Now GA - try the new issue transition experience in Jira!

[#1]

Update on October 23, 2024

Thank you, community, for your feedback and comments on this post. To address the top 3 asked questions below: (1) Support for Asset field: The old transition screens will continue until the Asset field is supported on the new transition screens. (2) Shortcuts: We’re working on improving the shortcuts experience, and changes will be rolled out soon. (3) Default selection between ‘internal comment’ and ‘reply to customer’: We’ve made a conscious choice to make the default option consistent with the issue view in JSM projects. This reduces the risk of accidentally sharing sensitive details publicly. We do recognize the need for the ability to configure this, so we’d urge you to vote/watch on JSDCLOUD-14319.

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Hey community,

We’ve been working on some exciting updates for the issue transition experience in Jira. Back in May, we released these changes to a small group of customers through an Early Access Program. Since then, we’ve been collecting and working through their feedback to make the new experience as robust as possible. Now, it’s being released to all customers across Jira and Jira Service Management.

The issue transition experience - what is it?

An issue transition is a process that happens when you select the status dropdown on an issue and change its status from one thing to another. For example, you might change an issue from “TO DO” to “IN PROGRESS” when you start working on it.

Jira admins can edit these transition processes by adding screens that ask users to enter certain details or update existing information (known as “field values”) whenever somebody transitions an issue. For example, before transitioning an issue to an “OBSOLETE” status, a knowledge worker might be required to enter additional information explaining why the issue is now obsolete.

What’s changing?

The key changes in the new issue transition experience are:

1. Search functionality in field values: Now, you can quickly search for specific values inside fields rather than scrolling through an entire list of options.

2. Privacy improvements for comments in service projects: Comments in service projects are now only visible to internal users by default. This reduces the risk of someone on your team accidentally sharing sensitive details.

3. Use Atlassian Intelligence in rich text fields: Generate, transform, and summarize content in comments and other rich text fields using Atlassian Intelligence.

4. Better commenting: Add richer comments using the new WYSIWYG ADF editor with / keyboard shortcuts.

5. Reference attachments in comments: You can now reference existing attachments when adding a new comment as part of an issue transition.

6. Feedback collector: We’ve added a feedback collector to the issue transition screen so it’s easy for you to tell us what’s working and what isn’t.

7. Faster performance: The new issue transition experience is faster than before, so you can update issues quickly and get on with your work.

8. Modernized look and feel: The new issue transition screen has been designed to be consistent with the issue create and view screens, delivering a more cohesive experience across Jira.

9. Accessibility: To improve accessibility with screen readers, the first focus is on the entire screen instead of the first editable field.

How can I try the new issue transition experience?

To activate the new experience:

1. In Jira, select your profile picture or initials, then select Personal settings

2. Scroll down to Jira labs and switch the toggle ON for the New issue transition experience

This will only activate the new experience for a single user (i.e. you). If you’d like to activate the new issue transition experience for all users on your Jira site, please contact Atlassian support.

Can I switch back to the old experience?

We will gradually phase out the old experience and replace it with the new one. However, you can temporarily switch back to the old experience if something doesn’t work for you.

Here’s how:

1. In Jira, select your profile picture or initials, then select Personal settings

2. Scroll down to Jira labs and switch the toggle OFF for the New issue transition experience

📣 Please send us feedback to tell us why you’re switching back! We want to know about any problems so that we can fix them.

Upcoming improvements & changes

• Support for more fields:

  • Jira Service Management fields: Assets, Services, Customer Organisation, Request Language

  • App fields: Forge Number, Forge String, Forge Multi-strings, Forge Group, Forge Groups, Forge Single-user, Forge Multi-user, Connect App Text, Connect App Rich-text, Connect App Number, Connect App String, Connect App Single-select, Connect App Multi-select, Connect App Read-only

• Canned responses for service projects: Agents can reuse predefined responses to instantly reply to frequently asked questions.

• Transition screens on team-managed projects: Soon, you’ll be able to configure issue transition screens for team-managed software and business projects.

• Compatibility with Marketplace apps: We’re adding support for Marketplace apps so you can use the new issue transition experience everywhere.

• Workflow validators and post functions: The new issue transition experience uses REST v3 API with ADF format instead of REST v2 API with Plain String format. This change primarily affects workflow validators and post functions. Read more about the impact of these changes and how to work around them.

As mentioned above, although we’re rolling out the new experience to all sites, at this stage we’re not enabling it by default for any user. However, if you’re an admin and would like to exclude your Jita site from the current rollout, please contact Atlassian support.

Tell us your feedback

If you’ve tried the new issue transition experience, we’d love to hear your thoughts! Please send us your feedback in Jira by selecting the feedback button on the top-right corner of the issue transition screen. If you have any questions, please comment on this post or raise a support ticket.

Thanks as always,
Arbaaz Gowher
Product Manager, Jira

[Lars Maehlmann]

Hello @Arbaaz Gowher 
Thank you for the update, it sounds fantastic. I have a question about the update: Are there any plans to introduce canned responses for agents to use when they close tickets and need to inform the customer*?
Cheers,
Lars

*Soon?, you’ll be able to configure issue transition screens for team-managed software and business projects.

[David Berclaz]

Hello @Arbaaz Gowher 

Thanks for the good news, it will make our life much better!

What about "Canned Responses", which is currently only available in the JSM comment WYSIWYG?

Are you also going to add it to the transitions WYSIWYG? It would be especially useful when we resolve a ticket and want to use a Canned Response.

Thanks for your help,

David

[Cedric Weber]

Privacy improvements for comments in service projects: Comments in service projects are now only visible to internal users by default. This reduces the risk of someone on your team accidentally sharing sensitive details.

For example when I use the transition "Ask customer" to a status "Waiting for Customer" this should not be the case. Please let us set this per transition whether the comment defaults to internal or customer! Coming from Data Center where we fixed this via JS workaround I currently see many comments that are internal while having information for the customer. Just a bad user experience, "DONT MAKE ME THINK."

[František Špaček _MoroSystems_]

Good news, but I abolsutely agree with @Cedric Weber

It would be nice to finally have more options to set directly in the workflow - be it purerly as an properties, thats okay for experienced users. But every company, even sometimes every project within the same company, sometimes needs different default options.

Thanks!

[Chris Young]

Nice - I think we will try this out.

[Trudy Claspill]

Upcoming improvements & changes

• Support for more fields:

  • Jira fields: Epic Status, Epic Summary, Epic Color

Why would support be added for Epic Status and Epic Color when those fields are being sunset?

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-articles/Upcoming-changes-to-epic-fields-in-company-managed-projects/ba-p/1997562

[Paul Heath Armengol]

Does this "new issue transition experience" allow displaying screens during approval transitions, so users can add comments and justify their approval decisions?

I believe this issue to be a major bottleneck for most of the companies approval workflow, since very rarely is anything a YES/NO without justification.

[Yatish Madhav]

Thanks for this - looks good so far. Appreciate the update. 

Looking forward to the Canned response update and the Compatibility with Marketplace apps

Thanks again

[Susan Waldrip]

Hi @Paul Heath Armengol , a request for this capability was made to Atlassian at JSDCLOUD-6989, you can vote for it there. 😊

[Paul Heath Armengol]

@Susan Waldrip I did.... back in 2021! 

[Pavel Pristupa]

Tell me, on the 2nd point. Is it only users with the "USER" access level who have access to internal comments? Do users with the "Client" level not have access?

[Frank Sessler]

Looking forward to use Canned Responses in a transition screen. 

[Yatish Madhav]

Thanks for this again - I think 1 think I noticed is that if the transition screen only has a comment needed, I add a comment and then press Ctrl Enter and it comments and closes. This is not available in the new experience. Please help in adding this back.

Thank you

[Jonas Lerch]

The change to internal as default was unexpected and should be at least adjustable.

[Jonas Lerch]

Regression: The control + return hotkey is absent

[Tomislav Tobijas _Koios_]

Hi,

Just to confirm - new transition experience has the same 'confirm' button label named Update? Previous transition experience had the button label same as the screen name. This was noted by some of our clients so just wanted to confirm. This will be same for all screens now and cannot be customized?

Cheers,
Tom

[Pieter Goeminne]

I would like to note that in the new experience, it's not ideal that "Internal comment" is the default for service management projects. As a result, when we close our tickets, the user doesn't receive a public comment. I had already reported this issue during the beta version but haven't received any response. I suggest that there should be an option to require a public comment when closing a ticket.

[Todd Thomas]

I noted that this change is for "Jira". I assume this includes Jira Service Management. If this is true (and hopefully it is), having comments as Internal by default for JSM is an issue since the primary function of this platform is for public communication with customers whereas Jira (formerly Jira Software) was a back-end tool meant for devs.

If this behavior could be controlled per project, this would likely result in the most success since some projects are internal and/or have confidentiality requirements whereas service projects with a high volume of requests that are primarily customer-facing need to be able to make public comments as the default.

@Arbaaz Gowher Could you address the concern for changing the default commenting behavior? Having a new transition experience will be helpful in so many ways (thank you!), but this is one change that would benefit from having some level of control and customization.

[Ashli Foust]

Piggy-backing off of Paul's comment, above, I think it would be really helpful if the comment associated with an Approval Transition or Status Transition were, in some way - be it even just visually - linked to the respective Transition from where it came. 

For example, if a ticket is transitioned from Pending Approval to Rejected and the transition screen showed up requiring a comment, the comment that was made should maybe show something like "Approval Request REJECTED and comment added" in the list of comments and maybe even in the Approvals tab. This would make it so much easier to marry up why a comment is being added and if it's still a relevant comment or if it's just in the comment history for audit purposes.

[Maria Yepez]

All of our pending tickets disappeared.

[Jolene Hart]

I'm finding the choices for the time an issue transitioned to be too restrictive.  For instance, I moved an issue to 'Done' status at 9:41 this morning after completing QA.  However, the only time choices available were on the half-hour, e.g., 9:30 or 10 AM.

Why have a way to indicate the time of day and then force it to be wrong?

[Marcel E_]

This is the ongoing feature request to the "2. Privacy improvements for comments... (internal comments by default)" topic:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDCLOUD-14319

[Dan Heffernan]

I concur with what other end users have said regarding "internal note" being the default when putting the ticket in a different status. Our IT department has been negatively impacted by that change. It would be great if this could be fixed to default to "respond to customer". I already switched back to the previous iteration and provided feedback as to why I have done so, but putting this out there for added visibility.

Thanks,

Dan 

[Birger Robrecht [avono AG]]

Is there any update on when we can expect canned responses and asset custom fields on the transition screen?

Thanks.

[Yatish Madhav]

Hey @Arbaaz Gowher - can the new experience please keep the Ctrl Enter shortcut to save a comment if that is the only field for the transition to take place? Otherwise, i need to either use the mouse OR need to press Tab Tab Enter ... whereas Ctrl Enter was just more convenient. Thank you