JIRA 6.0 Beta 1 Release Notes
22 April 2013
Atlassian is proud to present JIRA 6.0 Beta 1. This public development release is part of our Early Access Program (EAP) leading up to the official JIRA 6.0 release. We are making these EAP milestones 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 please provide us with your design (i.e. new look and feel) feedback here.
Love what you see in JIRA 6.0?
If you've tried out the JIRA 6 EAP and like what you see, we'd love to include your quotes, comments, and story of how JIRA 6 will change the way your teams work. Email Sara Yin to send us your quote.
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
New JIRA look and feel
JIRA 6.0 has been redesigned in accordance with 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. We think you'll find most common tasks simple and unobtrusive, with improved efficiency.
In most cases, the changes are cosmetic and the functionality is the same.
- The documentation will be updated for functional changes, but not for all cosmetic changes, at least not for a while. (This means that screen shots in the documentation will not match the product during this transition period.)
- We've rewritten and redesigned several dozen User Management pages.
- View issue keeps evolving and is getting faster.
- We have beautiful new icons throughout the product.
If you are a developer, you need to update your plugins to work in JIRA 6.0. The following documents are designed to help you with this transition:
- Preparing for JIRA 6.0 – summary of technical changes, with links to additional resources
- Building UI for a plugin shipping to multiple versions of JIRA – how to manage plugins for multiple versions of JIRA
We have made changes to JIRA's stable (Java) API. For details on this, see the Clirr results. Also see our Java API policy for JIRA for technical information on the JIRA Java APIs and our approach to changing them.
In this release:
Detail View
JIRA is optimized to let you quickly navigate lists of issues, switch to a detail view from the basic list view and back again, and take action on those items that need your immediate attention. The detail view lets you view an issue within the context of the filter it's a part of. This is great when you are triaging issues and you need a bit more context.
More direct access to JIRA Administration
JIRA Administrators now have easier direct access to the pages they use most. Now, instead of navigating to the JIRA Administration features by choosing the Cog menu at the top right of the screen, then choosing JIRA Admin > Projects (for example), you can navigate directly from the Cog menu to the functional area you wish to administer, e.g., Cog menu > Projects. See the illustration for details.
JIRA Mobile
You can now view mobile-optimised versions of JIRA pages on your iPhone or Android phone. The JIRA mobile interface is designed for viewing and interacting with issues on the go. Simply browse to your JIRA server's URL using your mobile browser to bring up the mobile interface for JIRA.
Search 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.
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.
Editable usernames
For all of you who have been anxiously awaiting this feature – "rename user" being the #2 most requested feature, as determined by customer votes – JIRA Administrators can now edit any username in the JIRA Internal Directory. This ability is important to have when you connect JIRA to an LDAP directory and the username format is different. Now you can edit the usernames before you connect to your LDAP directory and have them match in JIRA. Once the username is changed in the internal directory, all parts of the JIRA interface display the updated username.
Better workflow
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.
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 JIRA 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.
Project Templates
We've added a new dialog that allows you to select from different types of projects, when creating a new project.
Please note, in this release, choosing Blank Project, Bug Tracking, Software Development or Project Management in the dialog will create the default JIRA project. However, we are in the process of developing pre-configured project templates for project types. We are considering custom workflows, sample data, preset issue types, default fields, etc, for these templates.
Your use of the dialog will give us with valuable data to help us build the right project types.
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
Translate custom fields
You can now translate the field name and description of any custom field into another language. The translated strings will be included in the language pack that you specify (i.e. one of the language packs that is installed in JIRA).
Browse Project Summary
Starting a new project? You'll be greeted by a more informative screen when you next browse your empty project's summary.
The placeholder text provides guidance on what will appear on the summary, once the project has been populated. It also helps prompt users to get started creating issues and browsing the project.
Reports have moved
We have moved reports from the dropdown menu on the Browse Project > Summary tab to a panel on the same tab. This makes the reports more accessible and presents a cleaner user interface.
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.