My Top 10 Favorite Features in the New Jira Software Cloud

[#1]

This morning, our CEO Scott Farquhar shared exciting news about a reimagined experience in Jira Software. As Principal Product Manager for Jira Software, I wanted to re-share his blog post here on Atlassian Community and invite your questions, comments, and feedback.

There are so many awesome features in the new Jira project experience and I can’t wait to see how your team puts them to use. In an effort to help orient new users around the new Jira, I put together a list of the top 10 features I think will be most powerful and game-changing for your team.

Without further ado, and in no particular order, here are my favorite ten features in the new Jira:

• Flexible, shiny boards. Redesigned and rebuilt to be simple to start, yet powerfully configurable to support more advanced ways of working, the new boards in Jira represent a whole generation of improvements targeting ease of use and flexibility. Get started by creating a next-gen project.

• Totally redesigned issues. We’ve re-architected the Jira issue to intuitively organize information into logical and consistent areas. Open an issue, quickly get context, then take action. Take a tour of the new Jira issues.

• Simply powerful project configuration. Complex configuration has gone out the window and been replaced with a whole new way to customize Jira issue types and custom fields. Easily add your own issue types, give them an icon and intuitively set up custom fields using the new drag and drop interface. Read more about managing next-gen projects.

• Project independent configuration. Delegate project-level administration to project owners and team leads, empowering people in teams to independently tune & optimize their Jira project for their needs as many times as the want without impacting the configuration of other projects. Learn more about how we've reimagined project configuration.

• Features that let you run agile, your way. Backlogs, sprints, reports, roadmaps, and estimation can be toggled on / off with the click of a button, unshackling teams from rigid implementations of Agile. Teams are empowered and encouraged to try popular frameworks such as scrum or kanban, or mix it up and develop their own flavor of agile. Learn more about how to toggle the features, and how to use each of the features.

• Roadmaps that are connected to real work. How much time do you waste on simply updating your roadmaps? You can now easily sketch out the big picture roadmap view right from within next-gen projects, with the peace of mind that your roadmap is connected to reality inside of Jira. Learn how to use Roadmaps.

• Adding in guardrails for the team with rules. Automate away mundane tasks, as well as reduce the potential for error and re-work by defining a rule. For instance, you can easily add a rule that automatically updates an issue's field or assignee based on the column it is moved into. Learn how to add rules to your next-gen board,

• Visualizing work in progress. Images added to your issues will display as card cover images on the board. Easily group work using swimlanes, by assignee or epic, to get a sense of who is working on what, and progress on a feature. BONUS: you can now rename Epics to whatever you like in next-gen project settings. Many customers tell us they like to rename them to Features. Read more about images on cards.

• Continuous visibility into release status. New Feature flag integrations have been added to Jira’s tracking capabilities, with CI/CD integrations coming soon. The new Releases panel enables powerful issue tracking all the way to what many would argue is the real definition of done - tracking to the moment working software goes live in the hands of customers. Learn how to integrate with feature flags.

• Ability to star your favorite projects, boards, issues, filters, and dashboards. Create direct navigation paths to work items that are relevant to you, making it super easy to find and resume work.

• Jira on the go. (I can’t leave this one out of the Top 10...). Download the Jira cloud for mobile app for iOS or Android to stay up-to-date and connected through notifications on your phone. Interact with your team from anywhere to keep things humming. Read more about what's available on mobile.

Feel free to add to my list, or share what my team should be working on next.

[Daniel Pérez]

How can i see new features? It's only for mobile?

[Jason Wong]

Hi @Daniel Pérez

Glad you asked - most of the key features mentioned above are on next-gen projects which are available on both desktop and mobile. 

To get started, we've put this page together to step you through creating your first next-gen project 

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Next-gen-articles/Getting-started-with-next-gen-projects/ba-p/914448

Let us know what you think!

[Rafael Franco]

Hi Jason,

It's a shame such limited amount of issue types are available. We need at least a User Picker, Dropdowns, etc.

Also, it is not possible to convert a current project to a new-age one which is obviously frustrating. 

All in all, I think this a step in the right direction since it's much simpler, but it's still very much unusable at this point.

Cheers

[Henrik Öquist]

Hey, great to see these continued updates in this new experience. Can't wait for some of that to flow over to older Kanban and Scrum projects (like screen configuration and such).

I don't understand the comment on the roadmap thing though. That seems to me totally disconnected from the work done on the tasks within those epics. Am I missing something? Is there any documentation I haven't seen regarding how the tasks inside of an epic translate into the bigger picture without manually updating the roadmap?

[Block_ Greg]

Doesn't seem to be fully functional with Firefox 62. Can't load Test Metrics or Plan a Test Cycle. Older versions are ok, and you can use Chrome, but something looks broken with the latest FF version.

TypeError: ZEPHYR.TEST.UTIL.versions is undefined[Learn More]

Using Chrome...When you are in the Test Cycle Summary and add a test, the test doesn't show up in the list until you manually refresh the page.

[Jason Wong]

@Rafael Franco 

On issue types and the options for customisation - we’ll be sure to be adding more capabilities over time.

You’ll be pleased to hear that the drop downs you requested are coming soon!

For visibility on what’s coming next, please check out our public roadmap https://www.atlassian.com/roadmap/jira-software#result-87ee9848

• We recently released Epics, which btw can now be renamed. 
• Next inline are sub-tasks and required fields.

Please continue to send us feedback on other capabilities you’d like to see us add.

The way we’re prioritising the roadmap right now is to first address primary needs by getting more capabilities and options into next-gen projects. This will make the next-gen projects more useful for you. I’m sure that as more features are added, the demand for help to move from Classic to next-gen will increase and we will need look at making it easier for you to move.

[Jason Wong]

@Henrik Öquist Glad you’re enjoying the updates we’ve been shipping to the new experience. Be sure to visit the public roadmap to get more visibility on what’s coming next.

On Roadmaps, there are no automations / algorithms to reconcile epic start and end dates with child issues. This does mean that timeline view needs to be manually updated. It’s still a new feature with many more improvements to come. The product teams here like to zone in on opportunities for reducing manual work so watch this space!

When we say it’s connected to the real work, it’s the parent to child issue structure we’ve put in place with the way epics work in next-gen projects. It’s also about placing the Roadmap as a first class item, side-by-side with the teams’ backlogs and boards, and encouraging teams to keep their roadmaps tracking as close as possible to what’s really going on in their sprints/iterations.

[Jason Wong]

@Block_ Greg thanks for letting us reporting what's going on with Test Metrics or Plan a Test Cycle on those browsers. We'll take a look into the issue and work with Zephyr to resolve.

[Hari Suminto]

And what options are available to those who have been using classic Jira project? Can/should we change the project type?

[Arkadiusz Poński]

Are new features (e.g. roadmap) available for existing projects? 

[Henrik Öquist]

I'm definitely also interesting in learning more about how these features will trickle to legacy Kanban and Scrum projects. Should we initialize a move, or should we wait? :)

For me the trigger event here is that when we get:

1. child tasks/issues
2. (hopefully) the ability to connect existing tasks to Epics (similar to how it's worked previously)
3. as well as manage them from the backlog (and create new ones from there, also similar to how it's worked... those two points are highlights in Jira and would be a shame to lose)

So yeah, with those additions I'm leaving the old project types behind for all but our core development processes that needs the full Scrum treatment. 

For many other projects, these additions would make it a no-brainer to move to the new format.

[Jason Freeman]

How does this affect Jira Service Desk?

We use Jira exclusively because of Jira Service Desk, so we'd like to know how 2.0 will impact us and our users.

[Scott Boomer]

More custom field options? IP based fields? What will change with Service Desk? Table features? 

Just a few things I am looking for.

[Lynn Stahl]

I'm really excited about a few things in the new JIRA, however i'm really NOT excited about the lack of workflows. As the JIRA master for a large web agency we have many clients and projects going on simultaneously. I need to ensure that EVERY project/board ticket is set up in the same way.

I need to be able to restrict which statuses can transition where and why and by whom. If i have to manually do this one every one of our 100+ projects I'll go insane. I'm already struggling because I can't globally set card colors by JQL, I can't imagine having to MANUALLY set up the entire board/project for every client we have.

[J. Caldwell]

Will the changes populate into the server editions?

[Jason Freeman]

@Lynn Stahl I don't keep up with Jira like I probably should because we just use it for JSD.  So, what you are saying is news to me.

So, to be clear, when you say "workflows," you mean being able to get approvals, transition to statuses based on those approvals, etc.?

If so, we will literally have to get rid of JSD because we 100% bought it because of workflows.  I really hope I am misunderstanding.

[Brian Abston]

So are you going to leave the self hosted behind? writing on the wall

[Dom Baldin [Adobe]]

These features are great. When will Enterprise customers get access to Jira 2.0 features? My customers are can hardly contain themselves ;) . 

- Adobe

[Samuel Engelman]

Based on these comments, it looks like Jira 2.0 is still a beta product. The features that make Jira what it is, are still missing. Based on their track record, I'm guessing we'll see a full product in the future.

[Lynn Stahl]

@Jason FreemanYou are not misunderstanding. In the new JIRA 2.0 there are no workflows as of right now. You must create a board, create your statuses and columns within that board. AFAIK, you can move tickets in any order and direction through the columns.

This is problematic for a few reasons:

I have a workflow where a ticket is in progress and can be moved to 'in review', at which point it either passes QA and can be moved to 'push to staging' or fails and can be moved to 'return to dev'. Both 'return to dev' and 'in progress' are in one column.

In this same workflow, you can not move a ticket from 'to do' to 'done' without having gone thru the workflow so that we know it was thoroughly tested. As it stands now in 2.0 anything goes and things can and will miss remediation.

[Jake Slack]

@Jason Wong Currently you are unable to sign BAAs for Cloud platform users (https://www.atlassian.com/trust/faq). With the doubling down on innovating on Cloud, will BAAs be available in the future?

We would like to get the latest and greatest but will be forced to move to a Server license if we cannot get a BAA.

Thanks!

[Jason Freeman]

@Lynn Stahl Unbelievable.  If that stays that way, we'll just have to transition to another product because that won't be sustainable for us.

I hate this because we just jumped on board about 12 months ago, so having to change to another product so quickly is going to be pretty rotten.

[Furqan Iqbal]

Hi - are Subtasks available in the new project types? @Lynn Stahl

[Ben Boucher]

+1 for legacy project migration/conversion tools. We rarely open all new projects, instead we persist and continue to use a small number of projects and shared Epics across them for ongoing business and development work.

If you hope to see broader adoption of these new features and experiences for existing JIRA customers, supporting project conversion is a must.

[Craig Grant]

As much as I like the simplicity for our content teams without being able to log work this is pretty much unusable for us right now.

Is there a plan to add logging work in the future, didn't see it on the public roadmap.