Celebrating the new year with Snapshots users

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As 2025 starts, I am taking this moment to celebrate 2024. Here are some stats and surprising facts from our Snapshots of Jira Data into Confluence command and control center. Because, hey— we had such a great 2024 so I want to share a celebratory moment with you. Yes, you- all the amazing Atlassian community members, because you are very much the reason we exist. 

So, here is our 2024 summary in 12 points (why 12? Well,... why not? Am I only allowed 10?)

1. 1. By the end of the year users snapshotted more than 10,000,000 Jira issues! These are more than 10M issues captured from Jira and frozen in static tables in Confluence. 

   2. More than 120,000 snapshot tables exist across Confluence pages on five continents. (Think of all the users avoiding creating and manipulating Excel exports from Jira, and copy-pasting. All the extra time devoted to better things.)

   3. The largest single snapshot table that a user took has 28,621 Jira issues in total (across several levels of hierarchies). Can’t wait to see if someone will beat that in 2025. 

   4. One organisation has so many Snapshots fans that they have more than 3000 pages of snapshots (and they continue to add more as we speak).

   5. JQL is a core element of configuring a snapshot, and we were astonished to discover that someone has used a JQL which is 8872 characters long! Yep, someone fully utilised JQL. If you are interested in the details- this specific JQL is pretty simple:

      1. Key in (<a very long list of issue keys that spans almost 9000 characters>) 

   6. Back in February 2024, one user generated the widest snapshot table ever. It has 116 fields captured for each issue. That is a pretty long horizontal scroll!

   7. Many users took snapshots of one level (basically, a simple table), while many others (almost half, in fact) defined multi-level snapshot tables. These spanned two, three, four, five, six and even eight levels. As an example, here is how one user built a six levels snapshots. Going from the leftmost (top level) downwards
      
      

      JQL that retrieves the data	Interpretation
      project=PROJECTKEY and type=”User requirement” and fixVersion=”24.09-emea”	Bring all “User requirement” issues for the version we care about
      issue in linkedissues($key, "is implemented by") and type = Epic and fixVersion = ”24.09-emea” and summary !~ "Release Testing"	Then, add all the Epics that implement those “User requirements” and are not “Release testing”
      parent in ($key) and (type = Story)	Add the stories in those Epics
      issue in linkedissues($key, "is verified by") and type = "Feature Test"	Add the “Feature Test” issues that verify each story
      issue in linkedissues($key, "is verified by") and type = "Test Scenario"	Add the “Test Scenario” issues that verify the above “Feature Tests”
      issue in linkedissues($key, "testing discovered") and type = Bug	Lastly, add the bugs discovered by our testing activities

      And I admire an organisation that configured Jira with such precision. Using all the power of customized issue types and customized link types. With snapshots, they extract all this structure into a traceability matrix, in a snap. 

   8. 2024 was the first year where banks joined our user base, as well as one of the largest governments in the world. Continuing previous trends, we had many new users from pharma, med tech, and electronics.

   9. Snapshot users are spread across five continents, with a significant installed base in the USA, United Kingdom, France, and also Finland. Yes! snapshots are very popular in Finland.

   10. We had increased the number of our data center installations three fold. 

   11. We had released improvements over 27 new product drops: 19 versions for Cloud, 8 for DC. Got to love our awesome development team, which continues to work hard on these two platforms. 

   12. Our Xray integration widened and deepened, and many users took full advantage of it. In fact, close to 40% of the cloud sites who use snapshots also use the integration features with Xray (on Cloud, these are provided by our traceability extensions App). Our new macro, snapshots test report, landed (in Cloud) in April. With a few clicks and no code, the user gets a test report. It details the results for each step, the evidence, and all that Jazz. It had already gained a robust fan base. (To our data center users: this macro will very soon be landing on your site too).
       

   After celebrating this list with you, we now focus on what comes next. 

   Users have shared urgent requests and great ideas for improvements. Our backlog is full to the brim. We are working with great care to prioritise the things that will make the most difference to you.

   Most importantly, as 2025 starts, I wish us all peace and good health. so we, in RadBee can focus on delivering product improvements, and that you too- can focus on doing your best work ever.

   For peace and good health!