Jira Software 8.1.x release notes
4 April 2019
We're pleased to present Jira Software 8.1.Highlights
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Interested in trying a shiny new version? Don't forget to renew your active software maintenance! Renew now.
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:
Issue archiving (Jira Data Center)
You can now keep your Jira instance neat and tidy by archiving issues that have not been updated for months. This is the first milestone of issue archiving, and we’re working hard to bring you more in the next releases, so stay tuned!
At this point, you can use API to archive and restore individual issues, export the list of archived issues, or use the basic UI toolset to archive up to a thousand issues at once and restore them individually whenever they’re needed again. Learn more
Managing old components
To help you manage the data you use more efficiently, we've introduced component archiving. Now, whenever admins decide a component is no longer needed, they can archive it. It will be tagged as "Archived" and as such will disappear from selection options. For the issues in which the component has been selected, it will become read-only. Learn more
Development info on issue cards
Tired of having to click on each issue on your board to see the information from your development tools? Now you can add the development tool info directly to your cards by adding the Development field to your Card layout. Navigate to your board, select Board > Configure > Card layout, and then select Development from the relevant Field name dropdown to add it to your cards.
Next time you visit that board, the development information for each issue will be displayed on the cards. You can add or remove the development information for your cards on an individual board basis.
Flexible boards
You can now resize the ‘Issue details’ panel as you see fit! This was already available on Scrum and Kanban backlogs, but since boards are just a click away... we’ve brought these changes there, too. We’ve also added horizontal scrolling to boards with many columns, just so everything fits nicely, even on small screens.
More performance improvements
The board picker effect
The board picker is this little thing at the top of the side navigation, where you can quickly switch between the boards. Although our data shows that only 4% of visitors interact with the board picker, Jira loads the list of boards every time you open the page. Simplicity is king, so we’ve shaved off a few tasks needed to put the list of boards together, and made Jira do the math only when you interact with the picker icon.
You won’t see a difference when using the board picker, but you will see it everywhere else! This change does wonders to Jira performance, improving the speed of boards, backlogs, issue view, and every other page that displays the side nav, as Jira no longer needs to do the unneeded calculations.
Speed of color
To make your issues more visible, you can assign colors to issue cards based on various JQL queries. Calculating all these JQLs and showing them as colors put a lot of effort on Jira, so we’ve decided to change it, also bringing more speed to your boards and backlogs. To let you in on some details here, we first load and display the content of the page, and then apply colors only to visible issue cards. This change reduces the number of JQL queries loaded at once, and improves the loading time of boards and backlogs.
As always, you can check the performance results in Performance and scale testing.
Jira Data Center on Microsoft Azure
We’ve improved our Microsoft Azure deployment templates for Jira Data Center on Microsoft Azure. Check them out on the Azure Marketplace (for beginners) or from our Bitbucket repo (for advanced users).
These new templates address many known issues, improve disaster recovery, add support for Application Insights and analytics, and make it easier to configure both SSL and Custom Domain Names. We also made some under-the-hood changes that fix many architectural changes.
Oh, and the new templates apply to all Jira versions, not just 8.1.
New JMX metrics for more insights into Jira performance
We have added additional indexing instrumentation that is exposed through JMX so that you can diagnose performance issues related to indexing. The new metrics available over JMX expose more details than the old ones and there are more of them so that the data is more accurate.
For more information, see Live monitoring using the JMX interface.
We've also made changes to Atlassian profiling. Now profiling traces merge identical sibling frames so logs are easier to parse and traces report time spent in tenths of milliseconds. Additionally, we have moved profiling information from the standard log to a separate log file: atlassian-jira-profiler.log.
For more information, see Logging and profiling.
Small improvements to make your day
Sorting projects by columns
To browse your projects more easily, you can now sort the list of projects by columns. Whether it’s specific project type, category, or even project lead you’re looking for, just click the column name and have the projects roll out right at your feet. One of the reasons we’ve added this feature is to let admins easily identify projects that could be archived. Sorting by Last issue update or the number of issues will help you identify large and inactive projects.
Additional custom fields in batched email notifications
You can now add additional custom fields to your email notifications to describe them more precisely. Such custom fields will be included in every email notification for an issue, unlike other fields that are included only if their value has changed (notifications are all about diff). Some of our users use custom fields in this way to add security levels to an issue and have them displayed in every notification related to an issue. By doing so, they can properly categorize or hide important notifications. Learn more
Something off with the activity on your account?
To let you better sleep at night, we’ve added information about your recent login attempts to your user profile. You can now check when was the last successful or failed login, to determine if somebody tried messing with your account. Until now, this was only available to Jira admins, so go ahead and flex your admin muscles! To find this info, click your avatar at the top-right in Jira, and select Profile.
Shiny new avatars
In the past few months, we did a lot of big UI changes to bring Jira closer to our new Design direction. Following on this, we’ve updated the user and project avatars, changing the color palette and shapes, and bringing a bit more variety so everybody can choose something for themselves.