JIRA 6.4 Release Notes
Working together just got easier
JIRA 6.4 helps your teams work together faster and more effectively
In JIRA 6.4 we've introduced several key concepts and features to ensure that you and your teams can work easily and more efficiently together. We've greatly improved our HipChat and JIRA integration experience so that teams can now broadcast filtered JIRA notifications directly into HipChat rooms, ensuring the entire team can stay in sync with real-time information. We have also introduced new tools, such as the Release Hub, which makes the release management smoother through providing visibility into the status of a release and potential areas that need troubleshooting. Faster and more intuitive onboarding, an easier to manage workspace, and a workflow validator enable teams to work more efficiently within their projects.
JIRA + HipChat
We've made integrating JIRA and HipChat easier than ever! Now you can connect to HipChat Rooms and filter notifications from within your Project Administration screen with a single click. There's no need to access the project workflow, which means project admins can set up and add notifications to their HipChat rooms themselves, even private rooms. Issue transitions, status updates and more can be sent as notifications, so that your team never misses an update!
Release Hub
The Versions page has been totally redesigned in this release. We've created a Release Hub that harnesses the information in JIRA and your development tools to make release management easier from day one. Don't waste your time digging through issues, commits and pull requests. Now you can check the progress of your release, spot problems early, and determine what is likely to ship, at a glance.
Workflow validation
Ever created a workflow and started using it, only to discover you can't find some of your statuses? Or that you seem to have hit a dead-end when transitioning your issue? JIRA will now validate your workflow as you create it, informing you when you have a status that has no incoming or outgoing transitions, or if you have permission errors when you import a workflow.
New sidebar preview
We've been working hard on improving JIRA's user interface, and in JIRA 6.4 we're giving you a preview of what we've been working on. We wanted to make accessing your project's information as efficient as possible, so we've introduced a navigation sidebar to sit alongside your workspace. This makes it easier to access all project information from one view, and helps you work more efficiently, especially if you also use JIRA Agile. We've also added project shortcuts to the sidebar, which now allow you to add links to online resources that are shared with anyone who has access to your project. We're also collecting feedback on this new experience, and would love to hear from you on how we can improve your project navigation experience even further.
Performance improvements
In JIRA 6.4, we've improved performance in areas such as creating and editing issues, selecting and displaying projects, and selecting assignees or groups. The improvements are available in all JIRA instances, but are most noticeable in large JIRA installations containing a large number of projects and issues.
Enterprise — Disaster Recovery
JIRA has become business critical in many enterprises. JIRA Data Center 6.4 customers will be able to configure a cold single or multi node standby site in a geographically separate location. This feature will help enterprises ensure business continuity for JIRA in the event of a major infrastructure or environmental failure. The features introduced in JIRA Data Center 6.4 to support disaster recovery include:
- Index replication - Configurable replication of your index to a JIRA standby system allows you to optimize your Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
- File replication: Replicate different types of files to your standby system from JIRA, without having to use an external tool. The files include attachments, installed plugins, and more.
- Health checks: To give you confidence of your new ability switch to your standby JIRA instance, you can check the health of its database, search index and attachments, without running SQL queries.
And more!
Of course, that's not all we've done in this release. We're working really hard on legacy features and functions, and either improving their performance, or removing them from JIRA if they're no longer valid. We've removed Scheme Tools and the News gadget, and we've been working on other gadgets to improve their load times and performance on your dashboard.
As stated above, we're making the move to an enhanced navigation experience. While users can toggle between the new and old experience, we do realise that JIRA Administrators may prefer to have their JIRA instance set to one state so they can provide support to their users. We've implemented a switch which lets you select what state you'd prefer your users to access. Learn more...
Another notable improvement has been how JIRA handles bulk editing of multi-select fields, like Version and Components. Now, you're able to select whether you want to clear or add to all the existing values, replace all the existing values with a specific value or set of values, or simply remove a specific value or set of values. Learn more...
Access log analyzer 2.0 - Problem solving is hard, and as such we try to share our tools as much as is practically possible. We've released our Access log analyzer 2.0 which will help analyze the JIRA request logs. Learn more...
Simple Wiki editor - Ever wanted to add more than just plain text to your JIRA comments and descriptions but could never remember the Wiki markup? Now you don't have to, just highlight the text you want to change and click the relevant button in the toolbar, and JIRA will apply the markup for you. Learn more...
Paste images - Previously if you had an attachment or image on your clipboard, you had to save it and add it to a JIRA comment or description as an attachment. Now, you can simply copy it directly to JIRA by using your keyboard shortcut or selecting "Copy" from the right-click menu.
- Express setup - Installing and configuring JIRA can be a complex task, especially if it's your first time using JIRA. We've recognized this, and we've simplified the JIRA setup process. JIRA can now be installed and up and running in under three minutes!
- Agile integration and performance - The JIRA development team have also been working hard on the integration and performance of JIRA and JIRA Agile. There have been improvements in performance of JIRA, and the most notable of these can be seen when starting and closing sprints in Agile, and when using the View on Board link in the Agile panel.
- Persistent custom fields - When you're creating an issue and check "Create another", the custom field values you entered will be now retained for the next issue you create. When you close the Create issue dialog, the custom values will be reset.
Project-specific schemes for new projects - Creating a new project now creates a project-specific issue type scheme, workflow scheme, screen scheme and issue type screen scheme for that project. This change applies to all project types, except for the 'JIRA Classic' project type, which still uses the shared default JIRA schemes when used to create a new project.
- Schedule option for services - Instead of entering a delay time, you can now schedule services to run on a specified number of days per week or month. See the Services for more information.
- Updated priorities and resolutions - JIRA 6.4 ships with a new set of priorities, and a new resolution. The old default priorities of Blocker, Critical, Major, Minor and Trivial will be replaced with Highest, High, Medium, Low and Lowest. If you are upgrading an installation of JIRA, or importing existing data, JIRA will respect your original priorities and they will continue to be available instead of the new priorities. The new priorities will only become available and therefore the default in new installations. We're also shipping with a new resolution of Won't Do. This resolution will only become available when you create a software development project in JIRA and is exactly the same as the current Won't Fix resolution, apart from the name.
- ADG 2.0 - We're also shipping our most up to date Atlassian Design Guidelines as part of the 6.4 release. This means that users will see changes in components of the user interface, such as how confirmation messages are displayed and a subtle change in color scheme. There is no functional change imposed by ADG 2.0.
Pre-ADG 2.0 | Post ADG 2.0 |
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The JIRA 6.4 team
In memoriam
On the 30th July 2014, Rosie Dabinett (née Jameson) passed away after a brave battle with cancer.
Rosie was the first and longest serving technical writer for JIRA. She inspired us all and left us too soon.
Vale Rosie. We miss you.
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