JIRA 3.6 Release Notes
Atlassian is proud to announce the latest release of the award winning issue tracking and project mamagement software - JIRA 3.6. This release offers a range of new features and improvements throughout JIRA - from the introduction of custom events to wiki-style link aliasing - along with a number of bug fixes.
As always, this release can be downloaded from the JIRA Download Center - and dont forget to check out the upgrade guide if upgrading from a previous version!
Contents
New Features
To see a full list of new features and improvements added - ask JIRA!
- Custom Events
- Group Picker Custom Field
- Per-Issue Group Notifications & Permissions
- Wiki-style Linking
- "I'm Feeling Lucky" Quick Search
- Collapsible Fields
- Nestable Conditions
- Charting Plugin Updates
Custom Events
JIRA uses an event-listener mechanism to alert the system that something has happened and allow it to perform an action based on that event. In both Professional and Enterprise editions, this release presents the ability to add custom events to the system - providing a pivotal extension point for notification and workflow schemes.
For instance, a custom event can be added to the system and associated with a workflow post-function - fired on completion of the event. A notification scheme can then be configured to email particular recipients once this event has been fired. With custom events, the notification and workflow schemes can be configured extensively to respond to specific custom events added to the system.
Further, by adding custom listeners that monitor for custom events fired, the possible extensions to JIRA are countless.
Group Picker Custom Field
JIRA custom fields have become invaluable tools in extending the data associated with an issue. This release introduces two new custom fields into the fold:
- Group Picker
- Multi Group Picker
The Group Picker allows a JIRA-defined group to be associated with an issue while the Multi Group Picker allows the association of multiple JIRA-defined groups with an issue. It is possible to use these fields in an issue search as filter criteria in the Issue Navigator.
The assignee selector field in the Issue Navigator has also been updated with the Group Picker link - allowing the group to be selected from the available list.
Per-issue Group Notifications and Permissions
Building on the group picker custom field, one can now send notifications to members of a group determined by a custom field.
For example, add an Assigned Group custom field, and edit the notification scheme to send all notifications to the group's members:
Now the "Assigned Group" on each issue will be notified of changes.
As with notifications, one can now grant a permission to members of a group(s) selected by a custom field. Continuing our Assigned Group example, by granting the Assigned Group the Assignable permission, the possible assignees of an issue will be the members the Assigned Group custom field group:
You can also restrict workflow operations to members of a custom field's group, with a custom field condition.
Preset group lists
Per-issue groups can also be chosen via select-lists, in addition to the group picker. Say you wish to restrict the Assigned Group to jira-managers or jira-qa. Simply create a select-list custom field with these two values, and add the select-list to the notification and permission schemes.
Wiki-Style Linking
Adding to the Wiki-style renderingfunctionality, users can now enrich their description, environment and comment entries with pertinent links to other JIRA data:
User Aliasing
Using the syntax [~username], the username text will appear linked to the user profile of that user.
Issue Aliasing
Using the syntax [some text here|TST-1], the text some text here will appear as a link to the specified issue. This text adopts the behaviour of a regular JIRA issue key link - if the issue is resolved, the text will appear with a strike-through.
"I'm Feeling Lucky" Quick Search
Letting the user skip the results screen in the Issue Navigator of a search, the 'I'm Feeling Lucky' search presents the user with the first result associated with the search query. This seach can be engaged by pressing Control + Enter after submitting the search query to the 'Quick Search' query box.
Collapsible Fields
Enhancing the JIRA user interface, it is now possible to quickly configure the level of detail displayed while viewing an issue through collapsible and expandable issue fields.
The environment, description, individual comment fields and any textarea custom field can be hidden or displayed by simply clicking on the relevant link for a particular field - allowing fields with large amounts of data to be temporarily hidden while viewing other entries against that issue. JIRA only adds these options to fields that include a large amount of information.
Nestable Conditions
Workflow conditions allow workflow designers the ability to restrict the availability of a workflow transition. The criteria of the condition must be met in order for the workflow transition to become available.
Workflow conditions can now be configured to combine criteria with boolean OR statements - allowing condition specification to match the workflow design more closely. For example, a condition can be constructed whereby it is only met if the user is the assignee of the issue OR the user is a member of the jira-users group.
Extending this concept, more complex condition criteria can be constructed with the ability to nest conditions in groups. Each group can be combined with other individual conditions or groups with the boolean AND or OR statements.
Charting Plugin Updates
The latest version of the Charting Plugin includes two new charting options:
Pie Chart
Reports and portlets can be generated displaying data based on a statistic type (e.g. Status, Priority, etc.) of issues from a project or specified filter in pie-chart format.
Average-Age Open Issues
This chart displays the average-open-age of issues over a specified period with a configurable interval. This chart graphically conveys the trend for the average amount of time that issues remain unresolved.
Improvements
- Email Notification & Internationalization
- Performance
- Clone Issue Extensions
- Disable Notification for Bulk Operation
- Banner Visibility
- ... and many more ...
Email Notification & Internationalisation
JIRA is shipped with over 15 language bundles - allowing the user to configure the language JIRA is displayed in globally and on a per-user basis. The internationalisation coverage now includes the email templates used in issue event notifications. Each template has been converted to allow full translations of the body of the email for all locales.
Taking JIRA into a truly global team environment, JIRA can now send individual email notifications to each recipient in their user-profile selected language. Hence, global team members located in regional sites around the world can be updated of issue events and updates with individually-tailored email notifications in their desired language.
This functionality becomes complete with the addition of properties files for the locales in use.
The translation process is greatly supported through the much appreciated efforts of the JIRA community. Many thanks to Gerd Gueldenast who has already provided a German translation for the email template properties - which is included in this release. 
Performance
Improving overall response times while navigating through JIRA, this release introduces a caching servlet for all JavaScript and CSS resources. JIRA will cache these resources on the client system until the instance of JIRA is restarted. In-house testing and initial reports indicate that this change results in a significant performance improvement throughout JIRA.
Clone Issue Extensions
The Clone Issue functionality has been expanded with further configuration options. It is now possible to specify the level of detail cloned through:
- Clone issue links - links between the clone issue and those linked to/from the original cloned issue will be recreated in the clone issue
- Clone sub-tasks - sub-tasks associated with the original cloned issue will be re-created for the clone issue
Disable Notification for Bulk Operation
JIRA administrators (and project administrators of the selected issues) can now configure whether notifications are sent for a bulk operation - avoiding mass emailing of all changes made during a bulk operation.
With this configurability, it is possible to complete updates on a collection of issues without generating unwanted email notification noise. The possible scenarios where this option can be applied are many - e.g. adding a new custom field and setting a default value, updating old issues ...
Banner Visibility
The announcement banner allows pertinent information to be displayed on all JIRA pages. This feature has been extended to allow configuration of the banner visibility level:
- Public - show the banner to anyone
- Private - show the banner to logged-in users only
... and many more ...
A number of other notable improvements included in this release ...
Mail Server & Bulk Precedence
The JIRA mail service can be configured to ignore emails with a Precedence: bulk header. This improvement eliminates potential issue/comment generation loops through the mail service from auto-generated emails.
Statable VersionPicker Field
JIRA provides a vast array of portlets that can populate your dashboard with instant access to issue information. The Version Picker custom field has been extended to allow inclusion in the 2-Dimensional Filter Statistics portlet - a portlet displaying the results of a search in table format with configurable axes.
Quick Sub-Task Creation Form
JIRA can now be configured so that the quick sub-task creation form is present on the View Issue screen at all times - even if the issue does not currently have any sub-tasks.
Issue Link Configuration
The issue link view can be configured to include various issue fields (e.g. issuetype, issuekey, etc.) - providing further details of the linked issue without having to navigate to that issue. Further, it is also possible to specify the sort order for this table.
Bug Fixes
This release includes a number of bug fixes - just ask JIRA to view the entire list!
Upgrading
In order to complete a successful upgrade, please refer to our Upgrade Guides. If you are upgrading from JIRA 3.5.3 please refer to the JIIRA 3.6 Upgrade Guide.
If you are upgrading from a pre-3.5.3 release, please refer to the relevant JIRA 3.x Upgrade Guides.