Coming soon: Jira 8.0

Reading Time: 4 minutes

As we’ve developed Jira Server and Data Center in recent years, we’ve encountered a number of opportunities to invest more deeply in the product.

We’ve decided to start taking action on these opportunities, and need your help to bring these updates to customers. These changes will come as part of our next platform release, also known as Jira 8.0.

We are committed to helping you prepare for the next platform release as you continue building your business on top of Jira. In the coming months, we will share as many specifics and details as we can about the scope of the changes to Jira, so you can effectively plan how you’d like to respond to these platform changes.

Between now and the release of 8.0, we will release several Early Access Program (EAP) milestones. These will contain the breaking changes of the final platform release, to give vendors an opportunity to preview and develop against the changes of the platform release.

When the first EAP is introduced, we will also be creating a community discussion topic under the Jira Server category specifically to address the changes introduced with 8.0, and will have members of the Jira Product Management and Engineering team on hand to help answer any questions.

Predicted scope of breaking changes in 8.0

Please note that as development of the release is underway, the specifics of breaking changes will evolve. This is our best estimate of breaking changes at this point in time. Our EAP programs will contain the full scope of breaking changes in Jira for 8.0, along with supporting documentation with more detail and specifics.

Lucene upgrade

We will be upgrading Lucene from version 3.3 to a 7.x version. We will also be optimizing the index structure, which might be a breaking change for some apps.

A potential outcome of this upgrade could be changes to the Custom Field SPI contract.

The scope of the impact of the Lucene upgrade is still being determined, but we will be able to summarize the API changes in the EAP milestones for Jira 8.0.

Platform upgrade

Front-end

We will be working on parts of the Jira frontend to make it faster and more responsive.

As part of this effort, we will be removing global variables on some pages.

We’re planning to trim down ‘superbatch’ and disable it completely on some pages.

We are also planning to upgrade jQuery, and may update other frontend libraries, such as SkateJS.

As with the other upgrades in 8.0, the precise scope of the pages impacted is still being determined, but will be clarified with the coming EAPs.

Plugin system

Some libraries will be upgraded to more recent versions, including:

  • Spring

  • Guava

  • Commons-lang to commons-lang3

Other libraries may be upgraded as well, though this is the scope of the upgrades today. We will be sharing more information regarding upgrades to plugin system libraries with the coming EAPs.

Other changes

As work for Jira 8.0 proceeds, the Jira engineering team may discover work needed for other, smaller, breaking changes that have not been planned yet. We will do our best to inform the Ecosystem community as soon as possible when we learn about these changes and include them in the EAPs.

Early Access Programs (EAPs)

We're planning to deliver several EAP milestones, followed by an EAP Beta, and finally the EAP Release Candidate.

EAP milestones (bi-weekly)

We expect to deliver the first milestone in the coming days, and then continue to release the following milestones every 2 weeks until we release the EAP Beta. We'll do our best to include most of the planned breaking changes as early as possible, to give you enough time to schedule changes to your app before the official Jira 8.0 release.

EAP Beta

After releasing all the breaking changes, we'll release an EAP Beta, and stop releasing milestones. There will be no breaking changes after this point.

EAP Release Candidate

Finally, we’ll release the EAP Release Candidate, which will essentially be the same as the Jira 8.0 release. After that, you can expect the official 8.0 release.

Useful links

Once released, we’ll let you know about the first EAP milestone on this blog, and on the dev community.

You can also monitor the EAP page for dev documentation and other important details.

Impact to Jira Service Desk

The changes above will also be reflected in Jira Service Desk, and customers will be able to benefit from the underlying Jira platform enhancements.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

We know that a platform release can provide many unknowns. Here are some questions that we wanted to address with the information we currently have.

When will Jira 8.0 arrive?

As mentioned above, we cannot provide an exact date, but our current target to release Jira 8.0 is late in 2018. The release will not arrive until after Summit Europe later in 2018. The first early access programs (EAPs) will arrive in the coming days. We strongly recommend vendors investigate the EAP builds and documentation to get a sense of the scope of the impact of 8.0.

Why would a customer upgrade to Jira 8.0? Will there be new end user features?

Jira 8.0 will include other end-user features beyond the breaking technical changes above. However, we won’t be publicly announcing the end-user features until we release Jira 8.0.

The additional end-user features will not impact the vendors or developers building on top of Jira.

Will there be breaking changes to Jira’s APIs?

We do not yet know the scope of breaking changes to either the REST API or Java API. We are not planning major changes to either API, but we may update them with slight breaking changes, dependent on the progress of the updates above. We may also introduce new endpoints for app vendors and developers to use in Jira.

Are there any restrictions on who has access to the EAP builds of Jira 8.0?

No, there will not be any restrictions. The EAP is open to everyone.

Will there be additional resources to help us prepare?

Yes! In coordination with the EAP programs, we will provide more detail about breaking changes and the technical scope of Jira 8.0. We will also have technical documentation to provide detail on how to adopt the changes to Jira. We’ll be publishing all the documentation on the EAP page.

Best,

The Jira team