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:

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.


schedule issues roadmap.gif


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.

3 state issue create.gif

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:

  • Add 'Assign to Me' option – directly assign an issue to yourself with a single click;

  • 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;

  • 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;

  • Resize columns of the issue view – adjust the column size on the issue view to your preferred widths;

  • 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’;

  • Link issues – easily create and link a new issue from the existing one across Jira projects; and

  • 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.

Dark mode.gif


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.

turn off user invites.png


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.

exact phrase search.png

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:

  • 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

  • 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:

  1. Open an issue.

  2. Select a multiline text field or open a comment.

  3. 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.

reference attachments.gif

 

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

 

12 comments

Akshay Moryani January 3, 2023

Great

antony.melvin January 4, 2023

Lots of good features being introduced. More inline editing would be good. Also would be good to be able to find all the issues associated with someone who has left the company in JQL and have certain bulk changes like assign to someone else not rely on the clunky wizard.

I personally find the ability to drag epic bars about in advanced roadmaps to be irritating. It's easy to accidentally nudge dates when linking work epics and without the stand cmd-z undo being available you're left with a fiddly fix. I'd rather have an option to lock the bars and only change the dates deliberately.

Like # people like this
Gabriel January 23, 2023

Hello!

For this feature:

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.

How does that work? CTRL (of shift)+Click on issues?

I tried it and it didn't work.

Thanks!

Like # people like this
Neil Murray January 27, 2023

The customer feedback articles need to include a list of current problems that have been raised by the customers with a comment on what is going to happen with them.  Particularly for the problems/limitations that are not a "quick fix".  At least an indication that the problem/limitation has been acknowledged.

One that has not been addressed is the removal of the "Old view".  There is a large comment thread with people raising valid reasons why "Old view" is required and should not be removed.  For me the reason is I need access to the non-wysiwyg (or "text") editor.

There has been a lot of complaints but no official response to these.  So reporting on some of these "hot topics" would at least let us customer know that we are not being ignored.

Like # people like this
Mark Richardson January 27, 2023

There's 9 pages of negative feedback comments here on one issue in the last month, and you've not addressed it at all?! 

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-articles/Jira-Cloud-s-old-issue-view-is-going-away-soon/ba-p/2208963

Like John Rocha likes this
Dave Mathijs
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
February 21, 2023

Why do we need advanced JQL for exact search? I just don't get it. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Keep it simple instead:

  • A search phrase between double quotes should return an exact match (just like in Google), not a stemmed search.
  • If I want stemmed search, I just enter 2 separate keywords.
Like # people like this
Chris Dunne _Raledo_
Marketplace Partner
Marketplace Partners provide apps and integrations available on the Atlassian Marketplace that extend the power of Atlassian products.
March 21, 2023

I agree with @Dave Mathijs

Keep it simple. 

Andrea Ligios March 27, 2023

I've spent time bringing this problem up, again, in the survey:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-discussions/The-Security-Level-of-an-issue-should-be-more-clear/td-p/1697734

Let's see if we can finally have proper visibility indicators...

Casey Gould May 1, 2023

Last quarter, we shared that we are looking at opportunities to further improve global search (located on top right of Jira).

As a JQL user, I would like the ability to (at a personal settings level) make the search bar at the top right of my Jira view default to the advanced search instead.

It's really annoying when I type out what I want, only for the search to "helpfully" add text~"". I understand why this format for text-based search makes sense as a default for your average user, but please let me opt out.

Right now my workaround is to have new advanced search as a bookmark on my browser's bookmarks bar or use the "gi" shortcut, but since the search bar is there, it'd be nice if I could use it.

Clicks before typing JQL:

  • Proposed WYSIWYG search bar: 1 click
  • Browser bookmark: 1 click, page load, 1 click
  • g + i keyboard shortcut: 2 keys, page load, 1 click (or f key)
  • Current search dropdown: 2 clicks, page load, 1 click
Devkhishan July 13, 2023

I started using Jira 10 mins ago and after going through some beginner tutorials, it feels like they are actually smooth.  And I am going to use this project management tool for my college internship project.

Dan Driscoll July 20, 2023

It's July 2023, why did I get email on a Dec 2022 update article?  Is there a more recent one detailing issues with the new "Enhance my board and backlog" activated?

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