JIRA 3.7 Release Notes


Atlassian is proud to announce JIRA 3.7, the latest release of our award winning issue tracking, workflow and project management software.

New features include:

This release also includes over 100 bug fixes and 60 improvements. This version is a free upgrade for any customer who purchased/renewed JIRA after 13 December, 2005.

Upgrading

The 3.7 release can be downloaded from the JIRA Download Center. Before upgrading, please refer to the JIRA 3.7 Upgrade Guide.

Project Roles

In JIRA 3.7, you can configure project roles (e.g. developer, tester, administrator), and assign users/groups to these roles on a per-project basis. If you have more than a few projects, this will significantly simplify administration.

Users can belong to different project roles in different projects, e.g.:

Ease of management
Does your system currently contain multiple, project-specific groups? Once you upgrade to JIRA 3.7, your permission schemes and notification schemes can use project roles instead of groups. By implementing project roles, you may be able to greatly reduce the number of groups, permission schemes and notification schemes in your JIRA system.

Tools are provided to help you migrate your permission schemes and notification schemes from using groups to using project roles, for example:

The old

The new

Delegated administration
In JIRA Enterprise, a project administrator* can assign users and groups to project roles for their project. If their project's permission scheme and notification scheme are using project roles, the project administrator can control who may access their project and who receives email notifications. In Professional and Standard Editions the global administrator permission is required to manage role membership of a project.

Global access to JIRA is still controlled via groups, which are managed by JIRA global administrators.

*A project administrator is someone who has the 'Administer Project' permission, but not neceessarily the global 'JIRA Administrator' permission.

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'Charting' View for Issue Navigator

The JIRA Charting Plugin now integrates with your Issue Navigator. When viewing search results you can click the 'Chart' option in the Issue Navigator views to popup an instant chart view.

From the chart view popup you have the option to configure any chart that is available via the charting plugin. Once happy with your chart and its configuration you can, in one step, create a named filter and save the chart to any page on your dashboard.

RSS Improvements

RSS Feeds got a completely new look:

  • New RSS 2 compliant feed — this feed will enable your RSS reader to recognise issue updates correctly, rather than report updates as newly created issues.
  • Much more readable RSS — the new RSS feed presents issues in a much more readable format. If, with previous JIRA releases, you have been pointing your RSS reader at JIRA's XML feed, we strongly suggest switching to the new RSS feed.
  • Comments RSS feed — an RSS feed that shows comments which have been recently added to issues matching your search criteria. If you have ever wanted to see new comments added to issues you are interested in, this feed is what you have been looking for:

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User Properties

Ever wanted to record some additional information about a user? For instance, you might want to record their phone number, location, department, cost centre, etc.

In JIRA 3.7 you can easily add user properties of your choice. Once a user property is added, it is visible (to administrators) in the User Profile:


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SVN Project Panel plugin

The JIRA Subversion Plugin now features a new project tab, which shows all commits made against a particular project or a project version, giving you a summary of recent developer activity on the project.

This new tab is displayed on the Browse Project page for each project:

You can download this plugin from its home page.

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SVN Commit Acceptance plugin

In some environments, developers like the idea that there must be a one-to-one correlation between issues and check-ins. The new SVN Commit Acceptance plugin gives JIRA the ability to approve or deny any check-in made to CVS or SVN. We've started by allowing administrators to check three of the most common uses:

  • Does this commit reference a valid issue key?
  • Is that issue open?
  • Does that issue belong to the committer?

This plugin has two parts: an RPC plugin and a client-side perl or python script. The perl script uses XML-RPC to call the plugin, passing in the committer and the commit message. The plugin checks any of the rules that the administrator has configured, and returns a yes or no, which causes the perl script to allow or disallow the commit.

You can download this plugin from its home page.

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Other Improvements

JIRA 3.7 features a large number of other improvements, the most notable include:

  1. Internet Explorer 7 compatibility — JIRA 3.7 is compatible with the latest browsers, including Internet Explorer 7. You may want to check out the keyboard shortcuts.
  2. Improved search robustness — In previous JIRA releases, each search caused additional memory usage and, during peak-hours, many concurrent searches could cause JIRA to run out of memory. In JIRA 3.7 the searching sub-system has been revamped so that many more searches can be executed concurrently in constant memory.
  3. AJAX-loading of dashboard portlets — Portlets which can be slow to load are now loaded in two parts, making the Dashboard display much faster. The first (quick) part of the portlet is loaded with the Dashboard; the second is loaded as a separate request. For example, the List All Filters portlet shows the filter names first, and then fetches the count of matching issues for each filter.
  4. HSQLDB Upgrade — The built-in database (which ships with JIRA Standalone) has been upgraded to a more stable version (1.8.0.5).
  5. Tomcat Upgrade — The built-in application server (which ships with JIRA Standalone) has been upgraded to version 5.5.15.
  6. Performance improvements — If you're using JIRA 3.6.3 or above, you have already seen some performance improvements. With JIRA 3.7, we've added:
    • Excel and XML exports, and RSS feeds, now use constant memory, which means that you are able to exports thousands of issues without affecting other JIRA users, or causing JIRA to run out of memory.
    • Faster page loads — all JavaScript and CSS files can now be cached by your browser, which makes every page in JIRA load faster.
  7. Time tracking improvements:
    • It is now possible to import issue estimates via CSV.
    • It is possible to configure how the time tracking estimates and logged work information is formatted. You can choose 'days', 'hours' or 'pretty'. When choosing a specific time unit (e.g. days or hours) the information will be shown as fractions of the chosen unit (e.g. 6.5 hours). Pretty format preserves the way JIRA behaved in previous releases, i.e. breaks down the time into minutes, hours, days and weeks.
  8. Sub-task fields are now configurable — You can now choose which sub-task fields are displayed on the sub-task 'Quick Create' form (shown on parent's 'View Issue' page). This is done via the jira-application.properties file.
  9. 'Preset Filters' are now pluggable — The 'Preset Filters' (which appear on the Project portlet and in the 'Browse Project' menu) are now pluggable. This means you can:
    • Add new 'Preset Filter' links. For example, add a link to a search that will find all issues in a custom status (e.g. Awaiting QA Approval).
    • Choose the display order of 'Preset Filter' links.
    • Place conditions on when a filter is visible (e.g. 'Assigned to me' filter is only shown to logged in users).
      For details, please see How to create a custom preset filter.
  10. Navigation menus are now pluggable — JIRA 3.7 gives the ability for plugins to inject links to various sections of JIRA's UI. For example:
    • Main navigation bar (which appears accross the top of most JIRA pages).
    • Navigation pop-ups (e.g. History, Filters, Profile, etc).
    • Administration Menu (links appearing down the left-hand side in the administration section).
      This functionality greatly enhances how a plugin can interact with JIRA users. For example, plugins can now display a custom link in JIRA's Administration section and allow JIRA Administrators to provide configuration information via JIRA's UI, rather than having to tweak the properties file.
      The custom links are called 'Web UI Modules' in JIRA. For details on how to create these, please see this document.
  11. Pluggable Issue Navigator ViewsIssue Navigator views show results of a search in various formats. All built-in Issue Navigator views (e.g. Excel, Word, RSS) have been converted to plugins. This improvement creates the following advantages:
    • It is much easier to customise Issue Navigator views to your needs. For example, you can change the way that issue information is exported to MS Word.
    • By building a new plugin, you can show the results of a search in any format you wish.
  12. Pluggable Single Issue Views — similar to Issue Navigator Views, the single-issue views (Word, XML) have been turned into plugins. This provides the ability to customise how the issue is exported to various formats, and to add custom export formats.
  13. Issue Operations turned into plugins — all issue operation links ('Assign Issue', 'Attach File', 'Edit Issue') have been turned into plugins, which allows the JIRA Administrator to easily disable unwanted operations. For example, if you do not need the clone issue functionality, simply disable the 'Clone Issue' operation.

To see a list of all new features and improvements — ask JIRA!

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Last modified on May 30, 2011

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