, head of product for agile and DevOps, kicks off Atlassian Unleashed Amsterdam 2023. Photo Credit: Dion Hinchcliffe
Then came a sustained raft announcements, some minor as well as some that will almost certainly provide sustained, lasting value to Atlassian customers as the company continues to fill in a full developer experience toolchain.
The full-round up of news today was wrapped around three key tentpole ideas, each of which had specific announcements:
- Idea 1: Capture the right project/developer metrics to promote healthy culture
- Additions to Atlassian Analytics and the Jira Align strategic-to-execution platform
- Value-stream management: Flow metrics
- Org-wide DORA metrics
- Additions to Atlassian Analytics and the Jira Align strategic-to-execution platform
- Idea 2: Reduce the cognitve load on software engineering teams
- Idea 3: Keep developers (and adjacent teams) in the flow
- New features in Jira
- Integration with Figma and Jira, to flow design changes right into the DevEx
- Work suggestions in Jira, including next best action
- Command pallete in Jira
- New features in Jira
There was also a major focus on the capability that is a must-have in 2023: Generative AI. Atlassian announced the general availability of Atlassian Intelligence, which includes the following capabilities, under Idea 2 and Idea 3 both:
- Generative AI features in Jira, Confluence, and Atlas
- Intelligent summaries in Confluence, Jira Service Management
- Natural language automation in Confluence
- Natural language search in Jira
- Virtual AI agents with generative answers Jira Service Management
- AI project configuration in Jira Service Management
- Natural language to SQL in Atlassian Analytics
You can watch a quick video overview of most of these new AI features from Schvimmers demo of them onstage.
Collectively, these new capabilities provide real acceleration for developers along with metrics and AI support for team members and project leads that will help most organizations better tranform vision into actual product with lower costs. The generative AI features I saw were impressive and if they work consistently as shown, are likely to shave many minutes a day for the typical developer while also improving the quality of team communications and collaboration. Atlassian Intelligence is included in Premium and Enteprise subscriptions.
It's worth taking a quick dive into the comprehensive vision and detailed care taken in Atlassian Intelligence. The design of the domain model behind it spans discovery, execution (architecture, project planning, and development), and operations. The new AI capability specifically designed to reduce the cognitive load and keep developers in the flow, and the resulting demo was impressive, reaching across the DevEx to inject time-saving content or create contextually accurate summarizes, or support on the fly.
The domain model for Atlassian Intelligence. Photo Credit: Atlassian
The company also tipped its hand on upcoming features of Atlassian Intelligence (roadmap below), which shows that Atlassian is just warming up on its committment to bring generative AI to the developer experience. Many new features are coming, notably robust code reviews and intelligent summaries of Jira issues.
The Atlassian Platform: A Modern Developer Experience, Realized
While the generative AI features stole the show, the significance of all the announcements today show a growing richness and maturity of the Atlassian platform from overarching strategy and design all the way to deteailed execution and operations. Atlassian continues to invest heavily in innovation and seeking to build a best-of-breed developer platform.
In my analysis, CIOs and IT execs can remain confident their investments in Atlassian's platform will continue to take them along a fast-evolving modern development journey, as the company maintains a high "tech intensity" in its R&D and product management efforts. While software and enterprise architecture tools are still not as strongly represented in the plaform as they could be, there are plenty of such offerings on the market that projects can choose from that integrate well enough. For now, Atlassian is maintaining a crisp vision of what it intends to be with a matching high pace of product development.
Related Reading and Research
My social coverage of Atlassian Unleashed Amsterdam 2023, including key videos of new capabilities covered above
AWS re:Invent 2023: Perspectives for the CIO
Dreamforce 2023: Implications for IT and AI Adopters
Google Cloud Next 2023: Perspectives for the CIO
Exploring Wipro Ventures: An Enterprise-Focused Tech Incubator
My new ShortList of IT strategy platforms
My current view of Developer Experience and Platform Engineering:
