Christmas in July: bug fixes and product improvements that will make your day
G'day Atlassian Community!
I'm Michael Andreacchio, and I'm a Product Manager focused on customer experience here at Atlassian. I'm excited to share with you some substantial improvements my team has made to jira.atlassian.com (our public issue tracker). While I'm here, I also want to call attention to some of the most impactful bug fixes and features we've shipped this year, and share the hard work our teams have been putting into better tools to set you up for a successful upgrade. So let's dive in!
The new jira.atlassian.com: built to support you
We're continuing to evolve the jira.atlassian.com platform so it can better serve you. Based on your feedback, we've shipped the following updates to our public issue tracker:
- Notification slimming: Inbox overflow is no joke. That's why we changed jira.atlassian.com notifications to only trigger an email if an Atlassian staff member updates a ticket or if you are directly @mentioned in a comment.
- "Vote" is now "This affects my team": Shipping bug fixes is not a popularity contest; It's a strategic prioritization process that takes into account several factors, like the number of active users impacted and the severity of the bug. To reflect this, we've updated the terminology, replacing "Vote" with "This affects my team."
- New Feature workflow clarification: We've updated our Implementation of New Features policy to give you more detail on how a new feature suggestion progresses through the prioritization and development workflow, including more visibility into the purpose and function of each stage.
Last quarter, Product Manager Gosia Kowalska shared some major visibility improvements to jira.atlassian.com, including a new landing page and release dashboards for Jira Software to empower you to better manage your instance. We heard your positive feedback and requests for more resources like this, so we're rolling out similar dashboards for Jira Service Desk and Bitbucket Server and Data Center.
We're spreading the dashboard love to Jira Service Desk with two new release visibility dashboards:
- The Jira Service Desk Server and Data Center: recently resolved issues dashboard shows bugs and feature suggestions that have been resolved within the last 6 months. For a refresher on how we prioritize bug fixes, check out the Server Bug Fix Policy.
- The Jira Service Desk Server and Data Center: bug fix kanban board tracks upcoming bug fixes and their stage in development.
We recommend favoriting these dashboards (and sharing them with your team!) so you can stay on top of the latest product updates.
With two new release dashboards for Bitbucket, you now can see everything that recently shipped and upcoming bug fixes in Bitbucket Server and Data Center:
- The Bitbucket Server and Data Center: recently resolved issues dashboard shows which bugs and feature suggestions have been resolved within the last 6 months. (Check out the Server Bug Fix Policy for more information on bug fix prioritization.)
- Curious when certain bug fixes will ship? Use the new Bitbucket Server and Data Center bug fix kanban board to track upcoming bug fixes and plan your next upgrade.
Bookmark and share these dashboards with your team to stay informed and plan your next upgrade.
Upgrade improvements
Upgrades are the key to unlocking new features, critical bug fixes, and game-changing platform improvements. We know upgrading can be a complicated process, which is why we've shipped the following updates to Jira Software Server and Data Center to help you navigate your upgrade:
- Pre-upgrade planning page: Create a tailored upgrade plan to inform your process on the new pre-upgrade planning page in your application's admin console. This page will surface recommended documentation, pre-upgrade checks, and a custom upgrade guide with step-by-step instructions. To enable this, download the latest version of the Atlassian Troubleshooting and Support app. Read more here.
- Customized configuration support: For customers upgrading to version 8.3 and above, the Atlassian Troubleshooting and Support app will identify customized configurations located in the installation directories, so you can take appropriate steps during the upgrade process. To take advantage of this, update the app to the latest version (1.17.0) through the admin console.
To inform your next Server version upgrade, we've released the following in-product updates:
- Pre-upgrade planning page: To inform your next upgrade, we've built a pre-upgrade planning tool in your application's admin console that is available through the latest version of the Atlassian Troubleshooting and Support app. We'll surface documentation links, run pre-upgrade checks, and provide you with a custom upgrade guide with step-by-step instructions. For more details, check out this documentation. Note: this feature will soon be available in Confluence Data Center.
Recently-shipped product improvements
In addition to these visibility updates, we've shipped hundreds of bug fixes to our core products in a continued effort to make our products as stable, performant, and flexible as possible. Check out the latest feature additions and bug fixes:
We shipped over 142 bug fixes and 55 feature suggestions in the last 6 months in an effort to deliver continued value and stability to your Jira instances. Here are a few impactful bug fixes that we'd like to highlight:
- More efficient caching for app upgrades: We’ve fixed several issues that caused performance degradation in large Jira instances when installing or updating the Marketplace apps. In 8.2, we made the caching system more intelligent, so it only triggers a clear of relevant caches when changes resulting from app updates are complete.
- Optimized issue export: We’ve reduced the amount of memory needed for issue export, so you can export more issues at once. In our tests, exporting 100K issues (each with 10 custom field values) required 57MB of memory compared to almost 2GB before this change.
- Fix for App Diagnostics memory errors: For customers on 7.13 with large instances, high memory usage can cause out of memory errors. In version 8.3 (and 7.13.4), we released a fix to the marketplace (for the App Diagnostics app) that stabilizes database growth.
- Data Center - Cluster lock improvements: We improved the cluster lock mechanism by introducing lock timeouts in Jira 8.3. Now, when a node loses a cluster lock it will be automatically recoverable without any actions from the administrator. No need to restart the node or worry about losing critical functionality.
- Data Center - Re-indexing node recovery: Jira 8.3 now recognizes when a re-indexing node goes down and leaves a stale reindexing job in progress. Admins will be notified on the re-indexing page and prompted to clean up failed tasks, clearing the way to run future re-indexes.
These and other critical bug fixes will also be backported to the latest Enterprise release (7.13) – look for them in an upcoming 7.13.x bug fix release here.
In the last 6 months, we've shipped over 131 bug fixes and 13 feature suggestions in Confluence. We're investing in many areas of the product, but would like to highlight a few impactful updates here:
- Decreased page load time: Permissions associated with the create button often triggered time-consuming and numerous database queries that caused significant page-load delays, especially for customers using MySQL. In 6.15 (and 6.13.3), we refactored these database queries to be more efficient and shorten load time.
- New search UI: The previous quick navigation search restricted your search to titles, displaying a limited set of results based on the name of the page, file, space, or user. In 6.14, we replaced it with an expanded search view that performs and lists a full search of your site content, so you can find what you need, fast.
- CONFANCESTORS table duplication fix: Before, when moving or re-ordering a page in the page tree, the entry could be duplicated in the CONFANCESTORS table. We fixed this in 6.14 (and 6.13.1) by implementing a background grooming job that automatically removes duplicates.
The bug fixes mentioned above along with other critical fixes are backported to the latest Enterprise release (6.13).
We're continuing to invest deeply in Jira Service Desk, shipping over 76 bug fixes and 15 feature suggestions in the last 6 months. Here are a few updates that have a particularly high impact on the product:
- SLA information in issue reports: In version 4.0, we added a CSV issue export option that includes SLA information in your report, so you can easily surface relevant metrics to internal stakeholders.
- Fix for rendered duplicate images: In version 4.1, we fixed an issue that rendered duplicate images when multiple screenshots with the same name (e.g. image.png) were uploaded into a ticket. We now append a suffix to every filename to avoid this duplication without your users needing to rename files.
- Better error-handling for email processor: While processing encoded email data, if the decoding failed the email processor could get hung up when retrying a failed job. In 4.2, we released a fix that enables the email processor to abandon and log failed jobs, so that it can continue processing the queue.
We are constantly striving to improve Bitbucket so it can serve you as a best-in-class code repository. In the last 6 months, we've shipped over 68 bug fixes and 43 feature suggestions as part of that effort. We've highlighted a few high-impact updates here:
- Git LFS file locking: To help protect your team's time and avoid merge conflicts, we’re introducing Git Large File System (LFS) file locking. With this, teams can now see when a file is being worked on and prevents others from pushing changes until the file has been unlocked again.
- Compare commits: You can now compare revisions by selecting commit and comparing it to another commit, branch, or tag. Sharing the results of your comparison with your team is also easy with a generated URL. See how to use it here.
- Fix for webhook URL error: Before, a webhook URL that was longer than 255 characters caused exception errors from the database, and failed to fire silently. In version 5.12, we released a fix that resolves the issue by truncating the webhook URL in the logs.
- Data Center - Additional storage for repository data: As the repository data in your Bitbucket Data Center grows, it may become too large to hold in a single storage location. So in 6.0, we added the ability to add more data storage locations. Check out how to implement it here.
- Data Center - Azure implementation template: After launching support for Azure in version 5.16, we added a reference implementation template to help you deploy Bitbucket Data Center in Azure. The template can be modified to suit your needs, and you can deploy via the Azure Marketplace or using the CLI. Check out the Getting started with Azure guide to find out how it works.
Our products continue to make an impact because customers like you are so passionate about them. So thanks for taking the time to review these updates. As always, we welcome your feedback - please share your thoughts, comments, and questions below!
Cheers,
Michael
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