Sharing an open-source utility to help track Atlassian Cloud release updates in Jira

[#1]

Hi Community,

I wanted to share a small open-source project I have been working on to help Atlassian admins, partners, and teams monitor Atlassian Cloud release updates in a more structured way.

GitHub repository: https://github.com/pfrancezi/atlassian-cloud-release-updater

The project is called Atlassian Cloud Release Updater. It is a customer-run utility that helps create and update Jira or Jira Product Discovery issues based on Atlassian release information.

Why I built this

As Atlassian Cloud continues to evolve quickly, it can be challenging for admins, partners, and customer teams to keep track of all product updates in a single place.

There are official release notes, public Community posts, product announcements, admin release management views, the public roadmap, developer changelogs, and sometimes Community articles that effectively behave like release notes, even when they are not aggregated under a single release notes channel, group, or feed.

That makes it harder to answer simple but important questions, such as:

• What changed recently?

• Which product is affected?

• Is this only publicly announced, or is it already visible in my admin release management view?

• Is the change coming soon, rolling out, or generally available?

• Was the change also mentioned in the public roadmap, a Community article, a blog post, or the developer changelog?

• Do we need to inform internal teams, update documentation, or prepare customers?

The goal of this utility is to help teams bring those updates into a Jira-based workflow, where they can be reviewed, filtered, tracked, assigned, and discussed.

What it does

The utility can collect release information from two sources:

1. Atlassian Community Release Notes public source

2. Optional Atlassian Admin private source, executed by the customer in their own environment

It then creates or updates issues in a customer-owned Jira or Jira Product Discovery project.

The idea is not to replace Atlassian’s official sources. The official source always prevails. This project is meant to help teams organize, compare, and operationalize release information in their own Jira workspace.

Why compare Community Status and Admin Change Status?

One useful part of the workflow is keeping separate fields for:

• Community Status, based on public release information

• Change Status, based on what is visible in the customer’s Atlassian Admin release management view

This can help teams compare public announcements with what appears to be available, rolling out, coming soon, or generally available for their own environment.

Public JPD roadmaps

In addition to the GitHub utility, I have also been building public Jira Product Discovery roadmaps to consolidate and compare Atlassian Cloud updates from multiple sources.

These roadmaps include broader tracking across sources such as:

• Atlassian Community Release Notes

• Atlassian Admin release management data

• Atlassian Cloud blog updates

• Atlassian public roadmap information

• Atlassian developer changelog updates

• Other release-related Community articles behave like product release notes

The goal is to provide a more operational view of Atlassian Cloud changes, especially for teams that need to understand what was announced, where it was announced, and how it relates to what they can see in their own Atlassian environment.

Public roadmap links:

• The Unofficially Unofficial Atlassian Cloud Changes Roadmap: https://idevsolucoes.atlassian.net/jira/discovery/share/views/f380bf69-8b83-4e25-a323-c39d3a7bdb0b
• Public Roadmap:   https://idevsolucoes.atlassian.net/jira/discovery/share/views/044144e7-af32-48b1-b1a5-aa777f50ded7
• Developer Changelog Tracking: https://idevsolucoes.atlassian.net/jira/discovery/share/views/dd8b0096-9b38-445a-a822-2d2dbfb5915e

If you would like to follow the roadmap or contribute, you can also request contributor access in Jira Product Discovery. Contributors can subscribe, follow updates, and create their own views depending on the access model configured for the project.

Contributor request link: https://idevsolucoes.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/10/group/48/create/270

What this project is not

This is not an official Atlassian app.

It is not intended to replace Atlassian documentation, release notes, product announcements, public roadmaps, developer changelogs, or admin release management.

It is also not a hosted service. The code is designed to be run by the customer, in the customer’s own environment, with the customer’s own Jira project and configuration.

Current status

This is still an early open-source project. The current version includes:

• Jira Product Discovery support

• Jira Software support

• Field mapping documentation

• English and Brazilian Portuguese documentation

• Community Release Notes source

• Optional Admin private source

• Automatic creation of missing select options, when enabled and when the user has the required Jira permissions

There is still room to improve how updates are discovered, normalized, and matched, especially because release-related information can appear in different places across the Atlassian ecosystem.

Feedback welcome

I am sharing this with the Community because I believe other admins, partners, and release-focused teams may have similar challenges.

Feedback, ideas, issues, pull requests, and suggestions are very welcome.

If you already have your own way of tracking Atlassian Cloud updates internally, I would also love to hear how you are doing it.

This started as part of my own attempt to keep an “unofficially unofficial” operational view of Atlassian Cloud changes. It is still evolving, but I hope it can help others facing the same release-tracking puzzle.

[Darryl Lee]

Yaaaaas, this is awesome. Most especially, thank you for finding the APIs that back the new Community Release Notes!

# Public Community Release Notes API.
COMMUNITY_API_URL = "https://community.atlassian.com/gateway/api/public/app-updates/v1/changes"
COMMUNITY_DETAIL_URL_TEMPLATE = "https://community.atlassian.com/gateway/api/public/app-updates/v1/change-details/{change_id}"

One thing these APIs show that are inexplicably missing from the UI are:

<firstPublishedAt>2026-06-29T18:15:30.042Z</firstPublishedAt>

And:

<releaseStartDate>2026-06-29</releaseStartDate>

@Bill Sheboy, @Dirk Ronsmans, @Mykenna Cepek, @Josh and others pointed out the lack of useful dates when Release notes on Atlassian Community were first introduced.

@Patricia Francezi_iDev_ you've built an amazing tool, and more importantly, you've shared it AND the code. Thank you so much!!

[Patricia Francezi_iDev_]

@Darryl Lee Im working on this since March, if Im not wrong. When I felt confident that this is a good workflow I shared. 

The main reason is compare with my instance or customer instances. Its not easy to get the news, and also check the feature in UI, and also, and also.... yeah, we need to do ourselves 

If you want the developer changes, I can improve to share.... 

Feedback, and suggestions are valuable! thanks for your support!!!

[Susan Waldrip]

@Patricia Francezi_iDev_, this is a GREAT resource! Thank you for all the work you've done and for sharing it, I hope you get a lot of helpful suggestions and contributions. Several people are trying to fill this gap in the Community ( @Darryl Lee , @Bryan Guffey , @Jimmy Seddon and others) so this is a wonderful addition towards that goal. For those of us using Standard plans, these tools are so helpful because we  don't have a periodic release track capability and changes just show up so keeping up with what's coming is vital. So thanks again, Patricia, great work!

I'm thinking this app would be a great basis/resource for someone knowledgeable in API to teach an "API for Dummies" course, I'd love to set up and use this app -- anyone interested? 😊 

[Patricia Francezi_iDev_]

@Susan Waldrip do you want the course or provide it? 

If you need to setup the tool, you just need to run the python script, it asks you for your OrgID, your instance etc, and it will work with this definition, so no, you dont need to know the apis to run the helper. 

If you use community slack find me there. We may think about the API for dummies together.  I love this, nowadays we need to know the tool (the apis), but not the codes. lol