Jira Core 8.0.x release notes

11 February 2019

We're pleased to present Jira Core 8.0.

Highlights

• Better email notifications
• New priority icons
• New options in advanced search
• Faster indexing
• REST API for issue type schemes
• Smaller improvements to make your day
• Bonus resources
• Resolved issues

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Read the upgrade notes for important info about this release and see the full list of issues resolved. 

Compatible applications

If you're looking for compatible Jira applications, look no further:

• Jira Software 8.0 release notes
• Jira Service Desk 4.0 release notes
  
  

Better email notifications

With every issue update sent in a separate email, email notifications can get overwhelming. Digging through a pile of emails first thing in the morning is never a good idea, that’s why we’ve embarked on a mission to make notifications smarter, and less chatty.

In Jira 8.0, you can batch events that occur close together, and receive them in a single summary email. Every email like that groups events that occurred in a single issue within the 10-minute window, and is very helpful when you're doing any bulk updates, or when your teammates create issues and fill them in in one go. Here’s how a summary email looks:

Your Jira admin can enable this feature by going to  > System > Batching email notifications. Learn more

New priority icons

We’ve got a lot of feedback about our priority icons not being distinctive or accessible, and we have to agree with that. Finally, after countless hours of designing, user testing, and even looking for inspiration in Egyptian hieroglyphs, we’ve decided on a set of simple and clear icons that will make it easier to distinguish what needs to be done first. Here’s a comparison of old and new icons that you'll be seeing around Jira:

New options in advanced search

Here are some new options that you can use when searching for issues with advanced search:

Find authors (updatedBy)

Search for issues that were updated by a specific user, 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. Learn more

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. Learn more

Faster indexing

One of the big changes coming in Jira 8.0 is the upgrade of Lucene, Jira’s search-based subsystem engine. Though not visible at first glance like other user features, this change brings significant improvements to indexing, which makes it easier to administer and maintain your Jira instance. Here’s an overview of how this change affects indexing:

All of the following performance improvements are based on the Jira 8.0 vs Jira 7.6 comparison.

• Reindexing Jira takes much less time 
  Reindex duration is 71% faster (in our tests, a 3h reindex dropped to 53 minutes.) This means less time spent on reindexing after major configuration changes, and quicker upgrades.
  
  
• Jira indexes are smaller, and easier to maintain
  Index size has shrunk by 48% (in our tests, the index size dropped from 19GB to 9.9GB.) This means a faster, more stable Jira that is easier to maintain and troubleshoot.
  
  

• Jira performance is stable over time
  No need to reindex often, as performance stays consistent and doesn’t degrade with time.

• Jira is more stable and predictable
  Memory issues that occurred with intensive search functions, like very complex JQLs, are nonexistent in our 8.0 tests.

For more detailed performance results, see Performance and scale testing.

REST API for issue type schemes

Jira 8.0 brings REST APIs to let you manage issue type schemes outside of the user interface. As a Jira admin, you can perform the following actions:

• Create an issue type scheme and associate it with projects
• Retrieve individual or all issue type schemes, together with the associated projects
• Change or remove projects associated with a scheme
• Delete issue type schemes

For more info, see Issue type schemes in Jira REST API docs.

Small improvements to make your day

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! Here's a guide that will help you connect Jira to a MySQL 5.7 database. You can find more details about this change in this suggestion.

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.

Bonus resources

Performance and scale testing

With every Jira release, we’re publishing a performance and scaling report that compares performance of the current Jira version with the previous one. The report also contains results of how various data dimensions (number of custom fields, issues, projects, and so on) affect Jira, so you can check which of these data dimensions should be limited to give best results when scaling Jira. You can get the report for Jira 8.0 here.

Security overview and advisories

We’ve created a document for system administrators who want to evaluate the security of the Jira application. The document answers a number of questions that commonly come up when customers ask us about the security of our product. It will also list any security advisories published for Jira 8.0. You can view it here.

Resolved issues