Better Developer Experience with JPD, Bitbucket, and Compass
Unleashing DevEx – How Modern Teams Build Better
Successful development teams don’t emerge by chance. They need focus, clarity, and tools that accelerate rather than slow them down. That’s where Developer Experience (DevEx) comes into play: it puts developers and their needs at the center. DevEx creates the foundation for productive, motivated, and satisfied developers – and thus for better software, faster releases, and long-term business success.
Atlassian has recognized this lever – and with DevEx, has laid a groundbreaking foundation to help organizations design and implement modern Developer Experience strategies. The goal: to build scalable DevEx practices – efficiently, standardized, and in alignment with Atlassian’s best practices around DevOps, internal developer platforms, and DevSecOps. Whether as an enablement base for individual teams or to equip hundreds of employees via self-service – DevEx embodies Atlassian’s philosophy: relentless support to empower teams with scalable, standardized, and practice-oriented solutions to unleash their full potential – at every scale.
Putting It Into Practice
With Jira Product Discovery (JPD), Bitbucket, and Compass, an integrated toolchain is available that covers the entire development process – from ideation to continuous improvement. But how does Developer Experience become real, lived practice? Along the DevEx Journey – guided by the principle of “Build the Right Thing” – it becomes clear how ideas are turned into functional solutions.
Step 1: Jira Product Discovery – From Idea to Implementation
A successful product starts with a great idea. Jira Product Discovery enables product teams to systematically capture, prioritize, and transform ideas into actionable plans. Teams can collect and organize ideas and customer feedback in one central location. With custom fields and prioritization frameworks, the most promising concepts can be identified and evaluated. Roadmaps can then be created to give stakeholders a clear overview of planned developments.
Key Features:
- Idea & insight management: Capture product opportunities, potential solutions, and customer feedback on a single platform.
- Prioritization: Use your own prioritization frameworks to plan team work and focus on the tasks with the highest value.
- Flexible views: Create custom views to evaluate ideas and communicate roadmaps tailored to different stakeholders.
- Jira integration: Link ideas to Jira issues to track progress seamlessly from planning to execution.
By connecting ideation and implementation in a single platform, Jira Product Discovery enables coherent and transparent product development. Teams can ensure they are working on the right things and building products that delight customers.
Step 2: Bitbucket – From Implementation to Automation
Bitbucket is a Git-based source code management platform that integrates seamlessly with CI/CD pipelines. Development teams can set up automated builds, tests, and deployments directly within Bitbucket, accelerating and simplifying the development process. Its tight integration with Jira allows commits, branches, and pull requests to be directly linked to Jira tickets, ensuring full transparency throughout the development process. Additionally, Bitbucket integrates with leading tools for AI code generation, security, testing, and monitoring, allowing teams to seamlessly incorporate their preferred tools.
With Bitbucket Pipelines, getting started with automated workflows is a breeze. No server maintenance, no complicated setup – just start automating and get into the flow. Whether it’s quality gates, dynamic pipelines, or seamless integration with tools like Compass: every step is traceable, secure, and scalable.
What makes Bitbucket special:
- Built-in CI/CD: Automate builds, tests, and deployments directly in Bitbucket – no external tools required.
- Quality gates: With merge checks and clear approval rules, only verified code lands in the main branch.
- Deep Jira integration: Pull requests, branches, and commits are directly linked to Jira tickets – for maximum transparency in the development process.
- Security & compliance: With partners like Snyk, vulnerabilities can be detected early – without changing context.
Bitbucket’s mission is clear: developers shouldn’t waste time searching, switching, or guessing – they should focus entirely on coding. Bitbucket provides the technical foundation for that: automated, transparent, and scalable.
In addition to Bitbucket, teams can also seamlessly integrate GitLab into their development processes. By linking GitLab to Jira, teams gain a comprehensive view of their development activities, as commits, branches, and merge requests are automatically synchronized with Jira tickets. Furthermore, integrating GitLab into Atlassian Compass enables efficient component management via configuration-as-code, promoting consistent and transparent documentation of the software architecture.
Step 3: Compass – Navigation for Teams and Services
In modern microservice architectures, it is essential to maintain an overview of all components and their ownership. Compass serves as an internal developer portal that provides a unified, up-to-date view of all software components.
Teams can catalog and manage all services, libraries, and dependencies in a central location, bringing clarity and reducing developers’ cognitive load. Features like scorecards enable the measurement of component quality and maturity, while templates promote reusability and speed in development.
Key Features:
- Software catalog: A comprehensive overview of all the organization’s software components that helps untangle architecture and reduce developers’ cognitive load.
- Ownership assignment: Clear responsibilities for each component so teams know whom to contact for questions or issues.
- Scorecards: Measure the quality and maturity of components based on predefined criteria to promote continuous improvement.
- Templates: Reusable component templates that accelerate development and standardize best practices.
Compass provides more than just code organization: teams gain full transparency over their systems, clear ownership, and reliable quality metrics. Compass becomes the foundation of a standardized architecture that can scale and continuously improve – a true catalyst for a modern and sustainable Developer Experience.
“Build the Right Thing” – DevEx as a Competitive Advantage
Jira Product Discovery helps teams make the right product decisions – structured, prioritized, and customer-centric. Bitbucket brings those ideas into a clean, automated development flow, while Compass provides the necessary transparency around services, ownership, and quality standards. Together, Jira Product Discovery, Bitbucket, and Compass enable a seamless Developer Experience – from the first idea to reliable delivery.
Teams gain clarity on priorities, control over the code flow, and visibility into services and quality standards. The result: greater efficiency, better software – and a true competitive advantage.
Whether you're just getting started or looking to evolve your existing platform – with the right setup, DevEx becomes not only faster to achieve but also more sustainably anchored.
ByteSource: Your Partner for Scalable Developer Experience
Looking to take your company’s Developer Experience to the next level?
ByteSource supports you in implementing and optimizing the Atlassian toolchain to improve your development processes and empower your teams. Contact us to develop your individual DevEx strategy – together.
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