An update on Jira Software customer feedback – September 2022
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20 December 2022: Thanks for your interest in helping us shape and improve Jira Software. There's a new Update on Jira Software customer feedback – December 2022 now available, so this older article may no longer be actively monitored. |
Hello again Community!
I’m back with another update for this quarter on what our teams are hearing, have delivered or are working on, to address some of the key feedback themes that we’ve heard from Jira Software customers.
So, let’s get straight into it…
Usability and efficiency
”It could be confusing to use it the first time. Probably my fault as I did not read the guide on how to use it but once you get used to it, it is a great tool.”
Customers are the heart and soul of Jira Software and we’re committed to helping you work and collaborate efficiently by addressing areas where the look and feel of the UI may interfere with this or where unintuitive or difficult experiences add to the time it takes to learn how to use Jira Software effectively.
To assist with focusing on your work and increase efficiency when you update and edit issues, we’ve introduced inline editing for the priority, summary and epic fields in Backlogs for Team-managed projects and are exploring inline editing elsewhere in the product. Longer term, we’re improving our bulk editing capabilities and we’ll share more closer to the release dates of these enhancements.
We know our power users rely on the efficiency gains of keyboard shortcuts and shared the 4 new hotkeys we've brought to Jira in the last update. We're continuing to explore the best ways to make sure the shortcuts we bring to Jira meet your needs and additional hotkeys will be available soon. In the meantime, you can stay across new keyboard shortcuts through the Help menu or by pressing “?” in Jira.
We also hear from customers who want the process of creating issues to be quicker and easier. We're working on a project to enable users to create issues in a partially or fully minimized window that will allow users to navigate Jira while creating an issue to find and copy/paste relevant information to their new issue. And to help minimize the clicks needed to create an issue, we’re also adding some of the commonly-asked fields (like the Status and Watchers fields) to the create screen.
Going forward, we’ll continue to invest in making Jira Software easier to use and go deeper into usability enhancements like standardizing UX patterns in various areas, starting with bringing consistency into filtering issues and adding more in-product help content to assist users with learning the product.
We’ll share more via Community and our Cloud Roadmap as we have more detail on the solution and timelines for creating, copying or cloning issues, making bulk editing easier in Jira Software.
As for auto-refresh in Jira Software and whether links should open in a new tab by default, I shared a little more on our thinking and approach in my last update.
Jira users who are living with disabilities have shared how accessibility issues negatively impact their personal health, career progression and team productivity. This overview of the company’s expanded commitment and approach to accessibility shares our plans for engaging with the disability community, improving our platforms and design system, and accelerating improvements in accessibility across Atlassian products.
To begin, we're addressing basic accessibility gaps that require no new platform support or deep accessibility expertise and addressing critical issues that block key user journeys. We'll then focus on achieving conformance with WCAG 2.2 AA across our products, which will then enable delivering more usable experiences for people living with disability.
In the meantime, the Atlassian Design System team have been working on improving the accessibility of our color palette and will release it soon through color tokens. This same tokenization work is being used initially to support Dark Mode, but it also supports other themes (eg. high-contrast) for people with various visual needs and preferences. You can follow the progress to roll out Dark mode in Jira and across other Atlassian products on our Cloud Roadmap.
Representing work
”The roadmap view is useful, but could be better in my opinion. I would like something that makes it easier to visualize dependent work to understand what all is in-flight and what the approximate impact would be if scope was changed.”
Great teamwork requires great visibility. Some of you have expressed a desire to extend the capabilities of roadmaps and support planning and tracking work at a deeper level. Using roadmaps, your team can now plan and track their work from bite-size tasks to major deliverables, all in a single view. Create, schedule, drag and drop stories beneath epics on the roadmap for kanban projects. Visualize release dates alongside related work and dependencies on the roadmap for any project type. Learn more about story-level planning for kanban projects and releases on roadmaps in What's new in the Roadmap view? I'm so glad you asked.
Previously, I shared some of the challenges, that Advanced Roadmaps customers have told us they encounter 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.
I also addressed some of the confusion we hear from customers about why there are two different project types within Jira Software and some of the work underway to bring the longer-term vision for both Company-managed and Team-managed projects closer together by consolidating how core experiences work across both project types. We’ll continue to provide regular updates through the Community and our Cloud Roadmap on this journey.
We understand that teams want to ensure all Jira Software issues are filled out accurately and completely upon creation. So project admins can now specify required fields for issues in Team-managed projects and make additional required fields beyond the system’s default required fields. Required fields offer a great way to enhance the quality of information captured on an issue to help ensure that piece of work meets expectations when completed. Required fields for Team-managed projects are available now. Learn more about how to customize an issue's fields in team-managed projects.
Parallel sprints are now rolling out, a highly-requested feature from customers who previously used Company-managed projects and are now using Team-managed projects. This feature enables your scrum team to divide and conquer. Additional sprints can now be started and completed independently while working from the same backlog. Doing so can be helpful when your team wants to split their work to focus on different goals while using the same backlog. For example, part of your team might run a sprint for development while other team members focus on a separate sprint for design. Both sprints would contain issues from the same backlog, but each sprint can be started and completed independently.
We’re progressively rolling out parallel sprints for Team-managed projects, so if you can't see it in your instance today, it won’t be long until you do.
Lastly, the ability to rename Epics in Jira Software Cloud, is now available in a beta version for you to test out ahead of a full feature release in 2023. Intended to support the variety of Agile frameworks practiced today, we’ve seen this feature receive particular demand from customers trying to implement a SAFe (Story → Feature → Epic) issue hierarchy. The beta offers the chance for you to test out the changes in sandbox and test environments, prepare guides and training materials for your teams, and provide us with feedback so we can improve it for you. Join the private Epic-Renaming Beta Community Group for more details on the beta and to enable it for your test instance.
Tracking and reporting
“There should be a way to create custom reports without the need of a 3rd party addon (which cost more money)”
Over the last year, we’ve been bringing more data and insights right alongside where a scrum team works – the board and backlog.
In addition to the sprint burndown, sprint progress, epic progress and more – we’ve recently shipped a brand new insight designed to help teams more easily identify issues that might be stuck and need a bit of extra attention.
The issues for attention insight is the perfect complement to your daily stand-up, where flagged or blocked issues are clearly identified and teams can discuss what they’ll do to move them forward.
While insights have so far only been available for scrum teams, soon we’ll be bringing the issues for attention insight to teams who follow the kanban framework; where flow through the team’s system is critical to keep a close eye on. We’ll share updates on Community so please let us know if you’d like to be involved in any of our early adoption groups.
Using the Editor
“Same as in the old version, a user should be able to upload several pictures at once in the attachments and then only select them where they need to be inserted in a specific place in the description text.”
As a result of our focus on improving the reliability, scale and performance of Media; we’ve made huge strides in reliability when uploading, previewing or viewing a file on a page. Reducing Media’s bundle size has contributed to a much faster experience in Cloud and scale improvements mean we can now support much larger Cloud instances.
We plan to start addressing features related to manipulation, capture and collaboration on Media in response to the mix of feedback from customers who want a better experience re-sizing and manipulating images, adding and referencing attachments and collaborating on Media with sharing, commenting, and reactions. We’ll share updates in Community and on our Cloud Roadmap as work progresses.
Navigation and search
“It seems like the search functionality is pretty good. I can't imagine using Jira without that because it definitely lacks a structure that would be easy to navigate. Search functionality mitigates this issue.”
Our focus on navigation and search is to get customers to find their issues easier and faster. We hear that sometimes the quality of search results can make it harder to find and access your work.
We have spoken to some customers recently to understand how global search (located on top right of Jira) is being used, and we found that the awareness and comprehension of this search capability are high. It is mainly used for finding old work or discovering work, while some like using this global search for recent work. However, it can be hard to find the right result with keywords when a query is too broad. Taking this feedback, we are looking at opportunities to further improve global search.
Last quarter, we shared that we were exploring the best way to improve JQL Phrase Search so we can provide more accurate results when searching for a phrase. Search for an exact phrase with JQL will start rolling out in October.
Some of you may also be aware of a consolidated search initiative that's being worked on to simplify the search in Jira and make it faster and scalable. This work continues to progress, follow this Jira Cloud issue for rollout updates.
Set up, configuration and administration
“I think Jira Software should be more intuitive and user management could be improved.”
It can be difficult to understand exactly what a user has access to and how different groups affect that user's access without more visibility across all products, so we're making the administration of Atlassian Cloud products better and starting to centralize user management across all our products.
We want your admin hub experience to be simple, fast, scalable and expandable. Organization-level user and group administration now offers a single location to manage user access across Jira Software, Jira Service Management and Confluence. We’re also moving closer to centralizing all user access information across more than just those core products.
You can find out more about our plans for simplifying administration, centralized permissions view and granular admin roles on our Cloud Roadmap.
We understand the huge value that apps and integrations with third-party tools can add, but we also know it can be hard to get an overview of all your apps, manage them centrally, or determine what types of apps might help your team work more efficiently. To help you better find, view, and manage apps, we've released a few new features and enhancements since the last update.
First, for DevOps teams working in Jira, we’ve released a new toolchain page to help admins discover, connect and visualize apps and integrations to first and third-party tools that support your team’s entire DevOps workflow, from ideation all the way to operation and continuous feedback. With a new toolchain page right in Jira, you can find integrations for your team’s favorite tools, and see what you already have installed.
To help you get a more consolidated view of all your apps and integrations across all your teams and sites, we’ve also recently made several changes to the Connected Apps tab on admin.atlassian.com. We have:
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made more types of apps visible from the tab
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added new filters including install date, update available, and more
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included new quick links to documentation, licensing agreements and support,
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added new buttons to install private apps
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updated the interface for a more consolidated view
With these changes, admins can get a more complete view of your environment in the same place where you control and manage app settings.
You can find out more about the new Toolchain page in Jira Software, read about the app management changes on admin.atlassian.com or check out the trending Jira integrations apps in the Atlassian Marketplace.
Integrations and extensibility
“I love the ease of the user experience from the first interaction to the last. Building tickets and managing boards is extremely easy. What I love the most is how Jira integrates with all the programs I use; it's a one stop shop for me.”
We intend to keep investing in core features and native functionality to meet your evolving needs, while also enabling teams to add more advanced or specifically-tailored functionality with Marketplace apps. I shared some of the improvements we’ve delivered to include functionality available via apps-only for on-prem customers in my update last quarter. For more information on what we have planned visit the Cloud Roadmap for Jira Software or visit the Atlassian Marketplace to find out which apps offer a FREE version for teams of up to 10 users.
To help you navigate the availability of apps without cloud versions, we’ll continue to update Cloud alternatives to your Atlassian Marketplace Data Center & Server apps to recommend alternatives for apps where partners don't intend to build a cloud version in the near future.
We’ll continue working with Marketplace Partners to make sure their cloud apps support your needs. We keep shipping new APIs and investing in app security, support standards and reliability programs. For more detail on Cloud Fortified apps, visit Marketplace App Trust.
For customers who tell us they rely on APIs in order to customize and automate their work, we're making good progress in shipping critical APIs for Jira and continue to focus on this area. The recently shipped APIs for workflow configuration and custom fields resulted in multiple new apps on the Atlassian Marketplace and in-house workflow customizations.
In July we released Jira Runtime UI Modifications, a step in our journey to give developers and apps more control of the Jira UI and allows developers to programmatically set rules on issue fields, which change how fields behave on issue creation.
In Jira, you can already hide fields in issue layout configuration and change field descriptions and default values. Now, with UI modifications, developers will be able to add a field label or help text, set field visibility or make it required or optional depending on who is creating or looking at the issue. Modifications are applied on the first create issue screen load and with every user input. For example, you can create issue templates and set pre-populated content to speed up issue creation.
Developers can create interactive forms and adjust how fields work based on user data or issue data. Our Marketplace Partners are already beginning to build apps that use this functionality, for example Dynamic Forms for Jira has recently been released for cloud with functionality to display only context-relevant issue content.
We’ve also heard from you that the popular Server/DC feature of ScriptRunner for Jira called “Behaviours” is missing in cloud. The Atlassian team is working with Adaptavist to make ScriptRunner Behaviours available in cloud soon.
Technical performance
“Slowness, try to open three or four tabs to manage different teams or compare tickets and you need to have all your computer resources allocated to that.”
Meeting the technical performance and scale expectations that our customers have for Jira Software continues to be one of our top priorities. The Quarterly Cloud performance and scale update we shared in March showed some of the biggest performance gains that we’ve made across key experiences in Jira Software as a result of these investments.
We know that when pages don’t load or respond as quickly as expected, it can impact your ability to work quickly and efficiently, so efforts to consistently improve the page load and response times over the last two years while expanding our scale in Cloud have delivered a 20-25% improvement in performance for most of the key experiences in Jira.
We also outlined the large-scale program that we launched to make our Cloud products even faster. We’ll continue to provide you with regular updates through Community and on the Cloud Roadmap.
Many thanks again for all of your support and feedback. We’re always looking at how to improve Jira Software and feedback from customers like you is an important input into how we make sure we're investing in the areas that will bring the most value. We’ll share a new update next quarter and you can also follow the other work that’s in progress on our Cloud Roadmap.
– Megan
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Head of product for Jira Software Cloud
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