Jira Software 8.20 Long Term Support release change log

Jira Software 8.20.x upgrade notes

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Jira Software 8.20 is a Long Term Support release, and this change log aims to give you an overview of what's changed in the preceding versions. 

About Long Term Support releases
 We recommend upgrading Jira regularly, however if your organisation's process means you only upgrade about once a year, upgrading to a Long Term Support release may be a good option, as it provides continued access to critical security, stability, data integrity and performance issues until this version reaches end of life. 

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End of Life policy

Atlassian supports feature versions for two years after the first major iteration of that version was released. Once a version reaches End of Life, you won't be able to receive support for it. Here are the EOL dates for Jira Long Term Support releases.

8.5October 21, 2021

Learn more


8.13October 5, 2022
8.20January 31, 2024

Top features

Here's a summary of the great new features awaiting your users.  

All changes are divided according to versions in which they were released, but it doesn't mean you have to upgrade through each version separately. You can go straight from 8.5 or 8.13 to 8.20.

Versions 8.5 to 8.13
8.6
  • Jira copies over files on upgrade
  • Burnup charts in Jira Software
  • Support for PostgreSQL 10
  • Prefix and suffix search
  • Cluster monitoring for Jira DC
Release notes
8.7
  • Anonymizing users for GDPR compliance
  • Authentication option through OpenID Connect
  • PostgreSQL support
Release notes
8.8
  • Advanced auditing (Jira Data Center)
  • Dates for future sprints
  • Accessibility improvements
Release notes
8.9
  • Refreshed velocity chart
  • More accessibility improvements
  • Additions to cluster monitoring
Release notes
8.10
  • OAuth 2.0 support for incoming mail
  • GDPR compliance improvements
  • Optimized custom fields for Data Center
  • Stale nodes automatically removed in Data Center
Release notes
8.11
  • Issue detail view optional
  • Improved email notifications about mentions
  • Embedded Crowd upgrade
  • Restricting sprint selection
  • Stale node moved offline configuration option
Release notes
8.12
  • Improved user picker
  • MySQL 8.0 support
  • Just-in-time user provisioning in Data Center
  • Advanced auditing improvements in Data Center
Release notes
8.13
  • No updates
Release notes



Versions 8.13 to 8.20
8.13
  • No updates
Release notes
8.14
  • Email templates made better (Data Center)
  • Quickly view issues belonging to an epic
  • DVCS Connector improvements
  • Personal access tokens
  • Embedded Crowd and password encryption
  • Accessibility improvements when creating issues
  • Improved data insights (Data Center)
  • Jira Cloud Migration Assistant bundled with Jira
  • Choosing Bamboo plan branches in Jira
Release notes
8.15
  • Advanced Roadmaps is now part of Jira Software (Data Center)
  • Displaying image attachments in email notifications
Release notes
8.16
  • Get more insights into the usage of custom fields (Data Center)
  • Bulk delete custom fields (Data Center)
  • Default values for the Description field (Data Center)
  • Let users log in with multiple identity providers (Data Center)
  • Check the status of your data pipeline exports (Data Center)
  • Keep Jira safe by disabling basic authentication
  • Improvements to DVCS accounts
Release notes
8.17
  • Keep consistent naming of sprints and epics between Jira and Agile at Scale frameworks with Flexible Terminology
  • Refreshed commenting experience with improved appearance, keyboard navigation and support for assistive technologies
  • Custom fields are now included in data pipeline exports (Data Center)
  • Around 100 security vulnerabilities fixed in the Jira platform
Release notes
8.18
  • Comment reactions (Data Center)
  • Analyzing how your issues change over time with data pipeline (Data Center)
Release notes
8.19
  • New wizard for creating plans in Advanced Roadmaps (Data Center)
  • Dependency report in Advanced Roadmaps (Data Center)
  • Filtering epics and versions in backlogs
  • Data pipeline improvements (Data Center)
  • Pagination and UI improvements on Screens 
Release notes
8.20
  • No updates
Release notes

Critical bug fixes

Every release contains a bunch of bug fixes. Here's all the ones that were deemed critical severity and fixed since 8.5. 

Versions 8.5 to 8.13
8.5

Summary
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All 8.5 bug fixes
8.6

Summary
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All 8.6 bug fixes
8.7

Summary
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All 8.7 bug fixes
8.8

Summary
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All 8.8 bug fixes
8.9

Summary
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All 8.9 bug fixes
8.10

Summary
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All 8.10 bug fixes
8.11

Summary
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All 8.11 bug fixes
8.12

Summary
Refresh

All 8.12 bug fixes
8.13

Summary
Refresh

All 8.13 bug fixes
Versions 8.13 to 8.20
8.13

Summary
Refresh

All 8.13 bug fixes
8.14

Summary
Refresh

All 8.14 bug fixes
8.15

Summary
Refresh

All 8.15 bug fixes
8.16

Summary
Refresh

All 8.16 bug fixes
8.17

Summary
Refresh

All 8.17 bug fixes
8.18

Summary
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All 8.18 bug fixes
8.19

Summary
Refresh

All 8.19 bug fixes
8.20

Summary
Refresh

All 8.20 bug fixes

Supported platform changes

From time to time we will add or end support for a platform. Here's a summary of the changes since 8.5. 

8.5No changesSupported platforms
8.6

Added support for:

  • PostgreSQL 10

Ended support for:

  • Internet Explorer 11
Supported platforms
8.7

Added support for:

  • PostgreSQL 11 and Aurora 3.0 for Jira Data Center
Supported platforms
8.8

Ended support for:

  • Microsoft SQL Server 2012
  • PostgreSQL 9.4, 9.5
  • Solaris
  • Oracle 12c R1
Supported platforms
8.9No changesSupported platforms
8.10No changesSupported platforms
8.11

Ended support for:

  • Hipchat app (also unbundled from Jira)
Supported platforms
8.12

Ended support for:

  • MySQL 5.6
  • Microsoft SQL Server 2014

Added support for:

  • MySQL 8.0
Supported platforms
8.13No changesSupported platforms
8.14No changesSupported platforms
8.15No changesSupported platforms
8.16

Ended support for:

  • PostgreSQL 9.6
Supported platforms
8.17

Added support for:

  • Microsoft SQL Server 2019
Supported platforms
8.18

No changes

Supported platforms
8.19

Removed support for:

  • PostgreSQL 9.6

Added support for:

  • PostgreSQL 12
  • Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL 12
Supported platforms
8.20

Ended support for:

  • Microsoft Edge Legacy
Supported platforms

Technical Upgrade notes

This table is a high-level summary of the Upgrade notes, you should read the full Upgrade notes before upgrading. 

8.5

Important notes:

  • ZDU is not available if you're upgrading from 7.x version.
Upgrade notes
8.6

Important notes:

  • API change for JXM monitoring
  • Support for PostgreSQL 10
  • New JVM code cache check
  • New information in the audit log
  • Transferring custom modifications from old Jira files

  • Better support for reply emails from Outlook by mailhandlers

Upgrade notes
8.7

Important notes:

  • PostgreSQL 11 support
  • OpenID Connect support for Jira Data Center
  • Changes in the issue collector
  • Disabling HTML in custom fields description
Upgrade notes
8.8

Important notes:

  • The new audit log requires that we migrate your current audit log entries. This might take some time, but it will be done in the background.
  • We've enabled Garbage First Garbage Collection (G1 GC) for Jira instances running on Java 11.
Upgrade notes
8.9

Important notes:

  • New API to help the Versions view load faster

Upgrade notes
8.10

Important notes:

  • If you're using Google or Microsoft for incoming mail, we recommend that you create an OAuth 2.0 integration, and reconfigure your mail servers and email channels.

Upgrade notes
8.11

Important notes:

  • We fixed a bug that caused issues removed from sprint not showing in Burndown Chart or Sprint Report. This requires full re-index.
  • We fixed fetching updates from different products in Jira.
  • We upgraded Embedded Crowd in Jira from version 2.0 to 4.0.
  • We upgraded Apache Tomcat from 8.5.50 to 8.5.56.
  • Hipchat got unbundled from Jira.
Upgrade notes
8.12

Important notes:

  • Known issue: Azure SQL is reported as unsupported
  • Known issue: MySQL 8.0 is reported as misconfigured
  • We've added database password encryption.
  • We've extended API response to look for archived projects.
  • We've added new events in the Advanced audit log for Data Center.
  • We fixed a bug that caused issues removed from sprint not showing in Burndown Chart or Sprint Report. This required full reindex.
Upgrade notes
8.13

Important notes:

  • OAuth 2.0 integration for Microsoft Exchange Online will be introduced in 8.13.1
  • Document-based replication for Data Center
Upgrade notes
8.14

Important notes:

  • We've improved email templates that control your notifications
  • We've improved the performance of the DVCS connector
  • The project REST API can now show information on whether a project is archived
  • We've changed the format of GC logs produced by Jira running on Java 11
  • We've blocked logging in to Jira by passing credentials via URL parameters
Upgrade notes
8.15

Important notes:

  • We've made Advanced Roadmaps part of Jira Software Data Center
  • The Asset Management and Insight Discovery apps are also available in Jira Data Center
  • We've made changes to the web.xml file related to improvements for image attachments
Upgrade notes
8.16

Important notes:

  • Data pipeline API responses include request details
Upgrade notes
8.17

Important notes:

  • User-generated custom fields and fields provided by apps are included in the data pipeline export by default
  • We've removed obsolete JIM importers
Upgrade notes
8.18

Important notes:

  • Bundled JRE disables secure connections to MySQL Community Edition 5.7.27 or older over TLS versions 1 and 1.1
  • We've upgraded the embedded H2 database
Upgrade notes
8.19

Important notes:

  • Improved user assignment and mentioning performance
  • Jira Software binary installers bundled with Java 11
  • We've changed the data pipeline by adding disk space checks, export schema versioning, and improving exporting user details
  • We've added a configurable throttling mechanism to Activity Streams
Upgrade notes
8.20This release does not introduce new features.Upgrade notes

Upgrade procedure

Upgrading from a previous Long Term Support release?

See our dedicated upgrade guide. 

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.


Upgrade now

Last modified on Dec 7, 2023

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