How Jira Software develops incredible quality for incredible users

[#1]

As 2023 ramps up into a promising new year, the Atlassian Data Center team has kept busy with platform releases, LTS releases, and building great new features. As many of us do at the start of a new year, we’ve asked ourselves to push a little harder to boost the quality of our product and double down on bug fixes. Data Center has incredible users who deserve an incredible product and while bugs can be inevitable, we’re not happy with the quantity we faced at the end of last year. We’re resolving to crack down on those bugs, doing better to deliver incredible quality for all of you.

Our teams worked hard to squash the most impactful bugs to set you the customer and your business up for success. Read on to see how we’ve made quality a constant effort for the Data Center product team - looking at Jira Software as an example.

In Jira Software we made a quality upgrade an integral part of the Jira Software 9.4 LTS. In the last 2 quarters, we’ve closed ~90 major bugs! We pushed ourselves to not only fix bugs but also improve the overall product quality - to resolve problems in a way that they wouldn’t become a problem in the future.

About half of the bugs we fixed were high-impact and had been in the backlog for far too long. Our teams were glad to have been able to take your feedback and resolve these pain points and we will continue to push ourselves to do so in the next year.

Just a few of these resolved bugs include:

• Index replication service is paused indefinitely after failing to obtain an index snapshot from another node

• "Dangerous use of multiple connections" - error reports wrong number of connections

• Plugins fail to start in Jira 8.20

• "Epic Link" dropdown suggestions are not working properly due to changes introduced at JSWSERVER-21026 

• Legacy enterprise validation checking can cause erroneous type mismatch errors

• The status endpoint is taking longer to respond since Jira 8.20

• Bulk issue move operations are slow and performance is degraded with small EagerLoadingOfBizCustomFieldPersister cache

• Issue Create/Update action is slow when WebHooks are configured

• Issue history displays user key instead of a username for reporter or assignee changes

• The performance of Jira can degrade significantly due to slow sprint cache population

The majority of mentioned fixes are available in Jira 9.4 LTS. To learn more about these bugs and see the complete list, go here.

The JSW team looks ahead and continues the investment in quality, planning more than just bug fixes. We’re exploring areas that generate friction frequently and building a roadmap of updates designed to help teams get the most out of Jira Software as they scale.

Please check our Roadmap to learn also what new features and improvements to expect in the near future in Jira Data Center.

[Dave Mathijs]

Quality is what customers expect from Atlassian, nothing less.

What a pity to read that all of the DC "features" are related to:

• Apps & extensibility
• Cloud migrations
• Experience improvements
• Data & insights
• Infrastructure & operations
• Scale & performance
• Security & compliance
• Services & support
• User management & controls

NONE of these feature any UI/UX or new functional features developed for Cloud in the last 2-3 years. It's all behind the scenes, nothing front-end.

So basically, for the end user, there is no change in the product whatsoever.

Don't take this personally @Olga Springer , it's no criticism towards you in any way.

I'm just disappointed in the future of DC and it's clear Atlassian is driving its customers to Cloud-only instead of Cloud-first.

[Jacob Shepard]

Hi @Dave Mathijs  thank you for your comment and your feedback. You are correct that this post does not highlight end-user features or UI/UX updates. The intent of this post was purely to share and communicate some of the work that has been done in the quality space. Hopefully, you find insight in some of the other posts which speak more to feature value.

With that said we would like to invite you to join our Webinar- Roadmap highlights: Looking ahead for Atlassian Data Center where we will discuss and share a variety of new upcoming features, many of them focused on improving the admin and end-user experience. If the timing does not work it will be available on demand. While we do not intend to have parity with cloud when it comes to features, we are actively investing more in the product experience per customer feedback. Please visit our Data Center roadmap which we continually update to showcase investment areas.

[David Yu]

Would love to upgrade but we're still waiting on fixes for comment ordering which broke in LTS 9.X (JRASERVER-74191, JRASERVER-74122)

[Jeanne Howe]

@Dave Mathijs Is spot on. 

Your article states 

"Our teams worked hard to squash the most impactful bugs"

"In the last 2 quarters, we’ve closed ~90 major bugs! "

You have not closed ~90 major bugs, you have fixed 90 major coding errors. Errors that were either missed by Dev and QA testing, or errors you made the conscience decision to go to prod with as know-issues. 

These types of articles are nothing but a smoke screen and while I am sure they are intended to instill a sense of confidence in your customers that you support DC they do more to highlight the LACK of support we continually see from Atlassian. 

[Roman Kolosovskiy]

Hey @David Yu ,

I can respond to your question about comment ordering. I recently updated the tickets and the fixes should be coming soon.

1) Sortation issues

The plan is to address both sortation issues in LTS bug fix version (9.4.6) The fix will address which comments are sorted when a user changes oldest to newest. We will partially revert back to old Jira 8 behaviour where only the visible comments will be sorted. However, we will be keeping the progressive loading behaviour which was implemented originally for performance stability improvements. This fix will also address the change of sort order if a new comment is added. Given the potential performance implications of comments - a little extra time is required to develop this fix.

2) Add comment button
We will also fix the position of the new comment box/add comment button. This fix should make it easier for users to add comments to issues. This will be released in 9.8 and also in 9.4.6

Regards,
Roman | Jira PM