Jira Cloud - Project Fields Association Improvements - We want your help testing a new admin feature

[Carol Low]

Hello, I’m Carol, a PM on the Jira team looking after the configuration experiences in Jira. We’re currently improving the way admins manage Project fields, and we’re looking for customers to join an Early Access Program (EAP) to help us test what we’ve built.

On this post, I’ll run through what the change is and what types of sites we’re looking to test it on.

About the new feature

Currently, when a project owner adds a field to their projects, that association isn’t tracked anywhere on the back end. They can add global fields to their projects pretty much at will. There are two negative impacts of this:

1. It’s hard for administrators to tell which ones are being used and which ones can be deleted.

2. It has significant impacts on site performance, especially large sites.

This new feature requires project owners to explicitly add a field to a project. This can be done in a few steps, so we expect it to be a very small change for your end users. For administrators, there’s two key benefits:

1. performance improvements

2. makes tracking field usage easier (which makes field cleanups and maintenance easier)

Our first build of this can only be used with team-managed projects, though this change will be coming to company-managed projects in the future.

For more information about this change, check out our note in the Developer community.

Who we want to test this

In order to use our testing window to its fullest extent, we want to hear from customers who meet as many of the following criteria as possible. If you only meet most of them, still reach out to us.

You are:

• a Site Administrator of a Jira Cloud site OR

• a Marketplace partner who leverages any of the APIs listed below

Your site:

• has more than 500 seats (approximately; there’s wiggle room on this)

• uses automation rules in team-managed projects

  • please let us know if you have particularly complex automation rules - this is also of interest to us

• uses any of these APIs:

  • /rest/api/3/issue/{issueIdOrKey} (incl. writes where overrideScreenSecurity=true)

  • /rest/api/3/issue/bulkfetch

  • /rest/api/3/field

  • /rest/api/3/search

  • /rest/api/3/webhook (in particular, issue webhooks)

• uses a sandbox (recommended, but not required)

Next steps

Those who opt into this Early Access Program will see this change starting in November of 2024. The feature will be controlled by us (so you don’t need to enable or disable anything), but we will give administrators the ability to opt individual projects out of this experience if something breaks.

If you’re:

• an admin of a site that meets this description or

• a marketplace partner who’s affected by this change

Fill out this expression of interest form, and we’ll be in touch!

[David Cowley]

When this comes to company managed projects will this post be updated or it will be a new post?

[Carol Low]

hi @David Cowley - there will be a new post, no need to keep following this one!