4 new feature for DevOps in Jira provide more visibility and better insights

One of the biggest cause for complicated workflows and custom fields is the fact that Jira has never been a deployment tool, but the teams need the visibility of deploys. With this latest update to Jira Software Cloud we see improvements in this field with no less than four new features. DevOps teams or not, this will make life easier for everyone.

While there are several add-ons for Jira Software Cloud that will tie together repositories with Jira, this is now a standard feature in Jira. That means that it can be used with no additional cost (except for the Premium features if you don't have Premium of course), which lowers the entry point substantially. Hopefully this will mean the end of operations based statuses in the workflow and custom fields to hold release data.

Code in Jira

Quote

Stay focused on your code and (almost) never be disrupted by another ping asking which team is working on what code and in which repo. With Code in Jira, anyone on the team can simply open this view to see the most recently active repos across Bitbucket, GitHub, GitLab, or Git Integration for Jira, automatically surfaced right in Jira.

This feature allows you to connect your repo to Jira so you can visually see the repos in a new tab in your project called Code. Doing so if fairly easy, especially if you use Bitbucket, but adding Github for example takes only a few minutes. The biggest benefit of this feature for me however is that you will see the repo information in the Jira issue itself. This provide a lot of information to the viewer on where this issue has been committed.

Deployments in Jira

Quote

Anyone on the team can get a real-time view of where a deployment is, across any CI/CD provider, as it moves through the pipeline – without having to ask a developer. Since every work item across Atlassian and third-party tools is linked to a Jira issue, you’ll be able to track and measure from idea through to production.

This is where things get interesting.  With Code in Jira above you can see where your code packages are and their status. With Deployments, you can see where those packages also have been delivered to. This provides a very nice overview of where your code currently is available, which is what most people want to know when they try to build this into their workflows or work views.

Premium Features

The last two features are only available for the Premium version of Jira Software Cloud. Normally I don't like to have features split between a standard and a more expensive version, but these two features are all about measuring which I think is fine to have as a bonus if you need the more expensive version.

Deployment Frequency

Quote

We’ve taken the metric that high-performing software teams care about most and expanded it to track performance across any CI/CD provider. Jira automatically calculates how often your team is shipping value and how this is trending over time so that you don’t have to manually coordinate across tools or bug your ops team.

Cycle Time

Quote

Go beyond just measuring average lead time. Jira is the only tool that can track down to the granular view of each segment of the development workflow, since each piece of work across all Atlassian and third-party tools are tied to a Jira issue. Surface specific actionable insights on bottlenecks and optimize the team’s workflow as you go.

My Thoughts

This is a very good addition to Jira Software Cloud that have been needed for a long time. While I think the Premium features is mostly for numbers people and not really for the daily work I think this still is a solid addition. I would like to see the deployment information on the issues and it needs a connection with Insight, so I can connect deploys to my assets.

There is a lot of potential here and I look forward to seeing this taking further in the future.