Jira 8.0 Beta and RC Release Notes
Highlights of Jira 8.0 Beta and Release Candidate
- Look and feel: Scrum and Kanban
- Batching email notifications
- Significant backlogs load faster
- Dropping Linked pages count to boost performance
- New JQL options
- More goodies
- Infrastructure changes
- Upgrading to Jira 8.0
Look and feel: Scrum and Kanban
Following on the changes to the look and feel in Jira brought with Jira 7.10, we’re now updating another batch of pages. Jira 8.0 will have a new look and feel of Scrum/Kanban boards and backlogs. We'd recommend that you spin up the latest version to see for yourself, but here are some screenshots to give you a better idea of what to expect!
Batching email notifications
By batching email notifications, you can reduce the number of emails you’re getting when issues are being updated. Instead of sending each update separately, we’ll group them together and send you a single summary email.
Every email like that will contain updates that occurred in a single issue within the last 10 minutes, including changes to any of the issue fields, comments, work logs, and attachments.
To enable this feature, go to 
> System > Batching email notifications.
Sample summary email
Significant backlogs load faster
Big backlogs can take time to load, and teams usually work with a small chunk of the issues at a time. Acknowledging this fact and striving to make backlogs render faster, we're now by default displaying only 100 issues (90 from the top and 10 from the bottom) from your backlog. The remaining issues can be displayed if you click Show all issues.
On top of this change, we've introduced a number of backend changes that resulted in faster initial loading. For example, when we tested a backlog of 10 K issues, it loaded in 4 secs as opposed to 85 secs in earlier versions of Jira.
Dropping Linked pages count to boost performance
To significantly improve Jira performance, we've decided to drop the count of pages linked to epics and sprints. You can still track linked pages and see if there are multiple pages linked but the exact count in numbers is no longer there.
This change does wonders to Jira performance, so no count no cry in this case.
New JQL options
Find authors (updatedBy)
Search for issues that were updated by a specific user, and within a specified time range. Whether you're looking for issues updated in the last 8 hours, two months, or between June and September 2017 - we've got you covered.
Find link types (issueLinkType)
Search for issues that are linked with other issues by particular link types, like blocks or is duplicated by. This will help you quickly find any related blockers, duplicates, and other issues that affect your work.
More goodies
4-byte characters
Jira now supports 4-byte characters with MySQL 5.7 and later. This means you can finally use all these emojis you've dreamed about! If you'd like to try it out, expand the section below for more info on how to set up your MySQL database.
Add-ons are now apps
We're renaming add-ons to apps. This has already changed in our Universal Plugin Manager some time ago, and now Jira follows suit. This change shouldn't really affect you, but we're letting you know so you're not surprised when seeing this new naming in the Jira administration and other pages.
Infrastructure changes
Head to Preparing for Jira 8.0 to find out about changes that will impact add-on developers.
Upgrading to Jira 8.0
Together with Jira 8.0 Beta, we’ve published Beta documentation about the upgrade. You can use it to plan how 8.0-specific changes might affect your upgrade, especially when it comes to upgrading apps (add-ons) and reindexing Jira. At this point, we’d love to get your feedback about it, so we can make it better for the official release. If there are any things about Jira 8.0 that give you sleepless nights and we haven’t included them there, let us know!