It’s an exciting time for the Jira Software Server team. In the past 6 months, we’ve been hard at work on product improvements, new feature requests and setting our future vision with one goal in mind: how to best support agile teams in growing organizations.
Leading the charge for the product team is Gosia Kowalska. I sat down with her to find out what her team has recently shipped, and what they’re looking to accomplish in the near future.
Hi Gosia, can you tell us a little about yourself?
Yes, I’d be happy to. I’m a Product Manager for Jira Software Server at Atlassian, based in the Gdańsk office. I’ve been in the software development world for over 15 years and I love to build products that help teams be more efficient.
Most people are familiar with Jira Software for cloud and server. But can you tell us about Jira Software Data Center?
Jira Software Data Center is a self-hosted deployment option built for our enterprise customers. We often hear about customers who run Jira Software on a single server, but as their organization grows and their number of users continues to increase, they reach a point where Jira Software is mission-critical to their team’s work. Our Data Center offering provides high availability and performance at scale for our large organizations that require uninterrupted access to Jira Software, as well as deployment flexibility and administrative control to alleviate the complexity that comes with scaling an instance.
What’s recently shipped in Jira Software Server and Jira Software Data Center that’s been the most exciting for you and your team?
It’s been an incredibly busy year for our team. We recently shipped Jira Software Server 7.4, which included one of the most highly requested features by both end users and admins: the Kanban backlog. This solved a key problem for kanban users who were struggling to keep their growing backlogs organized. We’ve also put a lot of effort into an initiative to improve project level administration. We realize that as an organization grows so do the number of user requests for Jira Software admins. It may become difficult for admins to make changes in a timely manner and therefore they become bottlenecks for the team’s velocity. We’ve empowered project admins to own more aspects of configuration within their projects, such as the ability to add or remove statuses and configure transitions in workflows, and edit fields on issue screens. With this functionality, teams do not have to worry about process changes slowing down their work.
Apart from the features mentioned, we’ve released a number of bug-fixes and resolved more customer requests within Jira Software Server to streamline user experience. We closed 125 jira.atlassian.com issues to be exact! This number includes 100 bugfixes resolving a total of 1029 votes, and 25 customer suggestions resolving a total of 3618 votes. The top voted suggestions that were fixed include: improvements to Rich Text Editor, support for MySQL 5.7.x, and removing the limit for the number of exported issues with CSV Exporter.
We were also excited to announce new features to help organizations easily scale in Jira Software Data Center. One was out-of-the-box SAML single sign-on support, or the ability to connect your Data Center instance to your existing supported Identity Provider. This makes authentication more manageable by giving users a single sign-on experience. We shipped zero downtime upgrades so that teams who rely on Jira’s availability can jump from 7.3.x to the latest bugfix or 7.4.x without being forced to schedule downtime and interrupt working teams. And, we created more deployment flexibility with the ability to run Jira Software Data Center in AWS.
And last but not least, can you tell us what’s in store for the future?
In the coming year we’re focusing on features that improve both end-user and admin productivity, and agile-specific features to support agile teams within growing organizations. We know our Data Center customers continue to scale their instance as they add new users and expand to new locations. Performance at scale continues to be a big focus area for us in the upcoming year. Also, we’re investigating new deployment options to give more flexibility for customers to use the infrastructure of their choice.
For both Jira Software Data Center and Server we’re continuing to look closely at the top voted suggestions on jira.atlassian.com, to address and solve key customer problems and bugs causing the most friction.
The accomplishments highlighted by Gosia are not all the Jira Software team shipped. The past 6 months included much more. For a full rundown of new features check out our release notes.