JIRA Core 7.3.x release notes

Jira Core release notes

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3 January 2017

We're pleased to announce the release of JIRA Core 7.3! 

In this release, we're trying to balance releasing new features that you've requested, with enhancing existing features and improving JIRA Core as a whole.

For JIRA administrators, we've added the ability to start JIRA with either all or a selection of your add-ons disabled. This helps trouble shoot upgrades and installations where add-ons may be causing issues.

We're also pleased to announce that the rich text editing editing experience we launched as a Labs feature in JIRA Core 7.2 has now graduated to the default experience in your instance. Users will still be able to select Visual mode or Text mode, but JIRA admins can also still turn the feature off altogether.

In this release, the feature we're most pleased to announce is that project administrators can now edit the workflows of their projects, with a few caveats of course. This is really the start of a longer journey to empower the project admin, which has been a long running request from our JIRA customers.

Read on for more extensive information on what we've done in this release. If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to send them to us directly in our JIRA instance.

Thanks for reading!

Warren Thompson

JIRA Core

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These release notes are for JIRA Core Server. If you are using JIRA Core Cloud, you can read about the latest changes on the Atlassian Cloud release notes blog.


Project level administration

We've extended the project administrators permission, so that project administrators can now edit their project's workflow under certain conditions:

  • The workflow must not be shared with any other projects
  • The workflow cannot be the JIRA default system workflow, which cannot be edited at all

The project admins won't be able to edit the workflow to the same extent as a JIRA administrator. The restrictions are:

  • To add a status, the status must already exist in the JIRA instance i.e. the project admin can't create new statuses or edit existing statuses.
  • The project admin isn't allowed to delete a status from the workflow.
  • The project admin can create, update or delete transitions, but they can't select or update a screen used by the transition, or edit a transition's properties, conditions, validators or post-functions.

This feature is enabled by default, and can't be disabled. When you upgrade to JIRA Service Desk 7.3, all your project administrators will have access to this feature immediately. To edit a workflow as a project administrator, select Project settings in your project's sidebar, and select an issue type. This will present the workflow, and Edit will be available.

 

We understand this is a big change, so we've created a script that will help JIRA admins work out what the impact to their instance will be. The scripts return a list of your projects, and which groups and/or users will be able to edit the project's workflows. We've also added a new 'workflow' event to the audit log that'll let you know who made workflow changes, and to which projects.

 


Rich text editing

We released rich text editing as an opt-in labs feature in JIRA Core 7.2, and now we're pleased to announce that rich text editing has graduated to the default editing experience in JIRA Core. This means when you upgrade or install JIRA Core7.3, the rich text editor will be turned on by default. This gives your users the option to either use Visual mode (what you see is what you get) or Text mode (wiki markdown). We've retained the ability for administrators to disable rich text editing if they wish, this will disable it for the entire instance, and all your users.

To disable the rich text editor, select > System, and select Rich text editor from the sidebar.

 


Starting a JIRA instance

We've added two features that relate to starting JIRA:

  1. We've added an extra step to the JIRA install/upgrade process that means you need to actively choose to start JIRA.
  2. We've added a feature that lets you start JIRA manually with all non-system add-ons disabled.
1. Installing and upgrading start up

Now when you install or upgrade a JIRA instance, you need to actively select to start JIRA. This change was required to allow us to work with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide a Quick Start guide using CloudFormation templates to allow you to deploy JIRA Software Data Center or JIRA Service Desk Data Center in an AWS environment.

2. Disable non-system add-ons

We've added a feature that allows you to start a JIRA instance with all user installed and custom add-ons disabled, or with a specified list of these add-ons disabled:

  1. --disable-all-addons (or /disablealladdons for Windows users)
  2. --disable-addons=<addon keys> or (/disableaddons=<addon keys> for Windows users)

     

This feature is designed to help with upgrades and installation issues where an add-on failing during JIRA startup stops your JIRA instance from starting. You'll be able to disable the add-on/s, start JIRA and manually remove the add-on through the add-on manager. 

 


Resolved issues

Performance issues

We’ve noticed that versions 7.3.7 and 7.3.8 have performance issues and show errors while opening pages or finishing some actions. This applies only if you’re using postgreSQL and have more than 500k users. To work around it, increase the heap size by 1GB per million users. We’ll release a fix for this in the next bugfix release.

 

Last modified on Aug 21, 2017

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