Highlights of JIRA 3.12:

'Trusted' Confluence

For people who use both JIRA and Confluence, the ability to configure a 'trust' relationship between the two will allow for a seamless end-user experience, e.g. the 'JIRA Issues' macro will now display exactly the same list of issues on a Confluence page that the user would see in the JIRA Issue Navigator. No longer is there a need to hard-code JIRA user names and passwords on a Confluence page. (Note that you will need Confluence 2.7 or later.)

The 'JIRA Issues' macro in Confluence will now display (to appropriate users) issues that have a Security Level set:

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'JIRA System Administrators' permission

A new global permission has been added to JIRA, to allow for separation of duties.

• People who are granted the new 'JIRA System Administrators' permission can perform all of the administration functions in JIRA, including functions which could affect the application environment or network (e.g. data import/export, SMTP configuration, database connection).
• People with only the 'JIRA Administrators' permission can now perform most administration functions (e.g. creating new JIRA users; creating projects), but not functions which could affect the application environment or network.

This will be useful for organisations which need to delegate JIRA-specific administration privileges to particular people, without granting them total system administration privileges.
Note that everyone who had the 'JIRA Administrators' global permission before the upgrade will automatically receive the new 'JIRA System Administrators' global permission during the upgrade. This will ensure that everyone can still perform the same functions they could previously.

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FishEye plugin now bundled with JIRA

The FishEye plugin automatically detects JIRA issue-keys in your code commit messages. Within your JIRA issues and projects, relevant commit messages will be displayed along with links to the FishEye changesets and files — and (optionally) Crucible code reviews.

• Click here for a live example.

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Improvements to the Subversion plugin

Using the Subversion plugin (available separately), it is now possible to configure Subversion repositories from within JIRA. No longer do you need to muck around with .properties files and bounce JIRA every time you make a change! If you have existing SVN repositories configured in your properties file, the new SVN plugin will read that information and create identical settings for you.
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Improvements to the 'Project Statistics' and 'Filter Statistic' portlets

The Project Statistics portlet and the Filter Statistic portlet now show the total number of issues that match the filter, e.g.:

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New post function for workflows: 'Assign to Current User'

With the new post function 'Assign to Current User', you can now automatically assign an issue to the logged-in user when the issue moves through a particular workflow transition.

This is useful if you need to assign an issue to the logged-in user under particular circumstances, but not give them full rights to assign issues. For example, on Atlassian's support system, when a support specialist clicks 'Start Investigating', the issue is automatically assigned to them — even if they don't have 'Assign Issues' permission.

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Enhanced language support for searching

The range of available languages for JIRA search indexes has been expanded. This means that even more people around the world can now choose to have JIRA index their issue data in their native language.

This provides more meaningful search results for end-users, because:

• 'stop' words (i.e. words that are deliberately ignored by the JIRA search engine, such as 'the') are now recognised in more non-English languages (Brazilian, Chinese, Czech, Greek, French, Dutch, Thai).

• 'stemming' (i.e. the derivation of related words, such as 'archived', from a stem such as 'archive) is now supported in French, Brazilian, German, French, Dutch, Russian and English. For example, if your index language is set to French:
  • a search for "marchera" will find "L'enfant a marché"; and
  • a search for "marché" will find "l'enfant marchera".
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Visual SourceSafe plugin

The new VSS plugin displays Microsoft Visual SourceSafe commit information (along with the changed paths) related to JIRA issues, projects or project versions. This plugin is in beta and available for a separate download.

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Plus more than 100 other fixes and improvements