An update on Jira Align customer feedback – October 2022

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15 February 2023: Thanks for your interest in helping us shape and improve Jira Align. There's a new Update on Jira Align customer feedback – February 2023 now available, so this older article may no longer be actively monitored.

Hi everyone,

We’re always looking at how to improve Jira Align and customer feedback plays an important role in making sure we're investing in the areas that will bring the most value to the most customers. In this update, we’ll share some of the improvements we have planned to address some of the key feedback themes that you, our customers, have shared with us.

Integration with Jira Software

“The syncing between Jira Align and Jira can be hit or miss. Some items never sync correctly. When other items sync, sometimes it is with the wrong sprint. It's also hard to keep track of which items sync which way.”

Creating a seamless user experience between Jira and Jira Align remains one of our highest priorities. There are a number of improvements, identified as high priority by our customers, that we are working on releasing in the near future.

Sprint mapping: Jira recently added the ability to set end-dates on future sprints, so we’re updating our sprint sync logic to map Jira and Jira Align sprints based on those dates (instead of the order of the sprints on the Jira board). Teams will no longer need to keep sprints in a specific order or avoid using bucket sprints for sprints to map correctly.

Board mapping: Jira Align admins will be able to easily identify teams with sprint mapping issues using new filters and identifiers on the Jira connector board mapping page. Admins will no longer need to review every integrated team or wait for users to report data synchronization issues.

Status mapping: When using shared Jira workflows, you will be able to set your status mapping once, and then for every new project you integrate with Jira Align, those status mappings will be set automatically.

Bi-directional syncing of estimates: To help teams avoid entering data in both products, t-shirt estimates and point estimates will support bi-directional sync. In addition, teams will be able to use a different Jira custom field for story points and feature (Jira epic) estimates, which will improve the reliability of the Jira team reports.

After these improvements, we plan to explore a new sprint object that is shared between Jira and Jira Align, avoiding the need to map sprints altogether.

Usability and efficiency

“There are almost too many features to figure out how to use it best.”

We recognize that speed, efficiency, and ease of use are critical to our customers, and we plan to address that on several fronts this year.

New default configuration: To save new customers (and partners working with new customers) hours of manual work to set up a new site, we have streamlined and simplified our new default Jira Align configuration. The new default configuration includes updated platform settings, platform terminology, connector settings, data sets (e.g. regions and cities) and system roles in terms of access to reports, pages, and functionality.

Investing in technical excellence: We are growing our Jira Align product and engineering teams, and increasing our investment in bugs, performance optimizations, usability improvements, and other requested customer enhancements.

Navigation experience: We are working on a new navigation experience that will help new and existing users find what they need faster. New navigation menus, using the Atlassian look and feel, will be built to improve onboarding for users already familiar with other products like Jira Software or Confluence.

Representing work

“Jira Align has too many different views and screens, making it hard to pick out the correct data from the noise.”

To help our customers better organize around outcomes and value, we're making two major investments in Jira Align this year.

Objective trees: We are moving objective trees towards achieving creation and viewing parity with the legacy OKR experience. We're also adding goals and SAFe® objectives to the new experience. We will continue to support the legacy experience until we're confident that the new and improved objective tree experience meets and exceeds our customers' and users' expectations.

Custom hierarchies and rooms: By popular demand, we will soon begin moving custom hierarchies to general availability. Custom hierarchies enable users to create new object relationships and easily view them in the new custom rooms. Users will also be able to drill into specific relationships between objects without having to leave the context of the room.

Thank you again to each of you who have given us feedback to help us shape the future of Jira Align. We plan to continue sharing updates like this with you to give you better visibility into the improvements we are working on. For additional updates, you can follow our public roadmap and release notes.

– Natalia

[Rae Gibbs]

@Natalia Baryshnikova For the Integration with Jira Software updates, is that only Data Center or Cloud as well?

[Kyle Foreman]

@Rae Gibbs Jira Server/Data Center and Jira Cloud

[Liza Merriman]

@Natalia Baryshnikova  - I've noticed the public roadmap is not updated for the Feature forecast by team. I think that Q3 2022 for Atlassian has passed. Do you have an updated target date you can share? This is a HUGE hurdle for us. We loved to be able to forecast features at a team level and most importantly have the ability to indicate which teams are part of a feature. Thanks! 

[Natalia Baryshnikova]

Hey @Liza Merriman - thank you being a Jira Align customer, and thank you for checking on the feature forecast by team. After an internal review, we identified a few quality issues with that capability, and we are pushing back on the date of its delivery. Because Public Roadmaps update once per quarter, this has not been captured on the Public Roadmaps yet. We are looking to update the new delivery timeline with the next Public Roadmaps update that will happen in December. 

[Nydia S Robles]

Love the sprint mapping feature!