This article is based on reporting originally published by ITPro Today on June 10, 2020, and covers Atlassian announcements made alongside the release of its 2020 DevOps Trends Survey.
The Gap Between DevOps Aspiration and Reality
According to the Atlassian 2020 DevOps Trends Survey, released on June 2, 2020, there is a measurable disconnect between how DevOps practitioners and organizational decision-makers perceive the state of their DevOps implementations. The survey was conducted by CITE Research and drew responses from 500 developers and IT decision-makers.
“The biggest surprise was the gap between practitioners and executives in how they perceived their DevOps implementations,” said Tiffany To, head of Agile and DevOps solutions at Atlassian, in comments to ITPro Today.
Key Survey Findings
- 62% of IT practitioners agree it is difficult to measure the impact of DevOps progress and success, compared with 49% of decision-makers.
- 58% of IT practitioners say their organization has no clear way to measure DevOps success, compared with 47% of decision-makers.
- Nearly half of all respondents reported an increase in collaboration with non-technical teams after adopting DevOps practices — a positive finding that Atlassian highlighted as evidence that the right tooling can extend DevOps culture beyond engineering.
“To us, that’s a clear sign that DevOps teams need the right tools and practices in place to collaborate beyond engineering,” To said.
Atlassian’s Platform-Wide Integration Updates
Alongside the survey, Atlassian released a set of new features spread across its cloud product portfolio — including Jira Software, Bitbucket Cloud, Opsgenie, and Confluence — with the goal of reducing context-switching and enabling a more seamless application development pipeline.
Jira and Bitbucket Cloud: A Unified Work Dashboard
One of the headline additions is a new work dashboard inside Bitbucket Cloud that surfaces assigned Jira Software issues directly within the Bitbucket interface. While Bitbucket Cloud and Jira Software have long been integrated, developers previously had to switch between tools to view their assigned issues.
“Prior to this, users would have needed to hop over to Jira to view them, taking the developer out of Bitbucket and waste time checking between tools,” To explained. “Now, the dashboard has been brought into Bitbucket, so developers can stay in one tool to view assigned work.”
Opsgenie: Incident Response Aligned with Collaboration Tools
Atlassian’s Opsgenie alerting service received improved integrations with collaboration tools, most notably Slack. The improvements address how teams communicate and coordinate during major incidents:
- When an incident occurs, teams can now launch a dedicated Slack channel directly from Opsgenie to begin collaborating immediately.
- All Slack communications from that channel are automatically saved to the incident details screen in Opsgenie.
- Those communications can be exported to a postmortem report in Confluence for structured review after the incident is resolved.
- A new integration with Bitbucket enables developer teams to investigate deployment-related incidents directly from Opsgenie.
- Users can now open a Jira issue from the incident details screen in Opsgenie and map it to a specific project so the right team members are notified.
Code Insights and the Incident Investigation Dashboard
Atlassian also announced integration of its Code Insights feature — which enables automated code scanning for potential vulnerabilities — with Opsgenie via a new Incident Investigation Dashboard.
Here is how the end-to-end workflow is designed to function:
- A Code Insights scan runs against the codebase and detects a vulnerability.
- The deployment is automatically paused.
- A vulnerability report is surfaced to the developer directly inside Bitbucket — no need to switch to another tool.
- The developer can convert vulnerabilities into Jira issues from within Bitbucket.
- As issues are resolved, they are recorded in the project history.
- When all issues are resolved, the deployment pipeline automatically resumes.
The intent of this workflow is to keep the developer in a single tool — Bitbucket — throughout the entire vulnerability detection, triage, and remediation cycle.
Atlassian’s Broader DevOps Strategy
The common thread across these updates is reducing friction caused by context-switching between disconnected tools — a practical pain point for engineering teams that the 2020 survey data underscored. Atlassian’s approach positions its integrated cloud portfolio as both an accessible entry point for teams beginning their DevOps journey and a customizable, extensible platform for mature teams looking to optimize their toolchains.
“We aim to provide an easy entry point to those trying to implement DevOps while still providing an open and highly customizable platform for those looking to extend their toolchain and practices in order to ship better quality software faster,” To said. “You will see us expand our offerings to fit even more use cases as we look to align DevOps with IT and business teams through a common understanding of work.”
Summary: What Changed in the Atlassian DevOps Platform (June 2020)
| Product | New Capability |
|---|---|
| Bitbucket Cloud | Work dashboard surfacing assigned Jira issues without leaving Bitbucket |
| Opsgenie + Slack | Launch dedicated Slack channels per incident; sync comms back to Opsgenie |
| Opsgenie + Confluence | Export incident Slack communications to Confluence postmortem reports |
| Opsgenie + Bitbucket | Investigate deployment-related incidents directly from Opsgenie |
| Opsgenie + Jira Software | Open Jira issues from the Opsgenie incident details screen |
| Code Insights + Opsgenie | Incident Investigation Dashboard; auto-pause deployments on vulnerability detection |
Source: ITPro Today / Atlassian, June 2020.