An update on Jira Software customer feedback – December 2022
Hey Community,
It’s time to wrap up another busy quarter with an update on what we’re hearing from our customers and some of the work in progress or already delivered to improve Jira Software. Since my article last quarter, we’ve seen a shift in the key themes we’ve heard from customers. Feedback related to representing work in Jira Software is now the primary focus for more customers who’ve shared their feedback than it has been in previous quarters, so let’s start with that.
Representing work
“I'd like to reschedule multiple issues at once in roadmap by selecting them and then dragging left or right. i.e. shift the plan forward or backwards.”
Roadmaps provide Jira Software users with a single source of truth and connection to real, live data – enabling visibility, shared focus, and communication throughout the course of the project. In the past few months, we’ve shipped usability improvements while adding to the basics of software planning needs and closing the gap between adjacent experiences in Agile:
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A roadmap should be easy to adjust when things change, so we’ve released the ability to schedule/ re-schedule multiple issues at a time. This means you can multi-select and bulk schedule issues (including bar-dragging and bar-resizing) on the roadmap timeline, to plan and schedule work in batches.
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After getting some customer feedback on the ability to view releases/fix versions on the roadmap, we quickly added a few further improvements including an in-context action to quickly view the full version details, edit, and filter.
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Customers have articulated that sometimes those scheduling warnings on the roadmap are useful, and sometimes they are just plain annoying if the team has already discussed the conflict or they want to share with stakeholders as a happy path. Now, users can hide warning icons on their Roadmap to reduce noise when communicating.
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Enhanced filtering – epic filter, quick and custom filters to help customers set the right context when they are communicating their plans to their team or stakeholders, and concentrate efforts on the relevant issues.
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We often hear from Roadmap users that the Jira Software navigation elements take up real estate when trying to collaborate with their team, so we’ve added the ability to expand to full-screen to allow the team to focus on the timeline and better communicate progress and priorities with any size screen.
Advanced Roadmaps customers have told us they encounter challenges with multiple concepts of ‘Team' and the confusion it can cause. We’re currently working on a major unification of Team concepts to address these challenges consistently across all of your Atlassian products. If you’re interested in accessing our early rollout and providing feedback on the updates, you can read more and sign-up via Advanced Roadmaps Team unification: Sign-up to take part in the early roll-out.
Since our last update, we've finished rolling out the ability to run parallel sprints in Team Managed Projects, a highly-requested feature from customers who previously used Company-managed projects and are now using Team-managed projects. For more detail on how to start and complete parallel sprints, check out Run multiple sprints to divide and conquer in team-managed projects.
There’s also still time to join our beta for the ability to rename Epics in Jira Software Cloud and test the changes, prepare training materials for your teams and provide feedback ahead of the full feature release later in 2023. Join the private Epic-Renaming Beta Community Group for more details on the beta and to enable it for your test instance.
Usability and efficiency
“When you create a new Jira ticket, the pop up that comes up in the middle of the page is immovable. If you are currently, on a ticket that is related or just want to see the background of browser it would be nice to be able to move that pop-up or change the size of it much similar to a browser.”
We’re excited to announce an improved issue-create experience that lets you minimize and maximize the issue-create modal between 3 different sizes to make creating tickets quicker and easier.
We’ve heard from customers that they need to be able to reference other tickets or different views in their Jira Software site when creating new tickets. With the 3-state modal, customers now have the ability to see a ticket being created, access relevant material or notifications, and copy and paste information all in a single screen.
In addition to minimizing context switching, the new experience also maximizes screen real estate and reduces visual clutter and the effort needed to complete simple tasks.
Lastly, the 3-state modal accommodates natural interruptions during the ticket creation process (whether that’s to gather additional information or to attend a meeting) and resume the process at your leisure.
We’re currently rolling out this new experience and it will be available for all Jira Software customers by the end of December 2022.
Our teams have also been working hard to improve ease of use and address a few of the papercuts with the issue experience that customers have shared with us by delivering:
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Add 'Assign to Me' option – directly assign an issue to yourself with a single click;
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Inline editing in team-managed project backlogs – make edits to the summary, priority, and epic of issues found in team-managed project backlogs without opening the issue;
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Sticky editor toolbar – as you scroll down the page in the issue view, the toolbar will stick to the top of the screen, making editing easier and more efficient;
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Resize columns of the issue view – adjust the column size on the issue view to your preferred widths;
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Add a status field for new issues – change the default status of newly created issues to either ‘In Progress’ or ‘Done’, rather than just ‘To do’;
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Link issues – easily create and link a new issue from the existing one across Jira projects; and
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Reference attachments – you can now insert an attachment already on an issue in the new issue view from the editor toolbar. There’s more detail on this functionality later in this update.
We hope these updates create a more delightful and engaging experience. You’ll continue to see enhancements to Jira Software in the coming months and beyond.
We’re also excited to deliver an early access preview of our most requested features, a dark theme (and a new light theme as well) to Jira Cloud products.
We’ll be providing early access to themes in Jira labs, which means you get to test it out early and help us make the feature the best it can be. Learn more about how to help us test Jira’s new dark theme. Once you’ve opted into the experience, you’ll be able to switch between our new light and dark themes.
Set up, configuration and administration
”User management & permissions can be a bear, particularly if multiple pieces of Atlassian software are in use.”
Many customers tell us they rely on their internal user provisioning process in order to ensure the correct users get access to their Atlassian products, in the right way. This could be via Jira Service Management or other products such as Zendesk and ServiceNow.
We’re committed to helping customers to streamline their user provisioning process. So we’ve developed a way for org admins to turn off all user-to-user invitations and access requests in the admin.atlassian.com 'User access settings' area.
We’ll be rolling this out to all customers in the coming months, follow the Allow admins to disable user invitations ticket to find out more including how you can opt into the beta.
Since launching the Toolchain page last quarter, we’ve focused on understanding usage and improving on popular key actions. We’ve been exploring ways to make the page more discoverable for both admins and users, and researching ways to help teams improve their time-to-value with toolchain setup. We're looking forward to translating these learnings and releasing Toolchain page improvements next quarter.
Learn more about the Toolchain page in Jira Software or check out the trending Jira integrations apps in the Atlassian Marketplace.
Navigation and search
“The search function is very tricky. It isn't intuitive. If the search requires a phrase, the search engine will search every word separately instead of giving the best result for the phrase.”
Our teams are continuing to focus on making it quicker and easier for you to find and complete work in Jira Software.
Last quarter, we shared that we are looking at opportunities to further improve global search (located on top right of Jira). This quarter we are pleased to let you know that the work is underway, from UI consistency to bug fix for project filter. Next quarter we will be working on improvements to help you find what you are looking for faster.
Advanced search lets you search for issues by building structured queries using the Jira Query Language (JQL). It's being updated to provide more accurate results when searching for an exact phrase. The rollout of Search for an exact phrase with JQL is currently underway, with an estimated timeline for completion by the end of January.
Follow our Cloud Roadmap to stay up-to-date on how work is progressing.
Using the Editor
“There is no option to configure your default setting for displaying links. I prefer displaying the URLs instead of the the smart links.”
The option to disable smart links for non-Atlassian products has been released. Thank you all for your valuable feedback and special thanks to those who participated in user testing sessions with us. This means all Jira Software and Confluence users can now either:
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keep smart links as your default view, but add exceptions for the domains you want to insert as simple URLs instead (for example your dev/stage environments or third party tools you use that you’d rather see the URL for), or
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turn smart links off by default, but add exceptions for the domains you want to keep them for (for example Jira, Confluence, Google Drive or Figma).
You can Manage your link preferences or access the settings page by clicking your avatar at the top right of your product, clicking ‘Manage account’ and then heading to the ‘Link preferences’ tab. Follow our step-by-step guide for more information.
While we're confident this solution will satisfy the needs of most users, we acknowledge that there's a need for a site-wide, admin-controlled setting as well. Follow our progress via Site admins can change the smart link default view for all users.
We’re also pleased to share you can now insert an attachment already on an issue in the new issue view, which we know many of you have been asking for. Instead of adding a new attachment, inserting one that’s already on the issue can help add context without creating a duplicate attachment.
To insert an attachment already on an issue:
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Open an issue.
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Select a multiline text field or open a comment.
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In the editor’s toolbar, select + > Attachments on this issue.
Alternatively, you can use a slash command to insert an attachment faster, ie. while typing in a multiline text field or a comment, try /reference or /file or /attach or /insert.
Integrations and extensibility
”On-Prem Jira instance, Adaptavist ScriptRunner has feature called Behaviour which is getting used to provide auto populate pre-filled information \(template\). Even though on Cloud Jira we already have same plugin \(Adaptavist ScriptRunner for Jira Cloud\) but currently Behavior feature is missing.”
The wait is over… Behaviours - ScriptRunner for Jira Cloud; a customer-favorite feature, is now available on cloud.
This app complements ScriptRunner for Jira and boosts your Jira field customization power by defining how fields should behave based on project or issue types when creating a new Jira issue for better control and user experience. The first version supports the most popular fields on create issue view. Check out the announcement from our partner Adaptavist.
GitHub for Jira is also now available on the Atlassian Marketplace. This new integration enables features like Automations, Deployments and DevOps insights and unlocks better scale, and performance for GitHub Enterprise customers.
Lastly, new APIs for issue notifications schemes, resolutions and priorities (set default, move and delete) are now available. Learn more on Atlassian Developer.
It’s been another huge quarter with plenty of exciting change underway. We remain committed to listening to customer feedback in order to make certain we’re focusing time, effort and investment on addressing the challenges that customers share with us. Follow our progress via our Cloud Roadmap or watch this article to receive a notification when I share my next update in a few months.
– Megan
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Head of product for Jira Software Cloud
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