Tidelift — Secure Open Source Development with Atlassian Compass

As Atlassian experts, Modus Create helps organizations unlock the full potential of the Atlassian ecosystem. Tidelift, a Boston-based technology company, wanted to integrate its open source management platform with Atlassian’s Compass (in alpha at the time) to create a unified developer experience solution. Using Forge, we helped create a custom dashboard for Tidelift’s users on Compass, with information on their project health and alignment scores. Tidelift’s metadata in Compass helps engineers make more informed decisions, leading to increased development velocity and more resilient applications.

Our work involved

• User Discovery
• UX Design
• Application Design with Forge

Impact

• Tidelift Integration with Compass
• Increased Development Velocity for Tidelift’s Users
• More Secure Open Source

Open source software constitutes 70-90% of any given piece of modern software solutions. It’s truly the bedrock of the digital age, influencing not only technology but also culture.

However, maintainers, who form the backbone of the open source community, mostly volunteer their services. Only 26% of maintainers make over $1000 yearly from their work.

This often creates internal security and maintenance challenges in open source software. A Synopys study revealed that 91% of the codebases contain open source components that either were more than four years out of date or had seen no development activity in the last two years.

Tidelift is working to create a more secure open source for all. It provides the tools, data, and strategies that help organizations assess risk and improve the health, security, and resilience of the open source used in their applications. Tidelift partners directly with maintainers and pays them for their services.

The Tidelift Team (Source: Glassdoor)

The problem

Atlassian Compass is a new developer experience platform that brings distributed software architecture and teams together in a unified place. Tidelift wanted to create an integration for its users to get stats directly in Compass.

However, Compass was still in alpha and didn’t have simple REST APIs like other Atlassian tools, making it a challenge to create a custom integration. Modus Create’s Atlassian developer joined the Tidelift team to work on the problem.

Discovery phase

The project started with a short one-week discovery phase where we talked to Tidelift’s stakeholders and understood the project requirements. Tidelift wanted to add two metrics to Compass:

• Project Health Score: Project health is a 0-100 grade given to each project that gauges how “healthy” a project is. A project is healthy when it uses 100% reviewed and approved open source (and verified internal packages).
• Alignment Score: A score that measures how aligned a project is with the catalog, meaning that all package releases in the project are also in the organization’s catalog.

Our Atlassian expert suggested adding a new dashboard to Compass that not only displays the scores but provides further information on their utility. We shared low-res wireframes for the dashboard, received feedback, and proceeded to the development phase.

Application development with Forge

Forge is Atlassian’s next-generation cloud development platform that lets you build feature-rich, secure, custom applications for the Atlassian platform without requiring your infrastructure to build and host the application.

We used Forge’s Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platform to build reusable business functions hosted in AWS Lambda. Forge UI helped build the integration user interface.

Tidelift – Compass Integration

Collaboration with Atlassian

When we started the integration, Compass was still in alpha. As Atlassian was still working on refining Compass, we had to be mindful of its evolving feature set.

This is where being a Platinum Enterprise Solution Partner helped. Our Atlassian expert started a slack channel with the Atlassian and Tidelift team, providing an easy way to discuss edge cases and find solutions. The channel also helped Atlassian get direct user feedback on Compass and optimize the tool – a win-win scenario.

Impact

Creating a custom integration for a tool that’s still in alpha was a unique challenge, but the team pulled it off in less than 20 days. The new integration allows Tidelift’s users to get a complete overview of open source used in their products in the same place they manage their sprawl. Additionally, accessing Tidelift’s metadata in Compass helps engineers make more informed decisions, leading to increased development velocity and more resilient applications.

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