JIRA 5.2 Release Notes

• New system filters — Easily filter for the most common views in JIRA: 'My Open Issues', 'Reported by Me', 'Recently Viewed' and 'All Issues'.
• Favourite filters on the navigator — Quickly switch between views. Your favourite filters are now just a click away.
• Intuitive filter management — See who owns a filter at a glance and whether changes have been made.
• New search bar — Simply select the criteria you want in your search. Focus on the search criteria you care about and hide the rest.
• Ad-hoc searches — Search and refine on-the-fly with immediate results. Refresh your results without reloading your page.
• Complex searches — Create and execute complex searches with ease. The new search UI makes this simple, regardless of the number of projects, custom fields, or your JIRA configuration.

Read the documentation...

Background re-index — JIRA now has the option of re-indexing issues in the background. Performing a background re-index allows your users to use JIRA as normal. You won't need to schedule system-wide downtime just to perform a re-index.

Performance improvements — This release includes a multitude of performance improvements. You may not notice every tweak we've made, but it all adds up to a better user experience.

_{Faster loading of the View Issue page — Smarter loading of attachment thumbnails and the speed to render wiki markup has been increased.
Issue search — Faster results for searching (up to four times faster) when a project has an extremely large number of issue type or custom fields.
Searching with large "NOT IN" clauses — Searches with clauses like "fixVersion not in releasedVersions()" are now at least ten times faster, depending on the data size.
Other areas of increased performance — GreenHopper queries that use nested filters, managing project versions with an extremely large list (all browsers except Internet Explorer), and calculating the assignee field when performing large bulk edits. 
Indexing — More low level Lucene options exposed so you can tune Lucene to perform better in your specific environment.
Smarter use of memory — Reduction in the memory required to interpret Velocity files, resulting in faster page loads.
Faster exports — XML exports with Postgres and MySQL are no longer put into memory. They are now done in batches which allows JIRA to back up extremely large instances.
Faster imports — The garbage collection profile has been improved, resulting in less memory churn and a better performing import process.
Notification table — This table is no longer used and will automatically be deleted, resulting faster backups and imports as there is less data to migrate.}

Reduced Memory Usage

^{More efficient Search Index caching — Memory usage of searches has improved tenfold. This is particularly noticeable on very large instances that are very busy.
Removed the massive memory use of Postgres and MySQL in data export — You no longer need to increase memory size to very large amount to get an export to work.
Smarter pooling of UI rendering resources — This change saves 90MB of memory.}

SSL configuration via the JIRA configuration tool — If you want to run JIRA over SSL or HTTPS, you won't need to tinker around in XML files anymore. The JIRA configuration tool has a new screen that lets you easily configure access via HTTPS. The configuration tool also validates your configuration, so you won't need to worry if you've mistakenly entered an invalid certificate. Read the documentation...

Improved JIRA Data Generator — In JIRA 5.1, we built the JIRA Data Generator as part of our Enterprise performance work. This tool helps customers create large JIRA data sets quickly, which is useful for testing how your instance will perform at a projected rate. We also released a set of performance test scripts that can be used to test against data sets created by the JIRA Data Generator.  In this release, we've improved the JIRA Data Generator to support screen schemes and field configurations. The tool is not bundled with JIRA, but it is free and customers can get it from the Atlassian Marketplace: JIRA Data Generator.

HTTP Request Log Analyser — The new JIRA HTTP Request Log Analyser provides an analysis of the traffic on your JIRA instance, such as the maximum requests per minute, that can help you performance-tune your JIRA instance. We originally developed this tool to help our customers provide us with performance data for their JIRA instances. This tool is not bundled with JIRA, but it is available as a free download. We also have a summary of the results from our JIRA instances and from some anonymous customers.

New guides — Federating JIRA - Managing Multiple Instances and Scaling JIRA Agile.

Enterprise resources — If you haven't browsed our enterprise resources before, you can find them here: Enterprise Resources. You'll find guides on scaling JIRA, establishing staging server environments for JIRA, garbage collection tuning, and more.

Custom field performance — In JIRA 5.1, we gave our Enterprise customers the Scaling JIRA guide which explains how customers can get the most out of JIRA in large deployments. This guide describes how there are many factors that affect JIRA performance, besides the total number of issues. One of these factors is custom fields. In this release, we've investigated how the configuration of custom fields can affect performance. You can view our findings in the updated Scaling JIRA guide.

Simply register a webhook in JIRA with the URL where the callback should be sent. Any time any issue changes in JIRA, a JSON notification will be sent to the URL.

You can also refine webhooks to suit your needs:

• Constrain a webhook to fire for a set of issues and/or specific issue events.
• Use a variable to include the key of the issue that fired it.
• Configure a workflow post-function to fire a webhook.

Following on from the improvements to workflow administration in JIRA 4.4 and project administration in JIRA 5.1, we're continuing to make editing workflows easier within your project. You'll still have the power and flexibility of JIRA workflows at your fingertips, but configuration is much more intuitive.

Project workflows are now shown as a visual representation —  a diagram of each project workflow is displayed in a table, with the associated issue types alongside. The old text-based view of each workflow is still available as well, if you prefer.

Configuring project workflows is also much easier. Want to preview changes as a draft before publishing? Want to browse through diagrams of the workflows in the system when adding a workflow? Want to assign multiple issue types to a workflow in a single step? You can now do all of these tasks and more.

Read the documentation...

The screen designer has been overhauled in this release. Screens are as customisable as ever, however the user interface is faster and much simpler to use. You won't have to wrestle with controls when reordering — just drag and drop to move a field or tab. Autocomplete is now used when adding fields, making this process quicker and easier as well.

Read the documentation...

Streamlined user interfaces for projects

We've been working hard to improve the user interface when you are browsing a project, so that you can concentrate on the task at hand without any distractions. The list of improvements are in the table below:

UI Feature	Notes	Screenshot of new UI
New Create New Project button on the Browse Projects > All Projects page	N/A
Browse Project > Summary tab redesigned: Administer Project button now available on the Browse Project page itself Activity Stream only shows activity on JIRA issues and JIRA plugins Issues: Updated recently section removed  Issue: Unresolved section removed Versions: Unreleased section moved to different position on tab Show/hide toggle for additional versions removed "Eyeball" toggle replaced with smart switcher at bottom of list	Administer Project button used to be on Browse Project > Summary tab (now removed) Issues: Updated recently and Issue: Unresolved sections superseded by Activity Stream.
Standard issue filters directly available on Browse Project > Issues page	Used to be in Filters dropdown on Browse Project > Summary tab (now removed)
Standard issue filters directly available on Browse Version > Issues page	Used to be in Filters dropdown on Browse Version > Summary tab (now removed)
Standard issue filters directly available on Browse Component > Issues page	Used to be in Filters dropdown on Browse Component > Summary tab (now removed)
People section in Project Summary and page renamed to Roles	N/A
Project > Popular Issues page redesigned	N/A
Project > Labels page redesigned	N/A

JIRA admin helper

We've bundled the popular JIRA admin helper plugin in this release. This tool helps JIRA administrators to diagnose and fix any of the following problems:

Copying and editing issue collectors

In JIRA 5.1, we introduced the JIRA issue collector — letting you embed JIRA feedback forms in your websites that create issues in your JIRA instance. In this release, we've added the ability to edit and copy issue collectors. Tweak an existing issue collector or use it as the basis for an entirely new one.

Read the documentation...

Faster and more reliable mentions

We added mentions in JIRA 5.0, which gave JIRA users an easy way to share an issue with other users via email. This release includes a significant performance improvement to this feature. You'll notice that user names are suggested much more quickly, when you start typing after an '@' character. The suggested results are also more accurate and reliable.

Compatibility with Confluence Workbox Notifications

JIRA 5.2 is compatible with Confluence Workbox Notifications (introduced in Confluence 4.3). Read more in the Confluence 4.3 release notes.

Platform changes

We have made a number of platform changes in this release, including upgrading JIRA to run on Tomcat 7 and support for Java 7. Some of these changes affect the installation and upgrade process for JIRA. 

Please read the upgrade guide for details.