I'm Syed Masood, JSW Principal Product Manager, on all things Jira 8.0. AMA!

[SG]

Hello, Atlassian Community! 

My name is Syed Masood, and I am a Principal Product Manager for Jira Software and Data Center. Jira Software 8.0 is here–– and I know you have questions. I'm looking forward to answering all of them.

And we’re live! We’ll be on for the next two hours to answer questions. Please feel free to ask yours if you haven’t already! We’ll do our best to get to as many questions as we can.

Whether you’ve got questions about planning your upgrade to 8.0, want to hear more behind-the-scenes details about planning the release, or anything else - we’re here to chat! Check out the Jira 8.0 announcement blog for more info. 

[Meg Holbrook]

Hi Syed! I'd love to hear about how the Atlassian team is making upgrades easier for users. I know you all have done a lot in the last year to make this process smoother - but I'm curious to hear about the next steps. 

I know there was discussion about more 'smart upgrade' functionality. 

[SG]

Hi Meg!

Great question, and thanks for being the first one to ask! We have big ambitions to make upgrades easier for our customers, and we’re hopeful that our first few steps on this will start to make a difference in this area.

We recently introduced the pre-upgrade planning page in Jira Software Server, which helps streamline the process of upgrades by highlighting important steps and taking care of a number of manual checks for databases, licenses, modified files, etc.

Some of the 8.0 improvements - shorter index time and revised documentation - should help with upgrades, but it’s another small step.

One piece of feedback we are hearing often is about apps complicating the upgrade process. We are exploring the best ways to address this. Your feedback on this would be much appreciated!

[Meg Holbrook]

@SG - I agree that apps tend to complicate the process. In my organization, our apps are so critical to the success of the product, that we find ourselves greatly delaying upgrades until we have 100% certainty that our apps would be compatible. 

[Deleted user]

Hi @SG,

Going forward, what improvements have been made to streamline the upgrade process for Jira server and its add-ons?

Thanks for your time 

[SG]

Hey there Danny, good question! I’ve answered Meg’s version of it above.

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Re-Upcoming-AMA-with-Syed-Masood-JSW-Principal-Product/qaq-p/1004572/comment-id/322079#M322079

[Brendan Andrews]

Hi Syed,

Why does Atlassian seem to push story points versus time estimates rather than allowing choice?

(For example Kanban boards don't do time tracking and the 'new look' Jira puts story points into the form for issues even when they're not in the screen they're derived from.)

[SG]

Hi Brendan,

Good question!

I can’t speak for some of the newer Jira Cloud experiences, but on Jira Cloud classic projects and Server, you have the choice to configure estimates. Here’s an article that details how to change up your estimate options. For some more of our recommendations on estimating with Jira, I’d recommend this article from the Agile Coach.

[P_D_ Foerster]

Hi Syed,

the project archiving feature is currently for Data center only.
Would you consider bringing this feature to Jira server, too?

I'm asking because server are of course limited to one instance only. Therefore, reducing index size by removing projects and their issues / comments from the index would greatly help us server customers :)

One more thing:

Why is the release version '8.0.0.release'? This there any reason behind the '.release' or is this a bug?

Cheers,
Patrice

[SG]

Hi Patrice,

We are not planning to bring Archiving to Jira Server at this point.

Our process for deciding if a feature should be Data Center-only is outlined here – https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/prioritizing-features-server-data-center

Why is the release version '8.0.0.release'? This there any reason behind the '.release' or is this a bug?

This was a one time exception to work around a Marketplace quirk. Future versions will follow the X.Y.Z naming format.

[Paula Kingsley]

Hi! 

Is there any plan to prioritize and actively work on this soon? The public issue is 

When cloning an Epic, add the option to clone the linked Stories as well

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWSERVER-7721

It was created in February 2013, and at last count, has 170 comments. The comments are updated/added to regularly; the last one was yesterday.

There is obviously a critical need for this feature and I'm seeing a lot of frustration in the comments thread, which I share. 

A lot of us work with boilerplate epics/stories that are repeated ad infinitum, and it's an *incredible* pain to create them manually. 

Thanks,

Paula 

[Deleted user]

I vote for this!!!

[SG]

Thank you, Paula!

I fully empathise with your struggle with this issue. As the last update on that ticket says, we have this on our longer term roadmap. Feedback, such as yours, will help us prioritize issues more effectively.

[Paula Kingsley]

Hi Syed - thanks for the answer. I understand that this is on the 'longer term roadmap,' but that is incredibly vague and doesn't give me a lot of hope, to be honest. 

Given the number of "+1" comments in the public issue--it's gone up to 172 since I posted my question on February 12--how much additional user feedback can possibly be needed to prioritize this? 

[Deleted user]

If you consider the number of people who actually connect with the feedback system for any product is in the low single digits of its broader user base, any request with +172 points has the probably actual requestor base (i.e. a representative sample of the affected user base) is in the THOUSANDS.

So, I'll +1 @Paula Kingsley

question of ....can you be more specific about what is meant by "longer term roadmap".

If by "longer term", we mean....we'll get to it before we implement other things that make us look more competitive with Rally, not good. 

If by "longer term", we mean...There are some fundamental architectural concerns that we have to work up to, that will then enable us to more properly address this issue, then I can respect that. 

[Rachna Soni]

Hi Syed, We use JIRA extensively and I am currently exploring Next Gen project for few teams. Few questions:

1. What things to keep in mind when migrating classic project to Next Gen project?

2. What kind of reporting is available in next Gen project? We record Burn down, Cycle tiem and velocity. is it available? 

3. Is Next Gen project release is stable enough to migrate? I am bit worried incase there are major bugs. We follow Scrum and we have few boards with parallel enabled sprints.

4. How to configure roadmap board so that the highest priority epic shows up on the top? Something like Group by- Epic (available), and highest priority first (not available I guess).

Thanks

[SG]

Hi Rachna, thanks for checking out Jira Cloud’s next gen projects!

You’ve raised some good questions - I’ll need to get some help from the next gen team answering them. Thanks for your patience!

[Jodie Leonard]

Hi Syed

There was an update this past weekend that has changed our views. There is a button to click 'see the old view' but it is not staying and reverts back. This is causing us issues. Is there a way to make the old view stay or something that gives us the option to choose which view works best for us? 

[Eric Frank]

Hey Jodie,

It's funny you ask; I was able to figure this out last week. Saved my team the re-occurring headache.

1. From your Jira homepage, you can click on your icon on the bottom left and then click on "Personal settings".
2. In personal settings, scroll all the way down to the bottom. You'll see "Jira labs". Beneath that, you should see something like "New Jira issue view for software projects". Even if it looks like it's been turned off, it's on by default (which bothers me and others at my company). 
3. Click the button ON (green checkmark appears) and then OFF again (gray X appears). The new view should now be turned off, defaulting to the old view. Each user will need to do this themselves, as it's controlled by their own respective personal settings.

Follow up question: Is there a way we can keep the old view for years to come? Doesn't seem like many people on the forums have anything good to say about the new view. 

[SG]

Looks like you already got some help from @Eric Frank; hope that sorted out your view issues!

[Mohan Korakal]

Hi Syed, I'd like to hear how to download or view resource level activities added in Calender? I mean lets say one person has added all his holiday and training acvtivities in a calender. How to see all of his item for a month / year, in list view or text should be fine.

[SG]

Hi Mohan,

It sounds like your question is related to this app – https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1210975/calendar-for-jira-plan-team-activities

Is that correct?

[Ricky Lin]

Hi @SG. Thanks for doing this!

Does Atlassian have any plans to improve on the built-in Dashboard options, more specifically, on the gadgets and its layout options in its JIRA 8.x releases??

Dashboards are becoming more common and common for users of all levels and some of the things that I've found to be lacking are:

1. Custom Layout Options.  As of a long long time, we can only pick from 1, 2, or 3 columns and are locked into it.  Well, this sucks if I want to have 3 pie charts in 3 columns following by a 1 column Filter to keep the views clean.  https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-21201 seems to be the voting ticket for it and I'm very surprised that such a simple feature request is not being considered.  Thoughts?
2. More gadgets on basic metrics. One of the simplest ones being workload per user because the current workload pie chart doesn't really do what it's supposed to do correctly.  We ask our users to log in their hours on the tickets, yet we don't have a 100% reliable way to track these work logged based on what's currently available. I'm aware that there are plug ins that can help with this, but I see this being an essential and basic option??  https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/How-can-I-generate-a-report-of-time-logged-per-person-and-not/qaq-p/3093 is what I've found via research.

I'm a power user and a huge advocate for Jira, but the number of times I've had to look something up on a marketplace for basic features are way more than they should be.

[Jonathan Chatwin]

Syed,

thanks for the AMA on 8.0. Super excited to upgrade our Enterprise Environment in Data Center.

I just have one question: When is Issue Archiving coming for Data Center, any insider information on Timeline of this being delivered?

[SG]

Hi Jonathan, thanks for the question. Glad you’re excited about 8.0!

Issue archiving is near and dear to our hearts - we’re excited for it to be one of the first new pieces of functionality built on the 8.0 foundation. Stay tuned - we can’t say exactly when, but you should see an update in the next couple of feature releases. :)

[Cognizant Mobility]

Hi,

We have many JQL filters that use contains "~" operators like this [cf11032] ~ "AB-*" they didnt work since the upgrade to Version 8.0

Thank you!

[SG]

Hi ESG,

Could you please raise a support ticket for this? Thanks!

[Dustin Sawatzky]

Hi Syed,

I understand Jira uses resources more efficiently in Jira 8. Currently we're performing a nightly bounce and reindex. Is this still necessary? Do you have any recommendations on a maintenance schedule?

[Matt Doar]

I'm not sure that has ever been necessary, if the Jira server is set up correctly

[Justin Alex Paramanandan]

I guess the question is @Dustin Sawatzky , why are you scheduling a nightly bounce and reindex? What happened to the instance, which prompted you to schedule this?

[Dustin Sawatzky]

Hey Justin,

When we were new to Jira in 2016 we asked for some assistance about best practices at Adaptivist and this was one that was given to us. I'm sure a lot has changed since then.

[SG]

Hi Dustin,

As others have pointed out, this shouldn’t be necessary at all if you have setup your instance correctly.

With Jira 8.x, reindexing should become an even rarer event.

[Deleted user]

When is Jira going to address the disparity between the metaphors (Task is an Issue at the same level as "Story", but "Sub-tasks" of a "Story" cannot be reported upon with progress reports). What???

Here...you want a suggestion for how it should work.....look at this..

;tldr

Either you make the "Story" Swimline view, which groups by sub-tasks, also supported in the reports where your burn-up and burn-down show progress by "sub-task" (whereas right now you only show progress by "Story" or by "Issue").

Or....

You support a view for the Active Sprint to allow groups by Story with all "Relates to" links (i.e. Issues) pointing AT THAT STORY, categorized underneath it.

Fix this...and it will be INFINITELY more aligned with how the vast majority of Scrum Teams use their Scrum (Kanban) Board. 

Long version

What if you aren't using SUB-TASKS, because the Burn-Up reports don't report completed Sub-tasks as "completion" (which if it was working the way it SHOULD, it WOULD)?

How would one do that.

Story

^^

||

|| Relates to

||

\==== Task

||

\==== Task

How do we monitor progress when Jira operates so illogically in this regard?

If you're going to have Swimlanes to monitor Story progress by viewing Sub-tasks in the active Sprint, then support reporting the Burn-down or Burn-up via counting sub-tasks. 

[SG]

Hi Marcelo, thanks so much for your question and suggestions 

You’re right that there are some conceptual challenges with Jira terminology and hierarchy today. That has implications for what is included in Jira’s reports as well.

We are looking into this area of hierarchy of Jira issues and hope to be able to provide some more options for you soon!

Part of your question about reporting on sub-tasks are similar to Karl’s question above. Because subtasks don’t have estimates, they are not included in Jira’s default reporting. However, as you’ve pointed out, this creates challenges around tracking sub-task completion. If you’d like to see this change in the future, I’d encourage you to follow and/or vote on the feature suggestion I mentioned in the answer above (https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Re-Re-Upcoming-AMA-with-Syed-Masood-JSW-Principal-Prod/qaq-p/1013812/comment-id/324978#M324978).

[Deleted user]

I have followed and voted for the issue you mentioned, thank you. 

I find this particularly pesky, because it's a typical pattern for an agile team to decompose the WHAT (Story) into HOW's (Tasks/sub-tasks), and then to be able to visualize their progress to DONE is powerful (we actually print out the burn-up on a daily basis so they get a tangible record of what their progress looks like as it's changing). 

I encourage you all to pursue this with fervor. The fact that a plugin exists to "Count" (SumItUp) issues is preposterous. What's insulting is that one would have to pay for something that should be CORE to the OOTB experience. Guys, we pay good money for our Enterprise solutions, the CORE experience should include things like this, no question.

[Vignesh Kumar]

@SG Is there an option to track the "Time Spent" in a Status for issues that belong to JIRA Software projects? We got this requirement from many teams but we could not have an in built option till now. Some sort of SLAs for Software Projects.

[SG]

Hi Vignesh, the Average Time In Status Gadget should provide you with the information you need.

If you need more detailed information - there’s also a Time in Status plugin available on the marketplace.

[karl_hamilton]

Hi!

i hope you can help.

Does the standard burndown chart show sub task and parent story points added together? I think it double counts parents and children- please confirm

[SG]

Hi Karl!

This is a very interesting problem that you’re touching here and is a source of many debates in Agile world.

To be clear: No.

In Jira Software Server, sub-tasks are not included in Jira’s agile reporting, and they don’t carry story point estimates. The standard burndown chart does not include them.

This is a deliberate behaviour as Jira Software Server, by default, does not allow any estimates on the sub-tasks level. Whilst it is technically possible to enable such field in particular project - it will not work as the system was never designed for this additional layer of complexity.

We are constantly monitoring changes in the Agile movement and talking with our customers on regular basis to help them to help us to better understand how they use Jira.

We do see how expectations towards around this functionality have changed over time, and while Jira Software Server does not currently address this particular need, we are looking at how our customers estimate their work and are proactively seeking for solutions that could potentially address all their (sometimes very much contradictory  ) needs.

If you’re interested in this particular functionality, please follow and vote on this request:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWSERVER-9167

[Deleted user]

I +1 this!

If I could +10000000, I would.

[Zahid Shaik]

Syed Masood.

Kindly share your email id.

Zahid Shaik, Kadapa.

mdzahidshaik@gmail.com

[Schups]

Good day @SG !

Not sure if it was already suggested, but the space of the boards could be used much better. Cards are so big and there is no keyboard shortcut to toggle with a more compact version (on the other hand there is a keyboard shortcut to close swimlanes).

Looking forward to meet you at the next Summit!

[Nate Lamb]

Hi Syed,

The new email format has cause some of our client email notifications to be flagged as spam (and they seem to be unable to whitelist them)... Looks like it has something to do with the file extension or lack there off not meeting the RFC2183 standards... Is this a currently known issue or are there any changes/updates that are yet to launch?

Thanks!

[Tomasz Kanafa]

Hello Nate!

Could you describe the email problem in more details ?

Which systems are flagging new emails as spam, how could we replicate the problem ?

Regards

Tom

[Nate Lamb]

Hi @Tomasz Kanafa 

Sure thing, It is for one of our clients in particular. We are using Jira cloud, It appears to be all standard notifications are getting flagged, and cannot be white listed for some reason. It started February 20th... Their (our client) email servers, I believe, is what is flagging them (asp.reflexion.net)... I bring this up only because it was fine before the change, and they have already tried whitelisting the address... so not sure how to direct them. The emails are from "<jira@mereagency.atlassian.net> viajira@mail-us.atlassian.net"

I am kind of in the blind also, so I apologize for the lack of detail... I just was wondering more if anyone else was having the issue since the change, and if it was known or not...

Thanks So Much!

[AutomationUIUser]

Hi,

My question is around Jira's rest API. Accessing sprint details is trouble today for any integration maker. Load all the boards and then sprint for each board is too much CPU intensive and time taking operations.

Consider a situation when programatically creating/updating an issue which expects sprint id. Let say we are migrating data from some other tool to jira, in that case, just to determine sprint id requires to load all the boards one by one. 

Is there any improvement around this. Expected behavior of API should be load sprint details by name.

Thanks

Gaurav

[JP _AC Bielefeld Leader_]

Hi @SG ,

one of the biggest pains we and many customers of my AUG have, is the problem of transferring a Jira configuration (Schemes, issue types, fields, you name it) from a test/staging environment to production and vice versa. We actually want to version Jira configurations with Bitbucket to get an auditable set of configs we can release or switch back to.

Any ideas on this topic?

Best JP

[Deleted user]

Have you considered Configuration Manager (Botron)? Yes, it is an add-on. I’ve used it successfully to copy Jira configs between multiple environments.

[leodavesne]

Hi Syed, thanks for inviting to ask questions!

Here is mine: why is Jira not updated with the last updates of the Scrum Guide?

I see many Agile bugs and as a Scrum Master I have no choice to repeat to my teams that Jira is wrong in many places, like for the "commitment" wording in the Velocity Chart that should be "forecast" instead.

It really hurts our way of working when the tool is wrong. Could you please do something about that?

Here are two other links where I'm asking for a change since a while:
* https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWSERVER-15984
* https://twitter.com/leodavesne/status/1054789653935673345

Thanks and looking forward to read your answers!

[SG]

Hi Leo, thanks for asking about this.

I fully empathise with your struggle with this issue. As always, we are considering ways in which users' functionality and terminology needs are changing over time. Your feedback and requests help us know what improvements would be most helpful for you! I’ll raise these requests with our teams internally.

[Bing Li]

Hi Syed,

I have two questions. We are currently on JIRA v7.11 and would like to upgrade it to JIRA 8.0 when it's available. Can we do an "in-place" upgrade? Also how do we integrate JIRA 8.0 with Active Directory?  Thanks!

[Justin Alex Paramanandan]

Can we do an "in-place" upgrade?

You can do a direct upgrade from 7.11 to 8.0, with no issues. Just make sure that you update your apps beforehand and disable those that are not compatible with 8.0. :)

Also, how do we integrate JIRA 8.0 with Active Directory?

You should still be able to integrate with Active Directory the same way as how it works in previous Jira versions. Have you tried the steps listed here: Connecting to an LDAP directory in Jira?

[Shana]

Thanks for helping out, @Justin Alex Paramanandan ! That's the recommendation from the Jira team as well.

[Kha Hoang]

I think streamline the upgrade process is a great thing to focus on.  A lot of applications these days are trying to allow upgrade on demand or at least provide simple way to perform software upgrade.  Upgrading Jira is quite painful and specially have to deal with the certificates.  I am looking forward to see that happening.

[SG]

Hi Kha, thanks for your feedback. We agree that the Jira upgrade process is not as straightforward as we would like it to be. We are very invested in continually improving this, with our first steps being the pre-upgrade planning page (available for 7.4.3 and later).

Check out my response to Meg for more details on our thoughts here (https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Re-Re-Upcoming-AMA-with-Syed-Masood-JSW-Principal-Prod/qaq-p/1013773/comment-id/324963#M324963).

[Matthew Beda]

Hi @SG

Does this build address the issue of the memory leak in IE. Currently We have a corporate architecture that forces us to use IE and users have noticed (especially in SD Agents view) that after about a half hour the browsers slows down dramatically and freezes. The only way I have them remedying this right now is to duplicated the tab and close the previous tab (which is a pain). We currently are running on 7.13 enterprise release.

[SG]

Hey Matthew, I am not sure which issue in particular you are referring to. Could you please provide me a link, if it exists on jira.atlassian.com?

[Fadoua]

Hi @SG 

Are you planning on adding more options to workflows in the upcoming versions? Like post-functions (we need to add plugins in order to get some specific behavior that I think should be within JIRA - i.e. assign an issue automatically, add watchers,....)

Thank you!

[SG]

Hi Fadoua, thanks for asking about this.

You’re right that Jira doesn’t cover the workflow use cases you’ve mentioned. I’m glad the Marketplace has been able to help extend your Jira workflows to meet these needs!

As always, we are considering ways in which users' needs for functionality like workflows are changing over time. Your feedback and requests help us know what improvements would be most helpful for you! We don’t currently have this on our roadmap, but will consider adding these improvements in the future.