At Atlassian, we’re always trying to improve how we operate, and dealing with issue reports from customers is no exception. We’ve noticed for a while that many of our customers struggle to find the right channel to report issues with Atlassian products, so recently we set out to fix this.
In the past, there were two options available: raise a ticket in our support system at support.atlassian.com, or file a bug report on our public Jira instance at jira.atlassian.com. After reviewing hundreds of tickets and bugs raised over the last few years, many of which were filed in the wrong place, we’ve decided to consolidate issue reporting to a single place – our support system, which we determined best meets our customer needs when reporting issues.
Wait… but why?
The main reason to do this is to improve and simplify the customer experience. We found, most of the time, customer issues can be resolved very quickly when assisted by a support engineer directly. The majority of bugs created on jira.atlassian.com by customers were actually not well-defined bug reports, but rather issues that our customer support team could quickly help them with.
Our customer support team is a global 24×7 team and well-trained in reproducing issues. So we believe this change will allow us to respond to customers faster, as well as identifying and prioritizing genuine bugs as they’re reported. Internally at Atlassian, moving responsibility for the initial triage of customer problem reports outside the development team will also free up time for the development team to do what they do best – including fixing the bugs you report.
Are bug reports still public?
Of course! You can still watch, vote, and comment on issues in jira.atlassian.com as before. We will also continue to create public bug reports as new bugs are found, so you will still have visibility across all bugs in our products.
What about product suggestions?
Nothing has changed here – product feature requests and suggestions can still be raised in jira.atlassian.com, and our product management team will continue to monitor and respond to them. We really value all the feedback on our products and factor it into our roadmap decisions, even if we don’t have time to personally reply to each comment (or “Happy Birthday” message to your favorite bug).
How about ecosystem and API developers?
These changes do not affect our Ecosystem issue tracker. Add-on developers and people building integrations with our REST APIs are most often raising tickets describing specific API issues that need to be reviewed by an engineer, so we have a separate review process for our Ecosystem Jira projects.
Thank you for helping us help you
The product feedback you provide us enables us to continue improving our products, so please continue to track, watch, and vote on your favorite issues on Jira, and file any new bug reports on support.atlassian.com as you encounter them. We’ll be reviewing this process to ensure that it does continue to meet our customer needs now and in the future, but please let us know if you have any concerns about this change.