JIRA 6.0 EAP 7 (m09) Release Notes

25 March 2013 

Atlassian is proud to present JIRA 6.0 EAP 7 (m9). 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.  

Important information for developers

The EAP 4 (m6) milestone included all "breaking changes" for JIRA 6.0. These are changes to JIRA APIs that require ecosystem developers to change how they build their plugins. These include changes to the following areas:

  • JIRA's stable (Java) API
  • JIRA CSS styles
  • JavaScript components that build UI
  • HTML markup patterns

If you haven't already, start updating your plugins for JIRA 6.0 now. We are not planning on making further breaking changes, but if they do occur they will be highlighted in the release notes. For further information, see Preparing for JIRA 6.0 as well as our Java API policy for JIRA.

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.  Just send us your quote by emailing Sara Yin.

 

(minus) 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. In EAP 7, these changes are across the entire product, making it modern, fast, and easy to use.  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:

(info) We'd love to hear your feedback on the new JIRA look and feel. Please provide us with your feedback here.


 

In this release:

Detail View

JIRA 6.0 is optimised 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.

If you've used JIRA for some time, the 'list view' is the view you are used to seeing; namely, the search results from a filter, a basic search, a quick search, or an advanced search.

The new '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.

 


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.

(info) 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.

 


Editable usernames

JIRA Administrators can now edit any username in the JIRA Internal Directory (this is often referred to as the "rename user" feature). 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. The other most common use case is when a staff member wishes to change their surname. Once the username is changed in the internal directory, all parts of the JIRA interface display the updated username.

For more information, see Renamable Users in JIRA 6.0.

 


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. 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.

Read more...

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.

Read more...

 


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.

Read more...

 


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.

Read more...

 


Other improvements

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.

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.

 


JIRA Rest Ruby Gem - Help Wanted!

For all the Ruby on Rails fans out there, there's a great Ruby gem to use JIRA's REST API. Trineo, an Atlassian partner, created this gem and has lovingly evolved it, but is looking for a new owner. Give our kiwi mates a hand! Contact abhinav.keswani@trineo.co.nz if you're interested.

Last modified on Mar 25, 2013

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