Hey everyone,
Following our announcement at Team ’24 combining Jira Software with Jira Work Management, we’ve been working relentlessly to make Jira the place of work for all teams. One of the many initiatives we’re pursuing to make this happen is refreshing how teams’ work is represented in Jira. That means replacing Issue with a new term that represents the work of all team types, including but not limited to marketing, sales, HR, operations, finance and legal teams, and not just software teams that Jira originally set out to do two decades back.
We’ve performed extensive research on what the replacement term should be. Of all the options evaluated, we have ‘Work item’ and ‘Task’ as the primary replacement candidates. We believe these two terms are broad enough but not too generic at the same time and can allow our users across different functions to model their work within Jira.
Below is an early view (well, read) of what it could view like:
On end-user experiences:
Create issue → Create work item OR Create task
View all issues → View all work items OR View all tasks
On admin experiences:
Issue type hierarchy → Work type hierarchy OR Task type hierarchy
Issue type schemes → Work type schemes OR Task type schemes
Following plenty of research and several weeks of speaking to customers and Marketplace partners, we’re excited to expand this research to a broader audience and gather more insights from people like you.
We’ve developed a Chrome extension to enable you to try the Work item and Task terminologies in Jira. We’d love for you to try the two terms and share your insights with us so that we can better understand how you’d prefer your work represented in Jira. Your insights and participation will significantly improve the Jira experience for all users. In case your organisation has blocked the installs of extensions, please speak to your admin about enabling the extension from the Chrome Web Store. More on how to allow extensions.
Note: The extension is available for use in Chrome browsers only; we don’t support IE, Safari, or other browsers.
To use the new extension:
Download the extension from the Chrome Web Store.
Open the extension and select Add to Chrome.
Select Add extension and pin it to your Chrome browser to toggle between Issue, Work item and Task easily.
After you’ve selected a term, open your Jira instance. You should see the selected term replace Issue everywhere on Jira. Note that this only applies to instances set up in English.
If you already have Jira open in your browser window, refresh the page, and the new terminology should appear.
An important caveat is that the selected term will visually replace Issue everywhere, even in the summary and description of your issue. It, however, won’t be replaced in reality and will continue to show the original text (with issue) when you go into edit mode.
Please note that the way the new term is applied with the extension is not final and will change after a very careful review by our design team when it reaches GA.
We want you to use Jira the way you usually do, and we intend to understand your usage and preferences for the replacement term. Given this is an experiment, you may encounter bugs or unintended behaviour. If something is confusing or not working out for you, you can quickly revert to the old terminology via the extension. When doing so, please remember to share feedback by clicking on ‘Give feedback’.
We’d love to hear about your experience using the new terminology in Jira. Share with us:
Do either of the replacement terms seem like a natural fit in the product context
What’s working well for you
What’s not working well for you
Any other comments or suggestions, no matter how minor
After you've enabled the Chrome extension, you can proactively give us feedback on the new terminology by selecting ‘Give feedback’ on the extension.
For anything else, please feel free to leave comments below, and we’ll get back to you soon!
Cheers,
Arbaaz Gowher
Product Manager, Jira
Arbaaz Gowher
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