Atlassian this week extended its namesake automation framework to include its Confluence collaboration software. In addition, it’s now possible to automatically create bi-directional branches in Bitbucket, GitHub or GitLab platforms from within the company’s Jira project management application.
At the same time, it’s now possible to automatically generate feature flags from within Jira through integration with the feature management platform created by LaunchDarkly and automate alert and incident responses stemming from the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.
Dilani Kahawala, head of product for the automation platform at Atlassian, said these extensions to the Atlassian Automation framework are part of a larger ongoing effort to remove the silos within software engineering teams and the rest of the business.
DevOps teams, for example, will now be able to expand the number of those automated actions being taken because change requests can be automatically created. Atlassian estimated that IT teams will spend 25% less time managing change requests and save 115 hours per month.
To save more time, templates that automatically create Wiki pages in Confluence can be spun up at the completion of every sprint.
Since it first launched for Jira in 2020, Atlassian claims more than 10 billion automated actions have been executed across the Atlassian platform.
Kahawala said as more organizations realize how dependent they are on software to drive revenue, the need to close the divide between software engineering teams becomes much more pressing. She noted that changes to the timetable for one project can have a cascading effect across the entire business. At a time when organizations are counting on digital business transformation initiatives to remain competitive, the speed at which organizations share updates across silos is critical, said Kahawala.
At the same time, organizations are also striving to become more productive in an uncertain global economy. Automating rote tasks makes it possible for development teams to spend more time writing code, added Kahawala.
Less clear right now is whether businesses can absorb the pace of change that is enabled by modern software development. Historically, business leaders complained that their dependency on IT was holding the business back because it took too long for IT teams to implement changes. Today, however, many organizations routinely deliver code updates to mission-critical applications daily. While not every delivery may involve a major new update, it’s apparent that the pace of innovation is now occurring at speeds many organizations find challenging to absorb.
As organizations continue to adopt best DevOps practices, the pace of innovation is only going to accelerate further. The challenge—and the opportunity—is to ruthlessly eliminate as many manual tasks as possible to accelerate the pace of innovation. After all, software engineering pros have better ways to spend their time than manually creating yet another branch in a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform or, worse yet, reenter data into a project management application.
