Additionally, earlier this year, the company announced Atlassian Rovo, a generative AI tool for more easily accessing enterprise knowledge. Now, Rovo is officially generally available. 

Atlassian Rovo enables companies to search across all of their enterprise data and apps, including third-party ones. 

Users can then gain deeper insights from that data by using the chat functionality or browsing the automatically generated knowledge cards that provide a snapshot of specific information about projects, goals, new teammates, and more. Rovo Chat also is offered as a browser extension to give more specific help when working within a certain webpage, like asking questions about a specific Google Doc. 

And finally, Rovo Agents are like specialized “teammates you can pull into your workflow” to assist with various tasks, like generating marketing content, integrating UX research into Jira specs, or cleaning up Jira backlogs. Customers can create their own agents using a no-code interface, or make use of Atlassian’s 20 out-of-the-box agents. 

There is also a GitHub Copilot extension for Rovo, which can provide context about goals, teams, projects, design specifications, recent deployments, and more, all within GitHub Copilot.

According to Atlassian, beta customers using Rovo saw an average of 1-2 hours saved per week.

In addition to Rovo, Atlassian also just announced AI Agents, which for now are in early access. AI Agents are designed to reduce friction in development workflows by helping with non-coding tasks. They can generate code plans, code recommendations, and pull requests based on descriptions, requirements, and business context, for example. 

“Today, AI assists in code completion, but isn’t addressing the majority of tasks that get in the way of development velocity and quality, like getting started on a task with unfamiliar requirements, searching for information, or waiting for pull requests to be reviewed. We’re looking to change all that with our new dev-focused AI Agents,” Atlassian wrote in a blog post. 

The company also announced a number of AI improvements across its other products, like in  Jira Service Management, which now leverages AI to group related alerts, suggest resources and SMEs, summarize details of issues, capture key timeline events during an incident, and generate post-incident reviews.

Additionally, the Jira Service Management virtual service agent, which was previously only available in Slack, is now integrated in the help center, Microsoft Teams, and email. There is also now an embeddable widget for external customer support.

And finally, after acquiring the video messaging tool Loom last year, Atlassian has further integrated it into Jira and Confluence. Customers can now generate documents in over 50 languages, create bug reports from Loom videos, and fill in Jira issues from a screenshot from a Loom video. 

The post Atlassian Rovo is now generally available, giving users fast access to all enterprise knowledge appeared first on SD Times.

Atlassian co-CEO Scott Farquhar announces plans to step down

Farquhar, along with Mike Cannon-Brookes, have been running Atlassian as co-CEOs since forming the company together 23 years ago. 

Farquhar said in a blog post that he plans to spend more time with his family, working on philanthropic endeavors, and mentoring other tech CEOs.

His last day as co-CEO will be August 31, 2024, and he will still remain as a board member and special advisor to the company. 

“And while there is never a perfect time to make this change, I take comfort in my decision knowing Atlassian is so well placed for the future. We have a world-class cloud platform and the best team we’ve ever had. Our new Point A products are gaining real traction, AI is providing new and exciting opportunities, and we have over 300,000 cloud customers consolidating around Atlassian,” Farquhar wrote. 

Percona appoints Liz Warner as CTO

Liz Warner will step into the role of CTO of Percona to oversee further development of the company’s portfolio of database solutions.

She has decades of experience in the tech industry, most recently serving as CTO of Weaveworks. Warner has been the CTO for a number of other companies, including Clim8 Invest, Nationwide for Business, Motion Picture Solutions, Mettle, LendInvest, and Toyota Connected. 

She is taking over for Vadim Tkachenko, who is also one of the company’s co-founders. He is moving into the role of Technology Fellow for the company.

LogicMonitor announces the appointment of Karthik Sj as General Manager of Artificial Intelligence

Sj will lead the company’s AIOps and generative AI strategy. He previously was vice president of product management for the generative AI company Aisera. Before that, he was at SAP for 14 years, most recently as director of product management, leading AI strategy for SAP CX. 

“This strategic hire is the catalyst LogicMonitor was looking for to exponentially propel our existing AI capabilities throughout LM Envision, our hybrid observability platform. Customers crave predictive insights and automation to anticipate problems and optimize their systems for better performance and overall user experience,” said Christina Kosmowski, CEO of LogicMonitor. “With Karthik leading and growing an AI focused team, we are providing solutions faster and redefining hybrid observability as well.” 

Ex-OpenAI employee Logan Kilpatrick joins Google 

He is now a senior product manager at Google, leading the Google AI Studio project. Kilpatrick previously led developer relations for OpenAI, and had been the first dev rel hire the company made. 

“Lots of hard work ahead, but we are going to make Google the best home for developers building with AI. I’m not going to settle for anything less.” he wrote in a post on X. 

In addition to his time at OpenAI, he has also been on the board of directors at NumFOCUS, a community advisor for NASA’s TOPS program, and a teaching fellow at Harvard.

The post April 2024: People on the Move appeared first on SD Times.

According to Atlassian, the basis of Atlassian Rovo is the teamwork graph, which is a data model the company created based on the understanding it has gained over the past couple of decades on common work patterns, anti-patterns, organizational structures, and lines of communication. The teamwork graph pulls in data from Atlassian apps and other SaaS apps connected to it.

“AI is only as useful as the data it taps into … With every new tool connection, team action, and project event, teamwork graph draws more connections and expands its knowledge to deliver increasingly relevant results,” Jamil Valliani, head of AI product at Atlassian, wrote in a blog post. 

Rovo Search returns contextual, relevant results based on information from different tools, including Google Drive, Microsoft Sharepoint, Microsoft Teams, GitHub, Slack, Figma, or even tools that were developed internally. 

Information is presented in knowledge cards, which provide a quick glance of information on projects, goals, team members, and more. 

“Teams get immediate answers as they work, and knowledge cards get smarter as more data is added to the Atlassian teamwork graph,” Valliani wrote. 

Rovo also has Agents, which can actually execute specific tasks, such as taking action when as Jira issue progresses, create service checklists, assist with new employee onboarding, organize Confluence pages, and more. 

“Rovo Agents will transform teamwork with their ability to synthesize large volumes of enterprise data, break down complex tasks, learn as they take action, and partner with their human teammates to make critical and complex decisions. Agents aren’t just some souped-up version of chatbots. They bring specialized knowledge and skills to a wide variety of workflows and processes,” said Valliani. 

Currently there is a waitlist to get access to Atlassian Rovo. 

The post Atlassian Rovo makes it easier to understand, take action on enterprise data across different SaaS tools appeared first on SD Times.

The first update is the ability to connect Compass components to Jira Software. This provides developers better visibility into health and performance metrics of their applications without needing to switch tools. 

It provides visibility into things like health scorecard status, compliance with standards, information on ownership, documentation, and CI/CD events. 

The company believes that by allowing Compass components to be accessed from within Jira, it will reduce context switching for developers. 

“According to the latest Stack Overflow Developer Survey, more than a quarter of developers spend an hour or more each day searching for answers or solutions to problems. That not only means less time shipping great software but also breaking the flow state where developers do their best work,” Atlassian wrote in a blog post.  

Next, Jira Software has introduced Jira Work Suggestions, which identifies bottlenecks that developers face when transitioning from task to task and is another way the company plans to ease the burden of context switching.

According to the company, developers may plan their work in Jira, but then they get sidetracked when other unexpected tasks — like pull request reviews, build fixes, or security vulnerabilities to address — come up that are managed by other tools. 

Now, Jira provides visibility into those tasks that are managed by other tools, providing a central place to look to determine what needs working on. 

Finally, custom merge checks were added to Bitbucket, enabling developers to easily ensure that their code merges are meeting company policies. 

Normally, Bitbucket’s checks are a static list, but the new custom checks will allow developers to adjust them based on their company’s specific policies. For instance, it could be updated to require specific security scans to be run, require that code can’t be merged after hours when no on-call staff are available, or require a minimum level of test coverage. 

“Together, these improvements across Jira, Compass, and Bitbucket help development teams streamline information and bring teams together, to improve experience and focus on the work that matters most,” the company wrote. 

The post Atlassian hopes to improve developer experience in latest Jira, Compass, and Bitbucket updates appeared first on SD Times.

Building upon two decades of insights gained from millions of software, IT, and business teams, Atlassian announced in April its plans to integrate AI into teamwork experiences, showcasing the synergy between humans and AI.

The initial Atlassian Intelligence capabilities enhance individual productivity and tap into organizational data for immediate insights, simplifying data-driven decision-making. 

By leveraging AI, team members can draft business-critical content, automate routine tasks using natural language, summarize extensive content, and access context-specific help, fostering an environment where everyone can excel in their work with speed and efficiency, Atlassian explained.

For example, generative AI can now be used to instantly create user stories in Jira Software tickets and alter the tone of customer responses in Jira Service Management, and Confluence now offers AI-powered summaries and natural language automation.

Also in Confluence, the beta version of Q&A search enhances search results, allowing users to ask questions about project status, workflows, policies, or processes. The beta version of Q&A search in Compass streamlines information retrieval across microservices, systems, and teams by enabling users to ask questions in natural language about their technology stack, obtaining specific answers about components and deployments.

Atlassian Intelligence also enables teams to glean actionable insights from organizational data. Natural language interfaces can be used to write complex queries, providing flexible question-and-answer experiences across an organization’s knowledge base.

In addition, features like natural language to JQL and SQL, also available today, empower users to find issues and dependencies and access robust insights in Atlassian Analytics beyond data science teams.

According to Atlassian, the continual evolution of Atlassian Intelligence reflects its commitment to creating a future where humans and AI collaborate seamlessly to drive productivity and innovation in teamwork.

Atlassian, cloud, AIAdditional details are available here.

The post Atlassian adds AI capabilities across Jira, Confluence, and more appeared first on SD Times.

The global movement towards distributed work has fueled a need for new ways to help teams collaborate when they are not in the same location or even the same hemisphere. Asynchronous (async) video has been at the forefront of this movement with Loom’s business users recording almost 5 million videos per month.

“Async video is the next evolution of team collaboration, and teaming up with Loom helps distributed teams communicate in deeply human ways,” said Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-founder and co-CEO of Atlassian.

Atlassian has deep expertise in how teams work. It’s already the go-to place for over 260,000 customers who plan, track and get work done, and the addition of Loom will further elevate the collaboration experience for teams. Soon, engineers will be able to visually log issues in Jira; leaders can use videos to connect with employees at scale; sales teams can send tailored video updates to clients and HR teams can onboard new employees with personalized welcome videos.

Furthermore, by integrating Atlassian’s and Loom’s investments in AI, customers will be able to seamlessly transition between video, video transcripts, summaries, documents, and the workflows developed from them, providing multiple ways for teams to connect and collaborate.

For Loom customers, the acquisition will bring the benefit of Atlassian’s platform and portfolio of products, allowing users to plug async video directly into key workflows in Jira and systems of record in Confluence.

“Loom’s vision is to empower everyone at work to communicate more effectively wherever they are, and by joining Atlassian, we can accelerate their mission to unleash the potential of every team,” said Joe Thomas, co-founder and CEO of Loom. ”We’re excited to weave video into collaboration in a way that only Loom + Atlassian can.”

Details Regarding the Transaction

Under the terms of the definitive agreement, Atlassian will acquire Loom for approximately $975 million, inclusive of Loom’s cash balance, subject to customary adjustments. Total consideration will be comprised of approximately $880 million in cash, and the remainder in Atlassian equity awards, subject to continued vesting provisions.

Atlassian expects to fund the cash consideration through existing cash balances and the transaction is not expected to have an impact on the company’s share repurchase strategy.

The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of Atlassian’s fiscal year 2024, subject to customary closing conditions and required regulatory approval.

The acquisition is expected to be slightly dilutive to non-GAAP operating margins in fiscal years 2024 and 2025.

Loom Background

Founded in 2016, Loom is a video messaging platform that helps users communicate through instantly shareable videos. Known for their ease of use, users simultaneously record their desktop screen, camera, and microphone creating rich documentation of institutional knowledge. With transcripts in 50+ languages and AI features that write titles, summaries, chapters, and tasks, Loom videos become important company know-how to be shared, reused, and self-served across teams.

Sharing many similarities with Atlassian’s mission, product-led go-to-market motion, and culture, today Loom serves over 200,000 customers.

For further details on the announcement from Mike Cannon-Brookes, head to Atlassian’s Work Life blog.

About Atlassian

Atlassian unleashes the potential of every team. Our agile & DevOps, IT service management and work management software helps teams organize, discuss, and complete shared work. The majority of the Fortune 500 and over 260,000 companies of all sizes worldwide – including NASA, Kiva, Deutsche Bank, and Salesforce – rely on our solutions to help their teams work better together and deliver quality results on time. Learn more about our products, including Jira Software, Confluence, Jira Service Management, Trello, Bitbucket, and Jira Align at https://atlassian.com.

The post Atlassian acquires Loom appeared first on SD Times.

Read the full article here.

The post Atlassian Value Stream Management solution gives dashboard templates for measuring work appeared first on SD Times.

Companies using Jira Software include NASA, which can write code on a Monday and deliver it to drive the Mars Rover on Tuesday. And automaker Audi’s research and development team captures thousands of feature requirements during actual road testing. And there are literally hundreds of thousands of organizations trying to achieve business success through software.

Megan Cook, head of product for Jira Software, told SD Times:  “It can’t just be a bunch of engineers in a room doing that. There are so many of the teams that actually get it to that reality where it’s having that impact. And they’re marketers, program managers, designers, sales, like all of these non-technical teams throughout a company that are key to making that happen. And yet, they tend to use completely separate isolated tools. And so you get your information frozen in these tools, when you need all these teams to be top collaborators together. And that’s the problem that we really wanted to tackle with this. To have that impact on the world, we need to go further and bring those teams together.”

To facilitate that type of collaboration, Atlassian has created something called Overviews within Jira Work Management that gives organizations a way to connect all of the teams involved in taking software to market.

According to Atlassian’s blog announcing the updates, Overviews lets companies combine cross-functional projects into one aggregate view. Teams can work on their own individual projects, and Jira Work Management brings it into an easy to understand view. This update can map dependencies across teams, manage team capacity, identify overlaps, and more, according to the company announcement.

New shared release dates in Jira Work Management sync up in all teams’ calendars. Cook explained that teams like marketing can keep up with development teams on all new features. If the release date is pushed ahead or moved back, the marketing team knows it, without having to leave Jira Work Management.

“This is really important, because sometimes what you’re working on doesn’t just affect one team,” Cook said. “But you’ve got a marketing team, a legal team, a security team, a design team, and you’ve got to make sure all of that works together. And this is your view of that.” 

The result of a collaboration, Cook said designers working in Figma are now able to work in parallel with developers working in Jira.

The Figma for Jira app lets teams working in Jira add designs to Jira issues to gain context regarding designs, and includes support for Figma files, pages, frames and prototypes, For designers, the Jira widget or Jira plugin for Dev Mode links designs directly to a Jira issue without leaving Figma.

“Designers have all sorts of different work that they do at different times during the product development,” said Cook. “So they might be doing this right at the start where they’re putting a vision together. Or it might be further along in the implementation phase where it’s sort of like piece-by-piece design review. Figma launched a new view called Dev Mode where you can even copy code snippets, and as a developer, you can see down to the pixel how big you should be making the box. But it’s still in separate tools. It doesn’t bring it together, and as a developer, you still kind of have to hunt for that asset.”

New capabilities in the Figma for Jira app will be out later this year, the company said.

The company has added a command palette in Jira Work Management that lets teams interact with each other across Atlassian’s tools. “With CMD/CTRL+K [for either Mac or Windows users, respectively], over 40 commands with shortcuts,” Cook explained, users can do product searches, issue actions, navigate products and sites, and even interact with settings and help, without leaving their application. In the announcement, the company also noted it has added the ability to add context and relevant information from Confluence into Jira Work Management.

Lastly, Cook said, Admin Insights for Jira Work Management lets admins connect platform features such as Atlassian Admin, Analytics, Access, Data Lake and security features to Jira Work Management. Also a collection of AI capabilities in Atlassian Intelligence Editor will soon enable things like auto-generated content and project summaries. That integration should be completed soon, the company said. 

“What a lot of companies are seeing now is that we have the technology to move super fast when it comes to producing software. And so now the company can test and see whether they’re driving the impact that they intended to, at the speed of software. And so what’s so important about getting these non-technical and technical teams working so closely together is because it allows the company to have this incredible advantage in the market … and to make sure that all these efforts that these people are putting in are actually aligning with any kind of a business goal.”

The post Jira updates bring software teams, business side together appeared first on SD Times.

In collaboration with partners like Snyk, Mend, Lacework, Stackhawk, and JFrog, Atlassian is  equipping teams with the means to tackle security issues more efficiently and at an earlier stage.

Inside the Security tab of Jira Software, teams can access a unified location to manage all detected vulnerabilities across their security tools. This functionality simplifies the process of prioritizing, delegating, and handling tasks for development teams.

The newly introduced Security tab offers software teams enhanced context by allowing them to filter and rank vulnerabilities based on their severity level. This feature aids software teams in addressing critical vulnerabilities sooner, increasing development speed and minimizing the risk associated with each release.

One can configure Jira to automatically generate an issue filled with security details for identified critical vulnerabilities and effortlessly incorporate lower-priority vulnerabilities into sprint planning. This assists developers in maintaining their focus by reducing unexpected interruptions and promoting deliberate prioritization of security vulnerabilities.

Teams now have the ability to view the status and treatment of vulnerabilities in a single view. This allows for the integration of security into developers’ existing workflows, making the implementation of DevSecOps manageable.

“Leverage Security in Jira to bring security further into your existing software development rituals. Atlassian is dedicated to helping teams unleash their full potential and we’re excited to see our customers move faster and deliver more value to their own customers with the assurance that they’re deploying secure features and products,” Andrew Pankevicius, senior product manager, DevOps at Jira Software at Atlassian, wrote in a blog post. “Try out Security in Jira – free for all Jira Software Cloud users – by enabling the security tab and integrating your tools – today!”

The post Atlassian adds new security capabilities in Jira Software Cloud appeared first on SD Times.

The company has mined 20 years of data on how software, operations and business teams plan, track and deliver work to give Atlassian Intelligence a “unique understanding of teamwork,” according to a company blog announcing the new tool. It is that understanding upon which a teamwork graph is built around both service-based work and project-based work.

Atlassian Intelligence constructs this teamwork graph that shows the types of work being done and the relationship between them – enriched with additional context and data from the third-party apps teams use, according to the blog. 

“Our mission is to unleash the potential in every team. I think with the emergence of artificial intelligence and generative AI technologies, this is a huge part of helping us accelerate teamwork. We think teamwork is going to continue to change drastically,” Sherif Mansour, head of product for Atlassian Intelligence, told SD Times in an interview. 

Atlassian Intelligence is a part of the Atlassian platform, and on the service side of things, integrates with Jira Service Management to help users resolve issues more quickly, by using large language models to gain context about and intent of each request. An acquisition last year of percept.ai, along with a partnership with OpenAI, has helped Atlassian power up its virtual agents with greater understanding by combining the company’s internal models with OpenAI models.

Mansour gave the example of a worker needing access to a particular system. “In this case, [the agent] says, ‘I think you need account access.’ But it also knows related information. So, in this example, people who request access to Figma also request access to Adobe Creative Suite. It knows this because the customer has modeled in their system that they have two request types – one for Figma and one for the Creative Suite. In that example, the user will say, ‘Just Figma, please.’ “

A capability built into Jira Service Management called intents enables the virtual agent to take the request further. “In this case, the intent is for account access. And once [the user] defines an intent, they can define specific steps for that intent. We need to know what role they’re going to need access to, an edit role or view role, and with the power of cross-product automation, and scripting, the customer has automatically allowed the AI to grant access to the system, because that’s the set of rules they have defined in this example.”

On the project side, Atlassian Intelligence can help resolve issues across all Jira Cloud products, such as requesting to see which mobile features are blocking an upcoming launch, by translating a natural language query to Jira Query Language. The results of that query, pulled from Atlassian and third-party tools, can be visualized and analyzed by the newly GA Atlassian Analytics BI reporting tool to provide insights into the progress of work.

The complete blog post can be read here.

New features in Confluence

Also at its Atlassian Team ’23 event today, the company announced updates to its Confluence knowledge base, introducing whiteboards and databases. Both are nearing beta release.

Noting that every product starts with an idea, Atlassian has created whiteboards in Confluence to enable teams to turn those ideas into actionable plans in Jira. Users can use sticky notes, a pen, or stamps and timers in a whiteboard, then convert those notes into Jira Cloud issues, the company explained in its announcement. Users can view relationships between issues, such as if one piece of work is blocking another, and assign out all Jira issues to engineers.

To join the waitlist for the beta, click here.

Confluence databases are built upon the acquisition of K15t to bring structured tables in which organizations can organize things like Jira tasks, Confluence pages, statuses and due dates into one table. “Imagine an HR team tracking multiple candidates throughout the interview process, marketing teams managing complex ad campaigns, sales leveraging the latest competitive intelligence, and IT coordinating employee equipment,” the company wrote in a blog post.

To join the waitlist for the beta, click here.

The post Atlassian Intelligence provides developers a virtual teammate appeared first on SD Times.