Highlights of JIRA 4.0 Beta 5:

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Advanced Searching

The new advanced search (JQL) provides support for logical operations, including AND, OR, NOT, NULL, EMPTY --- even on custom fields:

For more on the new JQL search syntax, please see the documentation.

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Dashboard Gadgets

The new-look JIRA dashboard not only looks awesome: it now uses industry-standard 'gadgets'. So you can add external gadgets to your JIRA dashboard, as well as displaying JIRA gadgets in other places (such as iGoogle).

You can easily customise your dashboard by choosing a different layout, adding more gadgets, dragging the gadgets into different positions, and changing the look of individual gadgets.

What's happened to your favourite JIRA portlets? Don't worry: every portlet that previously shipped with JIRA has been converted to a 'legacy gadget'. And if you are a plugin developer and have created your own portlets, see the instructions for converting your portlets to gadgets.

The following gadgets are available in Beta 4:

• 'Activity Stream' gadget (see below)
• 'Admin' gadget
• 'Bamboo Plan Summary' gadget*
• 'Bamboo Status' gadget*
• 'Crucible Charting' gadget
• 'Create Issue' gadget
• 'Favourite Filters' gadget
• 'Filter Results' gadget
• 'FishEye Charting' gadget
• 'Introduction' gadget
• 'Issue Completed This Iteration' gadget
• 'Login' gadget
• 'Quicklinks' gadget
• 'Voted Issues' gadget

* Requires Bamboo 2.3.2 Beta 1 or later.

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Activity Stream

The new 'Activity Stream' gadget displays a summary of the latest activity in JIRA projects (and/or by particular people) in which you are interested.

The 'Activity Stream' gadget also provides an RSS feed, allowing you to create very specific RSS feeds of only the information that is most relevant to you.

See the documentation for more details.

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Issue Actions in the Issue Navigator

By popular request, issues can now be actioned directly from the Issue Navigator:

The "Actions" menu is also available for the list of sub-tasks within an issue.
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Charting Now Comes Standard

The following reports and gadgets from the Charting plugin have now been integrated into JIRA:

• "Average Age" report and gadget — Shows the average age (in days) of unresolved issues, e.g.:
  
• "Created vs Resolved Issues" report and gadget — Shows the number of issues created vs number of issues resolved over a given period of time.
• "Pie Chart" report and gadget — Shows the search results from a specified issue filter (or project) in a pie-chart, based on a statistic of your choice.
• "Recently Created Issues" report and gadget — Shows the rate at which issues are being created.
• "Resolution Time" report and gadget — Shows the average time taken to resolve issues.
• "Time Since Issues" report and gadget — Shows the number of issues for which your chosen date field (e.g. 'Created') was set on a given date.

Also, the "Resolved" field from the Charting plugin is now part of JIRA, so every issue now automatically has its resolution date recorded.

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New-look "Browse Project"

JIRA 4.0 provides a cleaner, more interactive view into a project:

See the documentation for more about browsing projects, versions and components.
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Project Icons

You can now give your project a visual identity, thanks to the introduction of project icons ('avatars'):

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New-look Header

The new-look JIRA header gives you quick access to all the most commonly-used functions. Creating an issue just got super-fast!

Click to zoom in:

If you prefer keystrokes rather than mouse-clicks, you'll be pleased to know that you can use your keyboard to navigate the new header menus.
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Default Unit for Time Tracking

You can now specify your preferred Default Unit (minutes/hours/days/weeks) for your JIRA system. This will be applied whenever users log work on an issue without specifying a unit.

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"History" is now permanent

Your list of recently-viewed issues is now stored in JIRA's database — so it's available after you log out and back in, even if you use a different machine.

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Engine Room

Beyond the 'Back' Button

When navigating away from a page where you have modified data, you will be prompted to see if you would like to save the data or discard your changes (see JRA-14911).

Index Queue

Index updates are now put in a queue. So even if the update takes longer than 30 seconds, the operation remains on the queue and is not lost. (See JRA-14220.)

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Plus over 800 other fixes and improvements

Click here for full list.