Bug Fixing Policy
Bug reports
Atlassian Support is eager and happy to help verify bugs—we take pride in it! Create an issue in our support system, providing as much information as you can about how to replicate the problem you're experiencing. We'll replicate the bug to verify, then lodge the report for you. We'll also try to construct workarounds if possible.
Search existing bug reports
Use our public issue tracker to search for existing bugs, add your report, and watch the ones that are important to you. When you watch an issue, we'll send you an e-mail notification when the issue's updated.
How we approach bug fixing
Bug fix releases are more frequent than feature releases, and target the most critical bugs affecting customers. The notation for a bug fix release is the final number in the version (the 1 in 6.0.1, for example).
We assess each bug based on the symptom severity (that is, when this bug causes symptoms, how severe are those symptoms). There are three levels of symptom severity.
Severity 1 - Critical
Your application is unavailable. Users aren't able to perform their job function, and no workarounds are available.
Severity 2 - Major
A feature is unavailable, application performance is significantly degraded, or users job functions are impaired.
Severity 3 - Minor
The application or specific feature isn't working as expected, but there is a workaround available. Users experience is impacted, but their job function is not impaired.
Assessing bugs using symptom severity makes sure that we prioritise the most impactful fixes. We give high priority to security issues.
About our bug fix workflow
If you watch or mark a bug as affecting your team, it’s useful to understand how we review, prioritize, and resolve them in our public issue tracker jira.atlassian.com.
We prioritize issues using a metric called User Impact Score (UIS), which is individually calculated for every issue. It takes into account the number of affected users, the severity of the issue, recent interest, and the percentage of users affected per instance. The higher the UIS score, the more pervasive and severe the issue is.
We have also standardised our workflow statuses across Data Center products to make it easy for you to see where an issue is at. Here’s the current workflow, and a description of each status.
| Workflow status | Definition | Phase |
|---|---|---|
| Needs triage | This issue is waiting to be reviewed by a member of the Atlassian product team. Typically, only recently created issues are in this status. Our product teams review these issues regularly. | Review |
| Gathering impact | This issue has been reviewed, but needs more supporting information to gauge how pervasive the problem is. | Prioritization |
| Long term backlog | A fix for this issue is required, but planned for farther in the future. This is because it’s not as severe or pervasive as other issues. | |
| Short term backlog | A fix for this issue is required, and will be prioritised in the near future. This is because it’s more severe or pervasive than other issues. | |
| Ready for development | A fix for this issue is required, and is ready for the development team to start their implementation. | |
| In progress | The development team is currently working on this issue. | Implementation |
| In review | A fix for this issue has been proposed and is being reviewed and quality-tested by the development team. | |
| Waiting for release | A fix for this issue has been implemented and is waiting to be shipped in a release. | |
| Closed | Work on this issue is complete. If it’s fixed, the resolution will be ‘Fixed’ and the Fix Version field will indicate the product version that contains the fix. If no code changes were required, the resolution will be ‘Duplicate', 'Won't fix', 'Handled by support', 'Timed out', or similar. | Closure |
How to get access to bug fixes
To get access to bug fixes you will need to upgrade to a release that contains the fix.
Release terminology for Data Center products
Platform release (example: 4.0) contains significant or breaking changes. For example changes or removal of existing APIs, significant changes to the user experience, or removal or a major feature.
Feature release (example: 4.6) can contain new features, changes to existing features, changes to supported platforms (such as databases, operating systems, Git versions), or removal of features. These were previously referred to as 'major' releases by most products.
Bugfix release (example: 4.6.2) can contain bug fixes and stability and performance improvements. Depending on the nature of the fixes they may introduce minor changes to existing features, but do not include new features or high-risk changes, so can be adopted quickly. We recommend regularly upgrading to the latest bugfix release for your current version. These were previously referred to as 'maintenance' releases by most products.
In addition to the three main release types, a feature release can also be designated a Long Term Support release (formerly known as an Enterprise release), which means it will receive bug fixes for a longer period of time than a standard feature release.
Long Term Support releases
Long Term Support releases (formerly known as Enterprise releases) are for Data Center customers who prefer to allow more time to prepare for upgrades to new feature versions but still need to receive critical bug fixes. If you only upgrade to a new feature version about once a year, a Long Term Support release may be a good fit for your organization. For Jira Software, Confluence, Bitbucket, and Bamboo we will:
- Designate a feature release as a Long Term Support release, at least every 12 months.
- Backport critical security fixes, as outlined in our current security bug fix policy, and fixes relating to stability, data integrity, or critical performance issues.
- Make bug fix releases available for the designated version until it reaches end-of-life.
- Provide a change log of all changes between one Long Term Support release and the next to make upgrading easier.
Not all bug fixes will be backported. We'll target the bugs and regressions that we deem most critical, focusing on stability, data integrity, or performance issues. There may also be some fixes that we choose not to backport due to risk, complexity, or because the fix requires changes to an API, code used by third-party apps (also known as add-ons), or infrastructure that we would usually reserve for a platform release.
For Jira Software Data Center customers, we'll endeavor to allow zero downtime upgrades between one Long Term Support release and the next Long Term Support release, but can't guarantee that downtime will not be required, depending on the nature of the changes. The change log will indicate if a zero downtime upgrade will be available.
In the example below, version 4.2 has been designated a Long Term Support release. The number of bug fix releases and timing illustrated below is just an example, your product's release cadence may differ.
Further reading
See Atlassian Support Offerings for more support-related information.