On February 11, Atlassian finally announced the release of Jira 8.0!
So what can Jira users expect when updating to this new version?
Read on to find out everything you should know about the latest features and improvements.
Productivity Updates
Many new and updated features in Jira 8.0 will enable you and your team to become more productive.
Jira is Now Faster
With this new update, nearly everything in Jira is faster, allowing you to work with more efficiency.
The Atlassian team has optimized its processes and updated several libraries to increase performance.
You can expect the following improvements:
- Agile boards now load 2x as fast
- JQL searches are performed 31% faster
- Re-index durations are 71% shorter
For a full description of performance and scale testing, view the documentation here.
More Streamlined Email Communication
Did you love receiving dozens of separate emails every time someone performed bulk changes on a Jira issue?
Yeah, me neither.
Thankfully, Jira 8.0 solves this issue by streamlining the email notification system.
All updates performed in the last 10 minutes can now be batched within a single email summary per issue. Each email will have info on the following:
- All comments
- Changes to attachments
- Changes to issue fields
- Work logs
However, this is not set by default.
To set this up, administrations will need to do the following:
1. Go to the Systems tab and select Batching email notifications (or search for it using the GG shortcut) under the ‘MAIL’ section
2. Enable the feature using the toggle button.
This will enable the feature for all users in your team.
Note that this does have a limitation. For now, you can not add custom fields to your email when you enable batched email notifications.
Update on Priority Icons
All priority icons now have their own unique shape.
This will make it easier to tell each priority apart for better at-a-glance comprehension of your workload.
Note that some priority icons also have different colors – for instance, the low to minor icons are now blue instead of green.
Changes to Agile Board UI
Your favorite UI views now have a fresh new look in Jira 8.0.
The old UI looked like this:
And now Jira 8.0 has a cleaner look, like this:
Both the Scrum and Kanban view have a more modern look that provides more information on each issue.
To add more speed to an already faster Jira, the backlog view now displays up to 100 issues. Which drastically improves loading time for this view.
By default, 90 of these issues are from the top of your backlog while the last 10 are from the bottom.
To view more than 100 backlogs, you can click on ‘show all issues’.
More JQL Functions
Two new functions have been added to boost your JQL searches!
Find authors (updated By)
This function has been requested since 2003! It enables you to returns issues that were updated by a specific user within a specific time range.
Find link types (issueLinkType)
Find issues that are linked together. For example, one issue that blocks, relates to, or is blocked by another issue.
This is quite useful in cases where you need to escalate issues to a development project. Now, you can search for all issues where the dependent issue has been resolved to keep your customers updated.
Native Mobile App in Beta
It’s finally here!
Now you can use Jira 8 on the go with access to a mobile app.
This app is currently available in beta on both iOS and Android phones.
No more clunky Jira work on your mobile browser. To find out more about how to request access to the beta, visit Atlassian’s official documentation page.
Data Center Improvements
For Jira customers who use Data Center, you’re getting several improvements as well.
The Jira 8.0 version of Data Center can handle 41% more throughput than Jira Data Center 7.6 – it also uses smaller and more stable indexing.
Additionally, performance optimization enables developers to scale back on hardware to run Data Center.
Miscellaneous Updates
On top of all these amazing updates, here are a few more notes:
- Add-Ons in the marketplace are now called “Apps”.
- For sprint planning, also note that the query which selects the issue to be shown on a board no longer needs to be ordered by rank. You can easily move issues to a sprint by right-clicking them.
- You can now get emojis 😁🖖👻🤗! thanks to 4-byte character support when connecting Jira to a MySQL 5.7 or higher!
Wrapping it Up
There you have it – work faster than ever by updating to a sleek new Jira 8.0.
With a sleeker interface, better email notifications, faster load times, and new search features, Jira 8.0 allows for a smoother and more streamlined workflow.
For a full overview of all updates in Jira 8.0, check out the official release notes.