Atlassian Compass – Managing Development Sprawl

The Problem

Modern software teams working in distributed architectures face growing complexity:

• Struggling to manage dependencies between services, APIs, and components
• Developers losing time connecting Jira tasks instead of coding
• Documentation about dependencies is outdated or missing
• Architects and teams left out of the loop on critical changes
• Endless, irrelevant API change emails
• No clear ownership when deprecating shared libraries

This is what we call development sprawl—an explosion of services, APIs, libraries, and repositories without a central place to track, understand, and govern them.

The Solution – Compass

Built by Atlassian engineers for themselves, and now available to you.

Compass is a developer experience platform and service catalog that helps organizations manage complexity in microservice and distributed environments.

With Compass, you get:

• A central source of truth for components, APIs, and dependencies
• Config-as-code in Git (commits, not forms)
• Easy import of existing services and libraries
• DORA metrics and health tracking
• Clear ownership with explicit team definitions
• Integration with Jira, GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and feature flags (e.g. LaunchDarkly)
• Native support for incident & alerting workflows via JSM
• Real components surfaced directly in Jira

Why Compass?

Compass was created in 2018 to help Atlassian’s own engineers manage thousands of microservices, improve delivery speed, and reduce cognitive load. In 2022, Atlassian released it externally so every engineering organization can:

• Document and connect services, libraries, and dependencies in one place
• Improve operational readiness and reliability
• Scale distributed teams without losing track of ownership
• Accelerate delivery while maintaining compliance and best practices

Who is Compass for?

• Developers – Quickly find component owners, dependencies, and health status.
• Engineering Managers – Onboard teams faster, track performance trends, and enforce standards.
• Platform Engineering Teams – Provide a consistent developer platform that scales with your architecture.

How Swarmit Helps

Swarmit ensures you get the most value out of Compass—from implementation and integration into your toolchain, to training your teams and optimizing workflows for long-term success.

👉 With Swarmit and Compass, your teams spend less time chasing ownership and more time building great software.

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