Learn what’s changed in Jira cloud with in-product release notes

[#1]

I’m Sam Irons, a Lead Content Designer working on Atlassian’s portfolio of Agile and DevOps products. I’m excited to write to you about the new release note experience we’ve rolled out to our Jira cloud products.

We've updated our release note experience, bringing it directly into Jira. Now, release notes are contextual, based on what features are delivered to your Jira site specifically.

You can view the most recent 3 months of feature announcements, improvements, bug fixes, experiments and more directly in Jira. To do so:

1. Log into your Jira site.

2. Navigate to a project.

3. Select Help (?) from the top navigation bar.

4. Select Find out what's changed in Jira.

Key changes

• Find out what's changed in your Jira Software, Jira Service Management, and Jira Work Management products directly from Jira's Help menu

• We publish Jira's in-product release notes exactly when a change has be rolled out to your specific Jira site.

• Filter, sort, and view new features, improvements, fixes, removals, and experiments from the past 3 months directly inside Jira.

Benefits

• Stay up to date with the latest and greatest from Atlassian. You can easily find out about new features and improvements that make their work in Jira faster and more efficient.

• Stop waiting for a change or guessing when it will hit your Jira site. Our release notes are published to your Jira site exactly when the change is rolled out to your users.

• Stay in context and focused on your work. Don’t worry about Googling and searching our support websites to find out about our latest developments.

Fun fact: Over 90,000 people viewed Jira's in-product release notes in its first week alone.

Why we're making this change

At Atlassian, we're customer-obsessed. Our teams are constantly trying to find ways that will improve the way we inform our customers about the new features and improvements that can help your team work more efficiently in Jira.

We're also invested in the future of software development, designing and delivering our products using modern agile and DevOps practices. That includes practicing and perfecting continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD). We were happy to take on the challenge of delivering change communications in our products, where autonomous teams build and deploy features, improvements, and fixes daily. Our new release notes experience puts communication of their efforts right alongside the ultimate source of truth - the code itself.

We can't prove that we're the first to do this. But, we have a hunch that we're the first to do so at scale.

While all that excites us. We're much happier that we can make your experience of finding out about our newest features a better one. We’re excited to help reduce change communication work for our admins by delivering release notes directly to their teams - in-product. And, we're happy to help developers and project managers learn a new trick that can make them faster and more efficient in their daily work.

Change management advice

Our release notes blog will continue to publish a weekly round-up of changes for all Atlassian cloud products, including Confluence, Bitbucket, and Compass. For notifications of changes to those products, continue to watch that page.

Let us know what you think

Our team is dedicated to improving the change management experience for all Jira users. Please leave us any feedback in the comments below.

[edwin vasquez]

Awesome addition!

[Yatish Madhav]

Nice - thanks for the update

[Fabio Campos]

Good job guys!

[Mykenna Cepek]

I find this very helpful. It's been a challenge to try to "stay current" across all our Atlassian cloud products in-use. Since it falls on me to highlight new functionality of value to us, and educate users to realize that value, I appreciate the ease of information delivery.

Users also get to self-serve, potentially finding new value on their own. Not as likely, but supportive of the goal to maximize product value. Thanks!

[Dave Mathijs]

Just noticed it, this is great for users & admins, well done!

[Jean-Christophe]

Thank you for your post.

[Nikki Zavadska _Appfire_]

This is a great way to stay up to date with new changes and it saves so much time, thank you! 🙏 

[Antônio Duarte]

Indeed, a useful (and well expected) addition!

Great job!

[Justin Couto]

We use Jira and several Atlassian products and like them.  The one thing that bugs me about Atlassian is how you say you are customer-obsessed. That comes across as not genuine to me and many others that have had feature requests in for years that have tons +1s that never get addressed. Atlassian doesn't weigh in or keep their customers informed about why they won't do something that so many need and want.

For example, there has been a request for allowing Sub-Task types in the self-managed Jira since it was first released.  Doing this would enable better board and projects management for so many customers.  Despite this fact, they stay silent, they don't add the feature or won't explain why they won't.  Then you see posts like this where they claim they are customer-obsessed.  They simply are not. You can declare you are something all you want, but it is your actions that show who you are.

[Anirudh Lakshmeesh]

Great job team! Keep rocking in every release

[Roland Schroth]

Nice addition, thanks

[jeffbfeldman]

I definitely thought this was going to be a new feature for users to create release notes lol

[Pierre Lemay]

Hi,

I think the release note blog is way too long, as if nobody is actually maintaining it.

For instance, the latest one contains things that are there since months and shouldn't be there anymore.

(https://confluence.atlassian.com/cloud/blog/2022/03/atlassian-cloud-changes-mar-7-to-mar-14-2022).

For instance, the entry "Android app update v2.13" appeared first in the 2021-12-13 report

The entry "Hiding the Like button on archived pages" is there since 2020-11-16.

Too much noise from such a page.  

So the real question remains "who is this intended for?" 

If it is intended for real humans, then it should be cleaned regularly.

[Allison Carlson]

@sirons  - Is there a way to identify which changes in the Cloud Release Notes are bug fixes?

I looked through 6 months' worth of Release Notes on this page:  https://confluence.atlassian.com/cloud/blog

and don't see any that indicate 'bug' or 'fix'.

When checking issues in https://jira.atlassian.com/browse,  I see Bugs that are marked as Done, in the same timeframe as the release notes range,  so would expect to see them in the Blog Release notes.

Please advise.

Thank you!

[Isabelle P _biotech_]

It would be helpful to specific to scroll down after the random help vignettes to find the "find out what's changed in Jira" in this help page. Or better, to move the quick suggestions above the random vignettes as the search bar is a clear invitation imho.