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 with either a Premium or Enterprise subscription 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!

[Cash Coyne]

If you are going to "require project owners to explicitly add a field to a project", then I have a few suggestions of functionality you really need to have:

1. Be able to have a set of "default fields" that the Project owner can use to apply to a project so they won't have to look for every field out of the hundreds in the instance.  Possibly even be able to have a few different sets of these as many orgs have different needs for different operating units.
2. Be able to list all the fields with checkboxes next to them for the user to easily see them and pick them.
3. On the screen to pick the fields have a search field that pulls up all fields with the text in the search.
4. Be able to copy a set of fields from an existing project to a new project

[Carol Low]

hey Cash!

Lovely suggestions - those are definitely on our radar. There is a new fields page as part of this change that has better searching and adding capabilities I'm keen to get everyone's feedback on!

With "Default fields" - on our radar but likely not in the first release. We have some related work in progress with getting set up faster - keep an eye out for that :) 

Copy a set of fields - are you thinking global fields or also project fields? (global fields have shared configuration, project fields would be a duplicate)

[Cash Coyne]

For copying a set of fields, I'm thinking of copying a set of fields that match an existing project

[Abhi Singh]

⁠This looks very interesting! My only question is if each project workspace now has to have custom fields added back in, or will everything stay visible by default, and the rules apply to new projects?

[Carol Low]

Hey Abhi!

Fields that were previously configured will stay visible by default. At the moment though there are ways to interact with a field without configuring it to a project, e.g. in Automations or through API, and those fields may need to be added to a project if it had never been added to the project. These cases are rare but do happen.

[Milad S.]

Hi @Carol Low

Great initiative, indeed.

Does this work also consider fields linked to JSM forms, Jira Automation rules, or JQL filters? Similar to the problem statement you mentioned, project admins add fields to these components within their project, and as Jira admin, there is no easy way to track these relationships at scale.

Kind regards,

Milad

[Carol Low]

Hey @Milad S_!

Unfortunately for our early access, we have no easy way to audit all of it given the extensiveness of it (as you mentioned), which is a motivator for us to test on Sandboxes to begin with. There will also be a way to opt an individual project out of early access to restore functionality as before.

Early access participants will help us determine the most critical areas to detect and add fields before we consider a broader rollout.

One alternative we are considering is to identify fields that previously have values added to them for admins to review. 

[Milad S.]

Got it, @Carol Low

This was like a wish I had as a Jira admin of large JSM projects with very active project admins. :D

I hope you consider this for later releases.

One alternative we are considering is to identify fields that previously have values added to them for admins to review. 

That is what we do now (manually through JQL with the field not empty and then looking up the column "Total forms" to see if there is any form attached).

[Carol Low]

@Milad S_ - would you be open to joining the early access program, we can consider enabling it only for a handful of projects (and involve some project admins) to make sure we reduce friction for everyone. No pressure if the timing doesn't suit.