So since we are no longer getting any response here @Josh Sherwood should we just interpret that as Atlassian, as usual, do not care about the customer and their feedback and will just push this crazy change no matter what? We are just talking to ourselves at this point?
@Terry Tyson you should go ask your Space Management team in your company's Space Management Office. They can create you a Space Charter and a Space Management Plan.
We do have teams that use Jira projects to house multiple project to manage, and sometime that would confuse some individuals. However, those types of projects were far less common and the majority of people understood it was a Jira project that contained projects.
I could see renaming Jira Projects to something like Workspace(s) like someone mentioned earlier might not be a bad idea, but using the same name as Confluence is going to cause far more confusion for users than the "project of projects" situation. I really do wish there was a permanent opt-out feature. Our company would absolutely not implement this change.
I recall that in many demos presented at Summits/Teams, Atlassian would use a fictional "Space Company" to show off new Jira and Confluence features. So clearly Space has been on their minds for quite some time.
When I was trying to find some of those demos, Google actually led me to this:
Back on April 1 2022, they announced that they would be launching one of their employees into space to work remotely for a week. Even though he experienced extreme distress, anxiety, and outright rejection (of stomach contents), they "shot him into space, regardless".https://www.atlassian.com/blog/space
Truly some important lessons learned back then. ;-}
Apologies, Andriy. It appears that some UI references to 'project' were missed during the updates. Thanks for highlighting these, I've passed it on to the team and they'll be fixed shortly.
@Josh Sherwood Should I take that as a sign that the Atlassian team at Atlassian doesn't know that "some UI references to 'project' were missed during the updates"? They renamed something randomly and "missed" a hundred of other places? Or, maybe there was just one person who worked on that, and then they went on vacation in the middle of the task, and no one else cared? This sounds silly, I know, but what else can I think after such a bad renaming job and such communication? I mentioned in the original comment that there are tons of places where renaming didn't happen yet, and my examples are just that - examples of a bigger problem. And, guess what, fixes for those cases that you passed to the team, they didn't happen.
A professional team would have developers that would do the renaming job thoroughly, in ALL the places (or, almost all, humans do make mistakes, that's fine). A professional team would have a QA team that wouldn't let this through. A professional team would have a release/delivery manager that wouldn't let this through (even if the first 2 teams fail). It is very sad that Atlassian team working on that change is not like that.
You gained a lot of extra trust from customers and partners with this one. Good job.
Renaming Projects to Spaces, adding Teams when we already had Groups, (and maybe even renaming Summit to Team?). It was right there all along in the training materials they've been using for years!
These were clearly the clues about all these changes. We just needed to read between the lines!
That's from Confluence 7.19 docs, but below is their Plan from 2013. Wait, I mean their Board. But not their Dashboard. And definitely not their Roadmap, or Portfolio, or Advanced Roadmap:
I mean, not to blame Scott since he's not there anymore, but, I'm pretty sure he's the one viewing this board!
Kind of weird how we have Teams in Spaces, not in one single Space. Maybe that'll be next month.
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
October 26, 2025 edited
@Darryl Lee Hi Darryl, apologies for the delay getting back to you. I can confirm that the Release Tracks date of December 9th is still accurate.
@Shy Hi Shy. Last year, we announced that we were updating Jira's language to better reflect the diverse ways teams define and manage their work, whether they're a software team, marketing team, sales team, etc.
Our goal is to make Jira the place of work for all teams, ensuring that the language in our tools is accessible and supportive of this vision. You can read more about this on this blog post.
Our documentation and guides are in the process of being updated currently. I'll see if I can track down a ticket to follow and get back to you.
@Mladenka Vukmirovic Hi Mladenka. Good call! We're currently in the process of updating the icon in Confluence, and it should be completed shortly.
@Andriy KozynetsThanks for sharing your concerns Andriy. I apologise for any inconvenience caused by the missed UI references. The team is actively auditing for any oversights, and will be fixing these soon. Thanks again for your feedback.
@Josh Sherwood so you are changing "Jira's language to better reflect the diverse ways teams define and manage their work" by making sure those of us who use Jira to work in projects no longer can create projects? How does this make any sense what so ever?
You even invent new job titles like "space lead"? 🤦♂️ It is almost funny that every time BS marketing terms like "diverse ways" is used, it is always in connection with reducing usability and excluding a majority of users.
If a software development team needs to start a new project, how do they now do that since we now have a more "diverse way of working " ? Can we create a project and assign a project lead, or no?
@Josh Sherwood what I am getting from your explanation of Atlassian "updating Jira's language to better reflect the diverse ways teams define and manage their work, whether they're a software team, marketing team, sales team, etc." is akin to converting what has been widely considered one of the best tools for project management, into something that is just mediocre because "business diversity" and "tool for all teams".
Why not just create a new feature that will allow for accomplishing this goal, and leaving the current naming and process intact for those that are currently happy using it as-is (which I would assume is the vast majority of users)?
"For JQL, we will introduce a new alias for 'space' to align with the terminology update, ensuring that your existing filters and saved searches continue to function as they do today. We are finalising the timeline for these changes and will communicate the details in advance to give you time to prepare."
Currently, in JQL:
Fail: space="superproject1"
Success: project = "superproject1"
If Atlassian knows about those issues ahead of time, why on earth are they releasing a name change before they actually release the new JQL alias?
I fully support @Bill Sheboy when he says: "I am still puzzled how what you describe aligns with common change management practices for an enterprise the size of Atlassian".
To me, the proper order should have been
Add JQL alias (as it is a backend change that won't hurt anyone).
Update all documentation, so users who read it can start querying with "space" and it won't make a difference.
Update the UI
@Josh Sherwood Atlassian should not create technical issues an justify them by saying:
"We understand your concerns about the misalignment of API and JQL updates with this change. This decision was influenced by complexities that would have impacted our release timeline, and we wanted to introduce more user-friendly terminology for teams as quickly as possible."
Whyyyyyy? Why would ever make a decision to rush out a terminology change when you know it will create technical issues you have yet to fix. What kind of though process is that? Just do the technical fix first, then release the change in terminology. Admins and power users won't be pissed and you will avoid receiving a new wave of bug reports. Win-Win.
Personally, I do not understand why Atlassian keeps spending so much time changing their products UI. Yet they spend so very little time improving admins' life: instance security, idp integration, users and licenses management, multilingual capabilities (JQL still fails so bad in those environments), etc.
This is a TERRIBLY Inconsiderate idea to the system administrators!
As a system administrator, I now have to decipher the context of "Spaces" between Jira and Confluence when users are asking for assistance.
... I already have a tough time getting folks to use "Boards" and "Projects" correctly in their requests (seriously, i spend several minutes asking pointed questions to determine if they really mean 'board' or 'project')
@Josh Sherwood Sounds like you're trying to turn Jira into ClickUp... which is made for exactly all of those other teams, but it is not that great for software development houses.
It is the reason we left ClickUp after using it pre-Covid till the end of last year, because we needed something that spoke more to our team/processes and Jira was the requested change, because it was the industry standard. ClickUp has "Spaces" and it always felt weird, even though we had an amazing PM who loved it (which is why we were using it).
It was amazing for the PM honestly but was a nightmare for the rest of our teams. It now seems Jira is headed in that same direction, which is disappointing.
I'm already forever explaining to people that Jira and Jira Service Management are totally different products despite having the same name. Now I'll have to explain that Jira Spaces and Confluence Spaces are totally different. Cheers Atlassian. All I can imagine is you named all of your sons "John" and all of your daughters "Jill" to make it simpler.
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