Answers to your burning questions!
Hi everyone,
In April, I talked with over 600 user group members in person and via live stream at user group events across North America. I couldn't answer all the questions that were asked, but I told you I'd be following up. Below are those questions that I took down.
1. How does Atlassian prioritize bug fixes, especially for non-critical bugs and what is the process? How do you plan on improving communication to customers? - Karina A., Chicago, IL
Our major products have dedicated bug fix teams who work solely on fixing issues we have shipped in previous versions of the products. The prioritization is done jointly by engineering and support, and is based on a metric called User Impact Score, which takes into account the number of users affected and the impact of the bug on their work. This way we're always working to fix the issues that cause the most customer pain first. We will continue to explore ways we can improve our communication in this area.
2. When creating screens today, there is only one area for attachments. In my situation, I need multiple required attachment options via custom fields that can include a description, colors and fonts to emphasize importance. Is this possible? - Ronen U., San Diego, CA
The JIRA team is investigating how to improve the user experience around custom fields.
3. Why did you stop versioning your product's cloud instances? It has made getting support difficult when managing multiple cloud instances. How can you tell which version you are on, especially when managing multiple cloud instances and trying to work with support? - Garrett C., Northern Virginia
Our cloud services always run on the latest version. Traditional versions simply don't work with updates happening multiple times a day and a service like JIRA consisting of dozens of micro-services that are updated independently.
4. I'm curious to learn more about project level admin features in JIRA. - Pamela H., St. Louis, MO
Our customers tell us that as their JIRA instances have grown, they’ve become the bottle-neck to their organization. To address this, we are on a journey to enable administrators to delegate project-level administration to the project owners. We have released our first step on this journey with the ability to add statuses and modify transitions with 7.3. Note that there are restrictions here where project level admins can only make changes to workflows that are not shared with other projects. As we continue on the journey to enable project-level administration, the next area we are investing is to enable configuration of the screens at a project level. Projects often have unique requirements for how their screens are configured and enabling this at the project level enables your users to work efficiently and effectively. We are keen to hear feedback on other areas that are important for you to be able to delegate to a project-level admin.
5. I manage a JIRA instance critical to my client. I want to test everything in the lower environment and then push it in to the production environment. There is no good way you can do that easily, or in an automated way. There is no way to take a script from lower to make it automated into production. I have to go in manually, which can take upwards of four hours. -Prajwal T., Chicago, IL
We are aware of this challenge around data portability. Specifically, we see 3 primary scenarios:
- Moving configurations from one instance to another. For example, going through a process of testing a JIRA workflow in your development or staging environment before being promoted to production.
- Moving projects from one instance to another one-time or on an ongoing basis, and
- Consolidating instances from multiple server instances to a single Data Center instance. Consolidating instances isn't easy as it often coupled with organizational change management to standardize around your project tracking processes.
Through our investigation, we've concluded that the fastest and most effective way to address this is by working with two of our partners, Botron Software and Awnaba, who have several years of experience in this area. We are working to provide more prescriptive guidance for our customers on our documentation website. Expect to hear more in the coming weeks and months.
6. Is there any way we can improve the auto-configuration tool in JIRA? You can go in there and change home directory config for connectors, but the connector for HTP protocol when they shifted from Tomcat 7 to Tomcat 8 doesn't have nested configure. When you shift from HTP to HTPS, using JIRA 7 you still have to go to server config file and update the protocol anyways. - James L., Toronto, ON
This fix is underway and will be released very soon. Please monitor JRASERVER-64082.
7. I'm very intrigued by Data Center and purchased it for Bitbucket. DataCenter doesn’t have capability for geographic failover. If Chicago goes down, I don’t have a way to roll to NYC or London. I could build it out as I have load balancers, but it is sort of manual because the product doesn’t support SQL high availability. Is this something that is on the roadmap for Data Center? -Chicago, IL
Smart Mirroring is intended for supporting geo-performance - i.e. giving remote developers a performant experience for scenarios like clone and fetch. However, it isn't intended for geo-failover. We separately support cold-standby failover as documented here.
8. Do you have a community license for Data Center? -Michael S., Northern Virginia
We currently offer Data Center at 50% off for community licenses.
9. When is HipChat group video coming to mobile? When are web links from the web app going to link to HipChat client? The links will open if you put them in a room, but if you are in a calendar link and you click on a URL it opens the web client rather than the standalone client. - Simon O., Seattle, WA
We can't wait to bring you more video functionality on mobile. Stay tuned and watch here: HCPUB-1661 - HipChat Video for iOS and Android. As for web links, we agree and our teams have it on their list of top priorities.
10. In the Confluence Cloud new collaborative editing feature, the discard draft is no longer there. There is now a blurry notion of what is a draft and what isn't. Is that still available? Where did it go? -Andreas S., Seattle, WA
Since rolling out co-editing we've learned a lot from how our customers are using and reacting to the original user experience. For now, you can discard a draft from the User avatar (top right) > Drafts menu. We are in the midst of enhancing how we surface drafts as it is not easily discoverable for most users. We will reintroduce the ability to discard a draft from My Work when we release an update. We've made it clear by adding a Draft status in your list of recently worked on within My Work. Once we release this update, we will remove the old User avatar > Drafts menu.
11. What updates are there to share specific to Fisheye, Crucible and Crowd? -Brian J., Austin, TX
We shipped several recent improvements. Specifically:
Fisheye/Crucible:
Resolvable comment: Authors and reviewers can mark comments as “Needs resolution”. Then, once the comment gets addressed, it can then be marked as “Resolved”. In addition, developers can easily filter and see all outstanding items in the activity stream based on their status: Unresolved or Resolved.
Review workflow API: Easily connect to the review transition process and prevent transitions from happening under certain programmable conditions.
Rename repositories: The ability to instantly change the name of a repository so that it can reflect its current name in the remote SCM. The rename operation is instantaneous and doesn’t require any further actions (such as reindexing).
Crowd: We are making significant investments to Crowd including releasing Crowd DC (customers need HA as Crowd can be a single point of failure). We have some bigger plans for Crowd over the next year and we've shared those more broadly at Summit Europe. Check out the recaps to learn more.
12. Why are we getting rid of the View File Macro in Confluence when it is so important to so many people like my company? It's critical in getting business users involved in Confluence. Also, the way you went about it is strange. There's a request for comment on a to-be-deprecated item harvested on jira.atlassian.com, and there are 4X more watches than votes. - Tom C., St. Louis, MO
The Office Connector view file macro will eventually be deprecated on Cloud. We will ensure existing application in pages can still be rendered. Our plan is to replace it with a native file embed experience where you can set how you want the file to be displayed: inline or thumbnail card. We know it's a widely used feature so we will maintain the capability even if this specific macro will be deprecated. We'll standardize the experience for all supported cloud files types (not just Office docs).
View the rest of the Q&A from the road show here.
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Thanks!
Jay
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