Jira Software 8.11.x upgrade notes

Here are some important notes on upgrading to Jira Software 8.11.

For details on the new features and improvements in this release, see the Jira Software 8.10.x release notes. 

 Upgrade notes

Known issue: Sprint suggestions aren’t working

The Sprint picker field (used either when creating/editing issues or searching for sprints) suggests the last five sprints you viewed. If you haven’t viewed at least five, Jira will retrieve all existing sprints and calculate which are the best suggestions for you. Because of a bug, Jira isn’t retrieving additional sprints, so you’re seeing suggestions that are based only on your history.

More about this problem: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWSERVER-20679

Affected versions: 8.11.x, 8.12.x, 8.13.0

Fixed versions: 8.13.1+, 8.14.0+ (not released yet)

Workaround: The only workaround right now is building your history so Jira can show suggestions based on it. To do this, you have to visit backlogs that include sprints you’re interested in. Follow this bug for updates

Note: Upgrading to one of the fixed versions might cause performance issues in large Jira instances with thousands of sprints. See Sprint picker field might cause performance issues. 

Known issue: Too many warning messages about RequestCache in the log file

FIXED in Jira 8.11.1.

In Jira 8.9.1, we introduced additional logging messages to track the use of RequestCache without the context. For some instances, this resulted in a huge number of warning messages in the log file, similar to the one below:

[c.a.j.cache.request.RequestCacheImpl] From Jira 9.0 version creation/usage of RequestCacheImpl will throw the IllegalStateException.

If you’re having this problem, you can work around it by changing the logging for RequestCache to ERROR. At the same time, we’re working on a fix for this issue. You can read more about it here.

Increase your pool-max-size before upgrade

If you're upgrading from Jira 7.x to Jira 8.x we recommend changing the pool-max-size parameter to 40 in your dbconfig.xml before the upgrade. Leaving the default of 20 can sometimes lead to “ResultSet Closed” errors during re-indexing on 8.x. For information on implementing the change, see Tuning database connections.

An important bugfix requires full reindex

We fixed a bug that caused issues removed from sprint not showing in Burndown Chart or Sprint Report. The problem will automatically be fixed for all the newly created and edited issues and they will display in the Sprint Report and Burndown Chart.
If you are not concerned about the past issues, you don’t have to take any action. However, if you want to be sure all the past and current issues get fixed too, you need to perform a full reindex.

Fetching updates fixed for Jira

If you use Jira with other Atlassian products such as Bamboo, Bitbucket or Fisheye/Crucible, you might have experienced it getting stuck paging over issue updates. This happens when the collective number of results to fetch is bigger than 50. We have worked on a fix and have bundled it in this release, so Jira should update without further issues.

A bug in Tomcat causing issues on upgrade

Tomcat started to use double-quotes as of version 8.5.48 as a result of Expansion of JAVA_OPTS in catalina.sh containing '*' stops startup on linux bug. That's why when you upgrade to Jira 8.9 and set parameters in setenv.sh or setenv.bat, make sure that you:

• Don't remove the double-quotes in the catalina.sh
• Set all your parameters in one line without any new line in setenv.sh or setenv.bat

Otherwise you might experience issues starting up Jira. 

Embedded Crowd upgrade

As you might have read in the release notes, we’ve upgraded Embedded Crowd in Jira from version 2.0 to 4.0. This upgrade doesn’t require any actions from you, and the user interface did not change in any way.

Here are some benefits of the new version:

• Performance improvements (improved sync times)
• Clustering support
• Improved directory failover
• A number of bugs fixed

Here’s a list of issues that were solved with the new version:

If you’re an app developer, we recommend that you look at Preparing for Jira 8.11, as this upgrade brings our changes in our APIs.

Apache Tomcat upgrade

We've upgraded Apache Tomcat from 8.5.50 to 8.5.56.

New events in the Advanced audit log DATA CENTER

We've added 4 new events to the Advanced audit log (General configuration and administration / Fields / Level: Advanced) that help you track issue statuses (Status deleted, Status created, Status order changed, Status updated).

 End of support announcements

In Jira 8.11 we unbundled and stopped supporting the Hipchat integration for Jira app, as Hipchat reached its End of Life.

For more details, see End of support announcements.

 App developers

See Preparing for Jira 8.11 for any important changes regarding apps.

 Upgrade procedure

Upgrading from a Jira version 8.x.x? 

See Upgrading Jira applications for complete upgrade procedures, including all available upgrade methods and pre-upgrade steps. For a more tailored upgrade, go to  > Applications > Plan your upgrade. We’ll recommend a version to upgrade to, run pre-upgrade checks, and provide you with a custom upgrade guide with step-by-step instructions.