August 2020 showcase: recent bug fixes and product improvements

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G’day Atlassian Community!

In this post, I’ll share some of the most impactful bug fixes and product improvements we shipped over the last six months (and since this post) to our self-managed enterprise products.

Before diving in, however, we’d like to give a special thanks to everyone who has reported bugs, suggested improvements, participated in interviews, and commented on Community Posts. You play such a massive role in the work we do.

While we know that there’s still plenty more for us to tackle, we wanted to make sure you didn’t miss some recent highlights inspired by you!

Keep reading for the latest bug fixes, product improvements, and more for Jira Software, Jira Service Desk, Confluence, Bitbucket, and Bamboo.

Jira Software

Over the last six months, we shipped over 184 bug fixes and 56 feature suggestions. Highlights include:

Performance boosts

• License check performance improvements: Checking users against license tier had been affecting product performance. We improved performance for limited tier licenses by improving the average response time by 65%. (Jira Software 8.9.0)

  • JRASERVER-71231 - Checking users against license tier affects product performance CLOSED

• Custom field optimizations: A high number of custom fields can negatively impact performance and indexing time in Jira. To minimize the impact we introduced improvements on how custom fields are indexed. Our internal tests showed a 45% improvement in reindex time! (Jira Software 8.10.0/Jira Service Desk 4.10.0)

• Removed performance lock on user deletion from a group (Data Center): In specific situations, removing a user from a specific role could take several seconds causing all incoming requests that require permission validation to hang. We fixed this so that your instance or Data Center node will no longer be locked while removing a user from a group/project. This speeds up the removal operation from ~10s - 12s to ~1s! (Jira Software 8.11.0)

  • JRASERVER-69446 - Removing actor from project role can make Jira unresponsive CLOSED

• Favorite Filters gadget control: For large filters, counting all of the issues can impact performance. To give you more control, we've added a global setting that lets you control the max timeout for this popular gadget. If the issues take too long to load, we’ll stop counting them and instead display a “Too many issues” message. (Jira Software 8.11.0)

  • JRASERVER-43040 - Favourite Filters Issue Count Performance CLOSED

Agility advancements

• Refreshed Velocity Chart: You asked us for the ability to see more than 7 sprints in the Velocity Chart, and so we’ve given you a completely reimagined Velocity Chart that now shows up to 120 sprints. This new chart also lets you choose a pre-defined timeframe or custom date range, shows the average velocity of your team, and has a new look-and-feel with some cool features like focus that lets you zoom in on the right sprint. (Jira Software 8.9.0)

  • JWSSERVER-6034 - Velocity Chart should show all Sprints and not be limited to last 7 Sprints CLOSED

• Ability to restrict sprints: To limit the possibility of linking issues to the wrong sprint, we’ve enabled a new admin option to restrict the sprint selection (available in the Sprint drop-down) to the sprint the project user selects. With Relevant sprints selected, you’ll only see the sprints that belong to the project you select on the page. To see sprints that aren’t linked to any project you can select Show all to have all sprints display. (Jira Software 8.11.0)

  • JSWSERVER-10805 - Ability to restrict the sprints shown in the 'Sprint Field' CLOSED

Improved reliability and stability

• Fix to ‘View Board’ function: We fixed a pesky bug in which the ‘View Board’ function would break upon the removal (or disabling) of an LDAP directory with a group that had been added to the Board Administrator. Now, View Boards shows all the boards as expected regardless of any LDAP directory changes. (Jira Software 8.9.0, 8.8.1, 8.5.5)

  • JSWSERVER-15924 - Removing or disabling a LDAP directory containing a group — or deleting an internal group added as board administrator — breaks View All Boards function CLOSED

• Automatic removal of stale nodes (Data Center): In addition to giving you more visibility into your cluster via the Advanced audit log, we’ve also introduced automation to your cluster so that you do not have to remove the offline nodes from your cluster manually. After two days of a node reporting no heartbeat, it’s automatically removed offline, and after two days of remaining in the offline state, it’s automatically removed from your cluster. (Note: in 8.11, you can configure this timeframe and move stale nodes offline as quickly as three hours.) (Jira Software 8.10.0)

  • JRASERVER-42916 - Stale node ids should automatically be removed in Jira Data Center CLOSED

Want to know what else we fixed and what’s in the pipeline? Follow along here:

• Jira Server and Data Center: current work and future plans

• Jira Server and Data Center: recently resolved issues

• Jira Server and Data Center Bug Fix Board

*Critical product and security bug fixes (and all other security bug fixes when architecturally possible) will also be backported to the latest Long Term Support (LTS) releases (8.5 and 7.13).

Jira Service Desk

We shipped over 36 bug fixes and 13 feature suggestions over the last six months. Highlights include:

Scale and compliance improvements

• Improvements to SLA processing: For some customers with large datasets and frequent updates, the SLA calculation for all issues would either slow down or stop working entirely. To prevent this issue from occurring and to keep SLA calculation consistent, we made changes to the way the SLA calculation operations are serialized. Now, Jira Service Desk is much more resilient under high load. (Jira Service Desk 4.9.0)

  • JSDSERVER-5730 - OffThreadEventJobRunner job execution threads wait for their turn in a very expensive way CLOSED

• Advanced auditing in Jira Service Desk (Data Center): Now, apart from monitoring general events related to your Jira instance, you’ll also see the following categories and events: SLAs (SLA calendars, SLA goals, SLA names), Reports (created, deleted), Agents (invited or removed from the project), Email channels (enabled, disabled), Request types (created, deleted), Organizations (created, deleted, updated), and General configuration (public signup enabled, disabled). (Jira Service Desk 4.11.0)

Notification and email enhancements

• Enabling notifications for agents acting as customers: By default, agents and admins working on Service Desk projects and occasionally acting as customers would not receive any notifications about internal comments or changes unless these changes were publicly visible. Now, we prioritize the agent role when the agent also acts as customers or approvers. For help further managing notifications, please see this page. (Jira Service Desk 4.7.0)

  • JSDSERVER-4207 - Approvers should not be always treated as customers CLOSED

• Fix to “View Request” link in email: Previously, when clicking on the “View Request” link in an email notification, a user was redirected to the instance rather than the issue in Service Desk. With this fix, the “View Request” link in emails will now redirect to the Jira issue link (accessible to licensed users). (Jira Service Desk 4.7.0)

  • JSDSERVER-4378 - JSD does not populate the requestURL variable on outgoing notifications when ticket lacks a request type CLOSED

• No more duplicate attachments: When customers raise requests over email, the email body is added to the request’s description. You’ve told us that this often includes some unwanted media like marketing images, company logos, and everything else from the email’s footer. That’s why Jira Service Desk will now detect and ignore any duplicates, leaving your requests nice and clean. (Jira Service Desk 4.8.0)

  • JSDSERVER-5723 - Ignore unwanted images in attachments for issues created from emails CLOSED

Better experience for agents and users

• Keeping your requests private: From now on, any new requests created in the customer portal will be set to private by default, and you’ll need to specifically choose to share it. As for requests raised over email, we created a new option in the Jira Service Desk configuration to let you choose- keep them private or share away with your customers. (Jira Service Desk 4.7.0)

  • JSDSERVER-4382 - Allow turning off sharing request with Organization by default when a customer is part of only 1 organization CLOSED

• Request Participants from the Create Issue screen: Previously, the only way to request participants was from within an issue. Now, users are also able to request participants from the create issue screen. (Jira Service Desk 4.8.0)

  • JSDSERVER-1511 - Allow adding Request Participant field into Create Issue screen in Customer Portal CLOSED

• Multilingual customer support: Jira Service Desk now comes with a multilingual customer portal and help center so you can help your customers in their preferred language. You can add additional languages to your service desk and provide translations for the most important items- these translations will be displayed in portal names, request types, and announcements. (Jira Service Desk 4.11.0)

  • JSDSERVER-819 - Provide multilanguage support for Service Desk CLOSED

Want to know what else we fixed and what’s in the pipeline? Follow along here:

• Jira Service Desk Server and Data Center: recently resolved issues

• Jira Service Desk Server and Data Center: bug fix board

*Critical product and security bug fixes (and all other security bug fixes when architecturally possible) will also be backported to the latest Long Term Support (LTS) releases (4.5 and 3.16).

Confluence

We shipped over 137 bug fixes and 27 feature suggestions over the last six months. Highlights include:

Performance boosts

• Safeguarding performance in massive spaces: When loading a page tree, lots of permission checks are needed to make sure people don’t see pages that are restricted. In a very large space, these checks can consume a lot of memory and CPU, and have an impact on the overall performance of your site. Now when you visit a space, we'll load a maximum of 200 pages at each level of the hierarchy. You can then hit the Show all pages button to load all the pages in the space in one go. (Confluence 7.3.1)

  • CONFSERVER-55392 - Pagetree naturalchildren.action permissions lookup can cause a concurrent cache lock and impact Confluence Performance CLOSED

• Less log spam: Tired of receiving erroneous error messages about a failing LaasPerformanceLoggingJob job in your test instances of Confluence? The LaasPerformanceLoggingJob job has been removed on startup to avoid confusion, log spam, and conserve resources allocated to running the job. (Confluence 7.3.2)

  • CONFSERVER-55875 - LaasPerformanceLoggingJob log spam while LaaS performance logging is turned off by default CLOSED

File editing enhancements

• Companion keeps getting better: In 7.3, we overhauled Companion (the app that enables you to edit any file type in Confluence) and we haven’t stopped improving it since! For example, we’ve made it easier for you to upload files with confidence-- as of Companion 1.1.0, you’ll be warned if a new version of a file has been uploaded since you started editing a file. You can either discard your changes or continue to upload your changes as a new version in the file history. And as of Companion 1.2.2, it’s possible to set trusted domains before rolling out the Companion app for all users.

  • CONFSERVER-58660 - Add warning about permissions to install to the download prompt for Companion App CLOSED

  • CONFSERVER-57842 - Allowing admin to pre-set Trusted Domain before distributing Companion App CLOSED

User experience improvements

• More cell colors: You can now choose from 49 different table cell colors, including pure black and all the colors of the rainbow. The old colors are still available, so your existing tables will look just fine. And we hope you enjoy making table art as much as we have.  (Confluence 7.5.0)

• CONFSERVER-27618 - More cell highlight colors in Confluence CLOSED

• Template page anchor link fix: We’ve fixed a bothersome bug that prevented you from adding anchors to a template. Now you can anchor link away! (Confluence 7.5.0)

  • CONFSERVER-26897 - Not able to link text to an anchor on a template page. CLOSED

*Critical product and security bug fixes (and all other security bug fixes when architecturally possible) will also be backported to the latest Long Term Support (LTS) release (7.4).

Bitbucket

In the last six months, we shipped over 90 bug fixes and 50 feature suggestions. Highlights include:

Compliance and security improvements

• Advanced auditing (Data Center): Since the release of 7.0, we’ve been building upon some of the core auditing capabilities to offer an enterprise-grade auditing solution. These enhancements include extended event coverage and capabilities to scale and better leverage your auditing data for strategic decisions. Learn more here. (Bitbucket 7.4.0)

• Push traceability: We introduced push logs to bring you a more streamlined audit of information whenever you need to quickly find specific information about how the branches in a repository have changed over time. Your admins now have visibility into details such as who pushed certain commits and who was responsible for creating or deleting branches. (Bitbucket 7.1.0)

  • BSERV-2642 - Push Traceability CLOSED

• Control over who can delete repositories (Data Center): Not being able to manage the deletion of a repository can be a compliance problem. To help secure your data, we’ve added a global policy that allows Bitbucket Data Center customers to set instance-wide permissions to have control over who can delete a repository. (Bitbucket 7.4.0)

  • BSERV-10718 - Allow control of repository delete permissions GATHERING INTEREST

Developer experience enhancements

• Integrated CI/CD: To help you streamline your workflow, we’ve given you two new ways to get continuous feedback on your code – a new Builds page and a new Builds tab on the Pull requests page. Now when you integrate your instance with Bamboo, Jenkins, or another CI application, you’ll see build results and additional related info on these two pages, right next to your code where it’s most valuable. (Bitbucket 7.4.0)

• New pull request experience: The pull request page has been redesigned and packed full of improvements to make your code review experience smoother, more enjoyable, and less of a tedious task. Some highly requested changes include:

  • Commenting- You can now comment anywhere in the diff, including on expanded lines of code that weren’t changed as part of the pull request. (Bitbucket 7.0.0)

    • BSERV-3749 - Add comments on any lines displayed in a diff, not just the original added/removed/context lines CLOSED

  • Syntax highlighting- Until now, syntax highlighting was only available on the side-by-side diff, but now it’s available in the unified diff too. (Bitbucket 7.0.0)

    • BSERV-2823 - Support syntax highlighting in unified diffs CLOSED

  • Task improvements- You can now create tasks in your pull requests without having to write a comment first. In fact, you can even convert comments into tasks. They also support Markdown and rich content, like code snippets. (Bitbucket 7.0.0)

    • BSERV-5233 - Allow the creation of tasks without requiring a comment CLOSED

  • File tree improvements- It’s now easier than ever to locate changed files in a pull request with the new Filter file tree button that allows you to use wildcards to find what you need faster. We also did testing with colorblind users to redesign the icons in the file tree view so that you can better recognize the relationship between them, and whether your file has been edited, added, removed, or modified. (Bitbucket 7.0.0)

    • BSERV-3677 - Colorblind Mode for File Structure under Diffs CLOSED

• Fix for pull request in diff display: We’ve shipped a new behavior to guarantee all changes in the diff view of a pull request are visible. Now, if the initial request returns a truncated diff, it’ll fall back to fetching the diff with minimal context (10 lines each side of the change). This will guarantee that you will see all changes in the diff, provided this new diff with minimal context doesn’t exceed 10,000 lines (a warning will show if this is the case). (Bitbucket 7.3.0)

  • BSERV-12309 - Pull request diff may not show all changes on large files CLOSED

• View hidden comments: Want more context on why code has changed throughout a pull request? By selecting the other comments counter when it appears on your pull request you now have the ability to view a file’s activity stream showing comments that are outdated or appear on another diff. (Bitbucket 7.4.0)

  • BSERV-7534 - Please don't "bury" PR comments just because the relevant lines have changed and they are "outdated" CLOSED

• Disable keyboard shortcuts: We introduced keyboard shortcuts a while back to provide a quick and easy way of navigating through Bitbucket and performing common actions without having to take your fingers off the keyboard. However, you’ve let us know that these keyboard shortcuts can be detrimental to usability and accessibility. To give you more flexibility, you now have the option to disable keyboard shortcuts in your account settings. (Bitbucket 7.4.0)

  • BSERV-7361 - Disable keyboard shortcuts CLOSED

Updates to supported platforms

• PostgreSQL 12 (Bitbucket 7.4)

• Git 2.27 (Bitbucket 7.3), Git 2.26 (Bitbucket 7.2), Git 2.25 (Bitbucket 7.0)

• MariaDB 10.4.6+ (Bitbucket 7.2)

• ElasticSearch 7.5.2 (Bitbucket 7.1)

• Microsoft SQL Server 2019 (Bitbucket 7.0)

Want to what else we fixed and what’s in the pipeline? Follow along here:

• Bitbucket Server and Data Center: recently resolved issues

• Bitbucket Server and Data Center bug fix kanban board

*Critical product and security bug fixes (and all other security bug fixes when architecturally possible) will also be backported to the latest Long Term Support (LTS) release (6.10).

Bamboo

We shipped 99 bug fixes and 47 feature suggestions over the last 6 months. Highlights include:

Developer experience enhancements

• Conditional tasks: You’ve let us know how important this is to you, and so we’re pleased to share that you can now mark your tasks as conditional by using variables and regular expressions to create conditions that have to be met to run a task. By deciding which tasks aren’t mandatory, you can skip build steps in plan branches. You can set conditions for tasks through Bamboo UI or by using Bamboo Specs. (Bamboo 7.1)

  • BAM-11257 - Conditional build step depending on value (or existence) of variable CLOSED

• Remote agents' workspace cleanup: We hear you- it’s been a huge pain to manually cleanup build directories in remote agents. To remedy this, we’ve made it so now build and deployment workspaces are automatically removed from remote agents' home directories if corresponding entities are removed on Bamboo server. (Bamboo 7.1)

  • BAM-13589 - Agents should remove workspaces for plans that no longer exist CLOSED

• Enhanced plan branch configuration: We’ve given you new configuration options for plan branches so that you can create a custom plan branch that differs from the default branch. This means you now can test your custom changes to your plan branch without needing to copy your changes to the master and have custom configurations for individual branches. (Bamboo 7.0)

  • BAM-19620 - Bamboo should support divergent plan branches CLOSED

• Webhooks: Bamboo webhooks allow you to send selected real-time information about Bamboo to third-party applications. For example, you can display a Bamboo build status in your team’s chatroom or signal an alarm in case a plan fails. (Bamboo 7.1)

  • BAM-14321 - Webhook notification type CLOSED

Integrated CI/CD

• Export/View Plan as YAML: You can now you can export your existing plans and deployments to Bamboo YAML Specs automatically, which will facilitate migration of your Bamboo plans to configuration as code. Moving to YAML Specs has never been easier! What’s more, you can now view a plan as YAML as well. (Bamboo 7.1)

  • BAM-19753 - Export / View Plan as YAML CLOSED

• Better logs: Excessive logging is known to cause serious performance problems including build result processing timing out (grey builds). That’s why we’ve made it possible to turn live log transmission off, which is one way to mitigate this problem. (Bamboo 7.1)

  • BAM-18855 - Improve audit log handling code CLOSED

Enterprise and scale improvements

• Customized Bamboo headers: Tired of how Bamboo looks? Now, you can change the color of the Bamboo header, introduce your own custom logo, and change the favicon. This can come in handy when navigating among multiple Bamboo instances or if you want to introduce your own branding. (Bamboo 7.0)

  • BAM-13311 - Customisable header styling CLOSED

• Project-level variables: Previously teams had to rely on a Bamboo administrator to add/remove/modify the global variables being used, which could lead to bottlenecks. That’s why we created project-level variables that do not require Bamboo administrator access to set up. Project variables are defined for a specific project and have the same value for every plan that belongs to the project. (Bamboo 7.1)

  • BAM-7132 - Project Level Global Variables CLOSED

Updates to supported platforms

• PostgreSQL 11 (Bamboo 7.1)

• Oracle 19 (Bamboo 7.0)

• MsSQL2017 (Bamboo 7.0)

Thank you for your continued feedback and passion for our products- we can’t do what we do without you! As always, we welcome your feedback- please share your thoughts, comments, and questions below.

[Bora Turgut]

Nice work all, and appreciate the post. Keep it up!

[Dave Liao]

Faster reindexing? I can get behind that! 👐

For Jira Service Desk, could your team eventually allow "Request Participants" field to be added to permission schemes or issue security levels? Please? ♥ JSDSERVER-3948

[Gonchik Tsymzhitov]

Thank you for all updates :) 

[Agnieszka Machielse]

Happy to read such news!