Transitioning all Jira Cloud users to the new issue view

[#1]

Update as of May 19, 2021:

Hi everyone,

My name is Loretta Brunette and I have recently joined Atlassian as a Product Manager working on the new issue view in Jira. Apologies we have been silent on this community post. I have published a new post here. I look forward to continuing any discussions about new issue view in the comments section of this updated post.

See you there!

Loretta

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Hi Atlassian Community,

Today we’re announcing that from March 31, 2021, we’ll begin moving all users to the new issue view in Jira Cloud products (Jira Software, Jira Service Desk, and Jira Core). Shortly after that, we’ll remove access to the old issue view.

The new issue view has progressed a long way in the past year. We’ve improved its performance and added your most requested features like web links, permalinks, and comment permissions. And before removing the old view, we’ll be making more improvements to the layout, bringing back tabs, and giving you more control over where fields appear on your issues.

We want to let you know about the key dates and upcoming changes well in advance so you and your team can prepare and get the most out of the new experience.

What does this mean for you?

From March 31, 2021, we’ll be moving users to the new issue view. We recommend every user be ready to use only the new view by this date.

Key dates

• October 2020: We’ll notify all users on the old issue view with the removal date and other details.

• October 2020-March 2021: We’ll keep everyone updated about the upcoming change and let you know when we ship new features.

• March 31, 2021: We’ll start moving users to the new issue view. For a limited time, you’ll still be able to temporarily click through to the old issue view.

For Jira admins — to give you more control over the change — we’ll be launching a setting that lets you move all of your users to the new view at once, and another to suppress our messages to your users about the transition.

How has the new issue view improved?

Over the past year, your feedback has helped us bring great improvements to the new issue view. Here are some highlights.

Comment permissions

Get the right information to the right people. You can now choose which groups of people can view a particular comment in the new issue view.

Web links

Not only can you link other issues, Confluence pages (if you have Confluence), and content from other apps to an issue, but you can now link any URL.

Link to comments and work log entries

Need to share comments or work log entries with people quickly? We’ve made it possible in one click. Just click the copy icon next to any activity item, and paste it to your team.

Pinned fields

No more scrolling through long lists of fields. You can now pin your most important and frequently used fields to the top of the issue view, including the ones under the “Show more” link.

Pinned fields are currently being rolled out and may not be on your site yet. It’ll be available to all users in the coming weeks.

Attachments

You can now view all your attachments in a list, including those from fields, comments, and work log entries. If you want to work with them on your own device, you can also now download them all at once.

Viewing attachments in a list is currently being rolled out and may not be on your site yet. It’ll be available to all users in the coming weeks.

Upcoming improvements

We’ve prioritized our roadmap to bring great enhancements to the new issue view over the next year. Here are some areas we’re focusing on before we remove the old view.

• Issue layout: We know the importance of quickly finding the fields you need, and that the new issue view isn’t suitable for every user yet. Our layout improvements will make it easier to find and read issue content.

• Performance: We’re making ongoing investments to improve the new issue view’s performance to make sure it reaches and surpasses the old view.

• Additional features: We’re building the most important advanced features in the old view that aren’t yet in the new issue view. These include voting, including subtasks in time estimation, updating the time remaining field when apps are installed, comment and activity sorting, and edit resolution field.

You can track progress on specific features by watching linked issues on JRACLOUD-70555. Any issue marked as “in progress” will be completed prior to transitioning to the new issue view.

Design concept

As we work to bring more enhancements to the new issue view, we want to share with you some key features that are currently in development.

1. Field tabs

Tabs are most useful when displayed on the top left hand side of an issue — like they were in the old issue view. We’re moving tabs from their current 'glance' location to take a more prominent position on the new issue view.

2. Flexible issue layout

You and your team will have more control over where fields are displayed. Admins will be able to move an issue’s fields between the left and right hand sides of the new issue view

3. Field grouping

Once field groups are introduced, admins will be able to organise the long list of fields into easily digestible chunks. Each user can expand and collapse these groups, reducing clutter on an issue with less important fields out of view.

4. Global loop transitions

Global loop transitions are coming to the new issue view, they’ll be available alongside the status dropdown. This will expose powerful actions that admins have set up with loop transitions directly on the new issue view.

5. Voting

Voting is a key workflow of many of our users and we are bringing this to the new issue view.

What’s next for Jira admins

We’ll send you an email and notify you in Jira when the new admin controls are available. You’ll be able to suppress our messaging to your users about the change, and to move all your users to the new issue view at once before March 31, 2021, if you so choose.

What happens now?

Give yourself more time to get used to the new issue view. Turn it on and give it a try. We think you’ll like the improvements, and you can switch back and forth for now anyway.

If there’s any way we can make the transition easier for you, any problems you’d like us to fix, or any concerns in general, leave us feedback in the comments section below. We’d love to hear how we can help you.

Keep an eye on this page. We’ll keep you informed and add any important updates here.

[Drew Cottrell]

This is really upsetting I'll open a support ticket to complain but the new issue view is not at parity yet and without https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-71630 you're creating a nightmare for large implementations, our official internal policy is still to not support the new issue view as configuration overhead is not scalable.

I could find more JRA tickets but as usual you're rushing this roll out Atlassian.

[Taranjeet Singh]

Great to hear and see more improvements coming in for the new Jira issue view in Jira Cloud! I think it still has a long way to go before bringing it at par with what JIRA users are used to in JIRA Server and Data-Center editions.

[Drew Cottrell]

@Matthew Canham can you share roadmap or remaining JRA ticket release plan that aligns with your rollout timeline?

[Natasha Liberman]

This is sad, sad news :(

[Drew Cottrell]

Hear hear! @Natasha Liberman 

@Matthew Canham sorry I know you may be new to Atlassian but you've really stepped in it here and there's long history of sharing marketing-style updates like this without backup of actual delivery plan.  All the more ironic you're rolling out premium features for this but not using internally and being transparent here.  Do we need to pay for premium support to see your premium roadmap LOL?

[Matthew Canham]

Hi @Drew Cottrell thank you for your comments.

Our team will be addressing JRACLOUD-71630 prior to transitioning all users across to the new issue view. I'm interested to hear more about how a shared configuration would be useful. What we've heard from other users is that they have many projects which all share a common screen configuration. Is this the case for your Jira instance?

Apart from JRACLOUD-71630, I'd be grateful if you could share any other problems that are preventing you from transitioning to the new issue view.

One of the reasons that we wanted to announce the transition from the old view to the new view early is so that we are able to adjust our roadmap based on the response from the community. Closer to the time of the transition we will look to publish a roadmap that lists specific JRACLOUD tickets. For now though, we are committing to our higher-level priorities of issue layout, performance, and additional features.

Kind regards,

Matt

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @Matthew Canham ,

What is the impact of this change on screen scheme configuration in classic projects, if any?

[Matthew Canham]

Hi @Walter Buggenhout,

There will be no impact on screen scheme configuration in classic projects, all configuration for classic projects will remain as it is today.

Thanks for the question!

[Walter Buggenhout]

Thanks for clarifying that, @Matthew Canham. So just to make sure I understand well: the new issue view will only be pushed through in next-gen projects? Or also in classic projects, but with the nuance that there will still be separate issue screens, but displayed with the features of the new issue view as well? 

[Matthew Canham]

@Walter Buggenhout, the new issue view will become the only available issue view for all project types (including classic) however the configuration experience will not change from what it is today. You will still have access to classic configuration (with custom fields, screen schemes, etc...) along with project-level issue layout configuration.

Please let me know if there's anything else that I can clarify.

[Dmitry Astapkovich _Colined_]

Just curious: do you plan to fix those double scroll bars on the right? And the one in the center... could be a custom one, a bit less massive may be

[Matthew Canham]

Hi @Dmitry Astapkovich _Colined_,

Thank you for bringing this up. The double scroll bar on the right is a known issue when viewing an issue in the issue navigator view. As we prioritise this bug against all of our other priorities you can keep an eye on this JRACLOUD ticket for updates: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-75198

[Walter Buggenhout]

@Matthew Canham ,

If you plan to make the resolution field editable, I assume it will be possible to disable that as well? Setting the resolution is an essential part of marking an issue as done and should not be set freely at other stages in the workflow.

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @Matthew Canham,

Me again. Sorry to keep getting back to the same topic again. I've done some checks and would like to be very specific about my concerns here:

The above screenshot comes from a current cloud site. You mentioned earlier that nothing changes with regards to classic project configuration, but screen schemes do allow to configure 3 different screens: 1 for creating / editing / viewing issues. The new issue view reduces this to just 1 screen.

Although the consistent ordering of fields across those screens is a good thing, there are very good reasons to have multiple screens for different operations as well:

1. on a create issue screens only show the fields a user needs to create an issue. Having too many fields there does not contribute to clarity and ease of use;
2. on an edit screen remove custom fields that should not be edited anymore after issue creation. This is a very common use case with many of our customers in lots of scenarios

What solution do you have to offer for these scenarios after reducing the set of screens to just 1? Or does the screen configuration really interact with the issue layout and is it just the messaging on this page that is confusing?

Also, relating to a previous comment by @Drew Cottrell at the top of this thread and to the JRACLOUD-71630 issue you refer to yourself: many organizations rely on consistent screen configuration for each issue type across their organization. The screen scheme used in the above screen shot example is effectively shared across more than 50 Jira projects. Why? To make a story a story, no matter what project you are working on in your organization. To facilitate easy transition of people into different teams by creating a sense of familiarity. Also to allow for consistent reporting across projects, usually to team, program or executive management.

Suppose our organization now decides to introduce 2 new custom fields, will I have to update the configuration of over 50 projects individually to make sure we keep that same consistent concept of a story over the entire organization? From that perspective I totally understand both the Drew and the nearly 200 people who voted for the aforementioned issue that the configuration - as it is - does not scale. 

[Mia]

Well !@#$%^ I was hoping you'd forget to remove the old issue view..... I still don't like the new issue view, which I have tried using several times.

Very disappointing news.

[Tomáš Vrabec]

This is such a fail. I do have few customers who stayed on Cloud only because of old view. For example, typical deal-breaker is the fact, that sub-task are not counted into parent. JRACLOUD-70150 this is not the best step guys ;-) This year, I migrated 4 companies from Cloud to Server. You are going in wrong direction. 

[Sean Russell]

This is  very disappointing . We only use the old view as there are far too many issues with the new view . 

[Ben]

We have a lot of custom fields, and the new view requires us to scroll all up and down to see the same information that used to be in a concise area. However, it also spreads things out even more, causing us to scroll A LOT. Any plan to address that before the required switch?

[Scott Buchanan]

@Matthew Canham Unlike many here, I'm a big fan of the new issue view. However, I do hope you are able to address this issue before making the switch: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-69567

Unlike some other issues that are inconveniences (even serious ones), this just absolutely blocks users from making a common, necessary change to the issue (clearing a due date).

[Jeanne Howe]

@Matthew Canham I have the same concerns are @Walter Buggenhout 

Forcing us into this view while there is still 100+ open issues with the view is disheartening. It is very clear that Atlassian themself does not work in nor use the cloud versions of their products. Perhaps if you did, you would be finding the means to fix all of the issues you have caused with the new UI, the new navigation, and the macro changes (that goes for both Jira and Confluence).

Two (ginormous) price increases in two years and all new functionality and bug fixes are going into "Premium" subscriptions. Functionality being added to "Standard" subscriptions is minimal, and quit frankly insulting, to your long-time loyal customers

[Sergio Palacio]

bad news.

[Paul Da Silva]

This is an absolute deal breaker for any project utilizing custom fields. Stuffing it all to the right, when the main content to the left is near empty, is a bad move. Especially for bug tracking. Who doesn't use custom fields?

[Ricardo Gomes]

Definitely a deal-breaker to us as well. There are thousands of complaints about limitations, issues, bugs, UI/UX issues, etc all over the web. Not to mention the infinity of bug tickets that are not resolved by Atlassian yet.

This is going to be a disaster for companies using a lot of customizations in Jira.

Atlassian, the power of customization was the main reason why you got this far with Jira, and now you're removing that ability. Do you realize what that means to your users?

Catastrophic news!! 

Just sad that all the feedback from admins that should matter the most has been ignored!

[Benjamin Bridgeman]

Well, guess we'll be moving to Asana then...

[Daniel Marcolesco]

Hello brave reader! Stay strong while reading this thread, there's a lot of anger. Some is probably justified, but I don't know enough to say for sure.

Have a nice weekend 👋