JIRA 6.0 EAP 3 (m05) Release Notes
21 January 2013
Atlassian is proud to present JIRA 6.0 EAP 3 (m5). This public development release is part of our Early Access Program (EAP) leading up to the official JIRA 6.0 release. Development work on JIRA 6.0 commenced recently and we want your involvement from the start!
We are making it publicly available so that developers can start assessing the impact of the changes that we are making.
Please provide us with your general feedback here and design (i.e. new look and feel) feedback here.
Important information for developers
6.0 is a major release for JIRA. As a result, we will be making a number of changes that may break plugins. You may need to update your plugin to work with JIRA 6.0. These release notes highlight the changes and link to detailed information in our developer documentation.
Please read Preparing for JIRA 6.0 for information on the changes for this release.
Read before you install/upgrade: Atlassian does not support upgrades both 'from' and 'to' EAP releases. EAP releases should not be used in production environments as they are not officially supported. For all production use and testing of JIRA, please use the latest official release instead.
Key Features
A new JIRA look and feel
The JIRA look and feel is being redesigned in JIRA 6.0 according to the new Atlassian Design Guidelines. We want to provide you with an amazing user experience that helps you get your work done as effectively as possible. These changes are being progressively implemented during 6.0 development.
We are not there yet, so some things may not look quite right. However, you'll notice design improvements to a number of screens in JIRA, including the Project Summary page in the Administration Console and the Create/Edit issue screen.
If you are a developer, these changes will affect you. Please read Preparing for JIRA 6.0 for detailed information on the Atlassian Design Guidelines implementation.
We'd love to hear your feedback on the new JIRA look and feel. Please provide us with your feedback here.
In this release:
Issue navigator improvements
Stable search
Now, when you search, your search results remain constant until you choose to refresh them. This provides you with a stable set of search results that you can work from when triaging issues. And, since your search results don't change as you are making changes to the list, you maintain the original list you started with.
We are in the early stages of testing this feature, you can help by providing us with feedback. We'd like to know what works and what doesn't. Does this feature help when you are working with a large number of issues? How could it be better? To provide feedback, click Give Feedback at the top right of your JIRA screen.
A faster view issue experience
In this release, we've streamlined the interaction with the View Issue screen and removed page loads to speed things up. We've also made additional performance improvements that make navigation between issues much faster. This makes going from stable search to viewing an issue and back again much faster. We will continue to improve performance for searching and viewing issues during JIRA 6.0.
Workflow improvements
Global workflow schemes
Now you can edit an active workflow scheme on a project: a draft is created, and the migration is handled through the normal migration process. The following functionality is available:
- Add existing workflows
- Remove workflows from scheme
- Reassign issue types between workflows in the scheme
- Publish draft
- Discard draft
In addition to this, workflow schemes can be edited even if they are associated with more than one project.
Workflow sharing
The new Workflow Sharing feature allows you to share your team's workflow with other teams in your organisation on different JIRA instances, or external parties in other organisations via the Atlassian Marketplace. This feature allows you to easily use workflows that other people have published, or to move a workflow from staging to production in your own organisation.
Get started faster
Faster JIRA setup with the new administration gadget
We're in the process of redesigning the JIRA default dashboard to help new administrators and users of JIRA get started faster. In this milestone, we've overhauled the administration gadget, which is displayed on the default dashboard for JIRA administrators.
The new administration gadget now displays a handy checklist of common tasks. Click on any task and you'll be taken to the relevant administration screen to complete it. The gadget also provides other helpful information for new administrators, such as links to the JIRA administrator documentation and license details.
New plugin points for the User Profile page
For the ecosystem developers, we have implemented new plugin points for the web panels in the User Profile page. You can override the default 'Details', 'Preferences' and 'Assigned Open Issues per Project' web panels as well as add your own custom web panels.
Other improvements
Auto look and feel
You can now create a new look and feel for your JIRA instance based on your company's logo. When you upload your company logo, you can choose to have JIRA change your colour scheme based upon the colours in your logo (see example below).
If you don't want to accept the change, simply click Undo in the displayed message.
Global autowatch configuration
We've implemented a new JIRA option that allows administrators to disable the autowatch feature (introduced in JIRA 5.0.3) for all users. To configure autowatch for all users, navigate to Administration > User Preferences (in Users section) > Default autowatch.
Users can choose to inherit the global autowatch setting or override it via their user Profile > Preferences > Autowatch setting.
Please note, if you are upgrading from an older version of JIRA, then all users who have not explicitly set their Autowatch setting will have it set to 'Inherit from global settings'.
Maximum project name size and maximum project key size configuration
JIRA administrators will be able to set the maximum size for both the project name and project key in this release. Navigate to Administration > System > General Configuration and update Maximum project name size or Maximum project key size as desired.
The Maximum project name size or Maximum project key size are defaulted to 80 and 10 respectively. This will not affect the names or keys for your existing projects.
Reports have moved
We have moved reports from the dropdown menu on the Browse Project > Summary tab to a panel on the same tab, so that they are more accessible.
