The Jira Align support guide provides an overview of the various help resources available for Jira Align, as well as guidelines for creating and monitoring support tickets, feature requests, and test instance refresh requests. We recommend reading this guide to assist you in creating better cases and getting issues resolved as quickly as possible.

Check it out in the Atlassian Community here.

The Atlassian Jira Align team is pleased to announce Jira Align v.10.112. 

• Enhancements and Features
• Defect Fixes

Enhancements and Features

These features for 10.112 were released to environments on the continuous release track on September 23, 2022, in version 10.112.0. The features will then be released to environments on the bundled release track on October 7, 2022, in version 10.112.2:

Removal of Awards

As previously announced, we’ve removed the Awards / Shout-Outs functionality from Jira Align. Awards was a seldom-used feature that allowed you to create custom badges and point values that displayed on a recipient’s profile page.

Pages removed include:

• Awards / Shout-Outs main page
• Shout-Out Awards list page
• Awards report

Note: For a short time, you may still see references to previously-granted awards on a user’s profile page.

If you attempt to visit these locations through a previously-saved link, bookmark, or Favorites entry in Jira Align’s navigation, you’ll be redirected to a new page that informs you the functionality has been removed. Select the Learn more link from the page to see more info about recently removed functionality, as well as instructions on how to clear old entries from Favorites.

Jira Connector: T-shirt size mapping

We’ve added a new mapping settings window to the Jira Connector settings. This new feature provides you with a way to match up entries in the custom field you use for t-shirt sizes in Jira with t-shirt size names in Jira Align. Previously, values needed to match exactly in both systems for the fields to sync.

Find the settings window by navigating to Admin > Jira Settings > Jira Setup and then select the Configure link found next to the T-Shirt field.

Jira Connector: sprint creation

We’ve added more fields that are set on a Jira Align team sprint when it is created by the Jira connector:

• Goal: the same as your sprint goal in Jira
• Region: set from the team Region
• Type: set from the Program Increment sync sprint Type (standard sprint or innovation & planning sprint)

Related to the sprint type, we also fixed an issue where the connector was always creating standard team sprints, even if the program increment sync sprint was innovation & planning. Now, the connector will properly create innovation & planning team sprints.

Jira Connector: Jira Project toggle on Details Panel Settings

We’ve added a Jira Project toggle to the defect work item type’s Details Panel Settings page to be consistent with the logic for features and stories. This setting is always switched on for work items in portfolios whose programs are integrated with Jira.

Also, we have removed the Make selection of Jira projects mandatory when creating items setting from the Jira setup page. The Details Panel Settings page has become the only place to choose whether the Jira Project field should be required for your work items in integrated programs. If the Jira setup setting was on (making the Jira project field required), your portfolio settings were automatically updated to keep the field required.

Related to our Jira Project field updates, you can now filter the feature, story, and defect grid by the Jira Project and view it as a column in the feature, story, and defect grid.

Features now on by default

The following list of functionality previously required enablement by our support or services teams during the initial configuration of Jira Align. This functionality is now permanently enabled and no longer requires manual changes.

• Email log: In the administration module, admins can view a log of emails sent by Jira Align.

• View Team Room Long Term Metrics by story points: Allows users to view the Long Term Metrics (program increment burnup charts) report by story points or hours.
  With it enabled, we use a different stored procedure to calculate the release burn-up. This new stored procedure (4 years old) has a daily plot for burn-up points, while the old one had weekly plots for burn-up points.

• Link to roadmap toggle: Just an old, behind-the-scenes toggle that we needed to get rid of. This change has no impact on users, but we wanted to call it out for our partners who assist in configuring new sites.

• Support link: Adds a link to Jira Align help and support in the user profile menu.

• Additional columns available in the backlog: Users can select a parent team rank as a column shown in the backlog (e.g. the portfolio rank of items when viewing the program backlog).

• Hide stand-alone features from backlog setting: Displays a setting to hide stand-alone features from the epic backlog. Find this setting in platform settings underneath Program.

• Assessment emails: Assessments are tools that can be used to measure team readiness, health, improvement, progress, or any other facet of Agile, such as maturity. This toggle controlled whether emails would be sent to users to take the assessment.

• Ideation: Gather ideas or change requests from external users (registered users, but without Jira Align licenses) or internal users (with Jira Align licenses), and allow users to refine and vote upon them. Then, teams can shelve the idea or easily convert them to a Jira Align work item.

• View features not associated with a team (via a story assignment) on the Program Board.

• Funding Plan report: This report provides a real-time financial view to a subset of the organization, to enable tracking against its allocated funding levels.

• Group items on roadmaps: Group items in the Themes, Epics, Capabilities, or Features roadmap views by fields such as owner, primary program, state, and more.

• View capabilities on Release Vehicle Roadmap.

• Map Jira statuses to Jira Align process steps with the Jira connector: Allows admins to map Jira statuses to Jira Align process steps instead of states. Process steps are great to use when wanting to customize Align states or simply replicate your Jira workflow in Jira Align.

• Daily meeting performance: In the daily standup meeting, the What User's working on and Stories owned by User sections are replaced with one Stories section. The burndown chart also only loads once during the meeting to increase performance.

API 2.0: Risks

We expanded the capabilities of our risks endpoints. Custom fields are now supported in all methods (e.g. GET, POST, PUT/PATCH), an /{id}/editmeta endpoint was added so that developers can get programmatic access to property metadata, and dynamic validation was added so that the API enforces the same required fields as defined in your Details panels settings.

API 2.0: Error responses

Previously, we returned a 401 "unauthorized" error when a user did not have proper permissions to perform the API call (e.g. the user does not have permissions to edit features). Now, we’re returning a 403 "forbidden" error to help differentiate the two types of errors.

Coming in 10.112.2: New objectives tree

Jira Align is updating our objective experience with a new and improved visualization of the Objectives Tree. Starting in version 10.112.2 on October 7, new customers will be able to try out the new experience. For existing customers, contact your Solutions Architect or Support to turn on this new feature in your instance.

Once on, you’ll see the new Objectives Tree by default, but will be able to switch between the legacy (current) and new experience. Later, we will deprecate the current experience.

The new experience rethinks the visual representation for strategic goals, objectives, and key results based on your actual goals and needs. Get clearer guidance on what's going well, what needs help, and what's off the rails from a single screen. Or, drill into additional details if needed.

Defect Fixes

The list of defect fixes will be updated to reflect changes in weekly maintenance releases. You can see the contents of individual maintenance releases in the Supplemental Release Notes section.

Below is our upcoming release schedule. Sandbox and production environments will be unavailable during our maintenance window, which starts at 11:00PM EST on the day listed below and ends at 2:00AM EST on the following day.

Release tracks

By default, production environments are set to use the bundled release track, while sandbox environments (previously known as test instances) use the continuous track. We recommend using this default setup for your environments, as it allows you to test new features released in a .0 feature release for two weeks in your sandbox environment. Those changes will then deploy to your production environment in a .2 maintenance release. 

You may change the release track from bundled to continuous in your production environment by submitting a request to our Support Team. Note that we do not guarantee a timeframe to make a release track change, but will strive to complete the request as quickly as possible. 

The 10.111.3 maintenance release was deployed to environments on the continuous release track and environments on the bundled release track on September 16, 2022. Maintenance releases contain high-priority defect fixes and fixes for any features deployed in version 10.111.0. 

Enhancements and Features

Security vulnerability fixes

• Resolved a permission-related vulnerability affecting the Products page.

Jira Align's Enterprise Insights (EI) was updated and deployed to 10.111.X instances on the continuous track on September 17, 2022, and will be deployed to instances on the bundled track on September 23, 2022. The following enhancements were made:

• Release highlights
• New tables
• Updated tables

Release highlights

• New content:

  • JIRAALIGN-4022 - Added Skill request estimate (allocation) for Epic/Feature work items.

  • JIRAALIGN-4142 - Added Jira Connector Logs.
  • JIRAALIGN-4227 - Added [Audit Log Detail] object for Program Increment changes on work items.

  • Added Creator Full Name and Flag values to ideas.

  • Feature Skill object added.

• Defect fixes: 

  • JIRAALIGN-4309 - Corrected Owner Full Name mapping.

  • JIRAALIGN-4310 - Corrected Owner Flag & FK User Owner ID field mapping for external owners.

  • Corrected FK Split Epic/Capability ID.

  • Corrected Deletion Flag logic for MAP Goal to Snapshot.

New tables

Updated tables

Jira Align will be updating our objective experience with a new and improved visualization of the Objectives Tree.

For a short period after the feature’s release, you’ll see the new Objectives Tree by default, but will be able to switch between the legacy (current) and new experience. Later, we will deprecate the current experience.

The new experience completely rethinks the visual representation for objectives and key results based on your actual goals and needs.

What else you'll find in the new Objectives Tree

• Simplified high-level reporting with quick filters helps portfolio managers focus on what’s most important, what needs attention, and how things are related. This helps organizations better visualize goals by providing a visual format that represents the status of objectives.
  
• Richer status reporting vocabulary provides greater nuance to in-progress objectives.
  This new view has enabled us to mimic the statuses of objectives tracked within Jira Align to the status options available in Team Central, which provides greater nuance than the previous statuses could. Instead of just a Not Started, In Progress, and Completed status, the new experience provides more options. These include Pending, Paused, On Track, At Risk, Off Track, and Completed. These statuses are displayed at the top of the page and the objectives can be easily sorted by status for further investigation into why something may be at risk or off track.
  
• Easier management-by-objective and course correction with at-a-glance portfolio views and drill-down capabilities including simpler reporting supported with visual controls, i.e., traffic-light indicators, progress bars, etc. The streamlined view puts the most important information on a single page and makes course correction conversations faster with a visual roll-up of the most pressing issues.
  • Portfolio objectives that drill into program level and team level objectives with the click of a button.
  • Track how much work still needs to occur to achieve the objective with Work progress bars.
    
  • Easily visualize how many key results are associated with each objective in the Key results column. Key results are tied to the specific work item as in, you will only see portfolio-level key results associated with the portfolio-level objective, not a roll-up of all key results associated with ALL program and team level objectives tied to the portfolio-level objective.
    
  • Easily see who is responsible for each objective in the Owner column.
    

Why are we making this change?

Enterprises at scale are transitioning towards thinking and aligning on business outcomes (or the desired result) as opposed to focusing on work output or outputs. Enterprises also want to unlock ambition and inspiration at every level, encouraging all teams to strive above and beyond without fear of failure culture.

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are important in identifying the change organizations want to see in order to have an impact on the highest level needles or KPIs in the business.  More importantly, using them to develop hypotheses and measure impact, otherwise work will continue to be tracked by the traditional on time on budget with a focus on outputs as opposed to the impact it has on a business outcome or validating a hypothesis.

We are making this change for several reasons:

• To provide a better user experience through improved visual representations of OKRs
• To make high-level reporting more actionable by improving the nuance for in-progress OKRs
• To ensure better understanding and prioritization of the work surrounding OKRs to achieve objectives faster

Note: This article has been deleted and re-published to send a new notification, as the release timeframe for these changes has been updated.

For versions 10.100.1 and later, we'll be making some big changes to objective statuses that will also affect the API:

What’s coming in version 10.100.1

In this release, we will be adding three new statuses to objective tracking in Jira Align. These statuses will provide more nuance to the status of objectives than our current option (In Progress) allows. The new statuses will be:

• On Track: Indicates that an objective is likely to reach its desired outcomes.

• At Risk: Indicates that an objective has uncertainty around reaching its desired outcomes. For example, work needed to complete the objective may be behind schedule, or risks might pose a future threat to completion.

• Off Track: Indicates that an objective is unlikely to reach its desired outcomes if action is not taken.

In version 10.100.1, the new statuses will become available in the Jira Align UI, and will not change any existing status values. API users should also note that the status endpoint will include the new statuses, and no statuses will be removed or changed for this release.

We strongly recommend that you review your in-progress objectives and update any objectives that are at risk or off track, as the In Progress status on objectives will be migrated in a future release.

What’s coming later

In a future release, any remaining In Progress objectives will receive the On Track status. At this time, the API status value for In Progress will also be removed.

What this means for the API

Any objectives with the In Progress value will now return as On Track. There are also two new values: Off Track and At Risk. In any scenarios where the In Progress value is specified, there would need to be a change to specify On Track and depending on the use case, include the new status values as well. Otherwise, there is no action needed with this change.

Why are we making this change?
This change is in preparation for a new end-to-end objective experience including a new creation workflow, a cleaner Details panel, and a more powerful objective tree experience. As we continue to respond to feedback, it has been evident that we need the ability to provide better status updates around objectives.

For our customers utilizing OKRs, the objectives often appeared to be “at risk” when they had low scores, even if it was just too early in measuring. These new changes, along with the updates to the objective tree around the corner, will provide a much clearer picture of which objectives need attention (and which don’t) when reporting on status.

You can subscribe to three Help Center sections to receive notifications the instant release note articles are published:

• Main Release Notes: These articles contain compiled information on a Jira Align version, initially published for the 10.X.0 feature release and updated each additional release through 10.X.3.
• Supplemental Release Notes: These articles contain information on individual supplemental releases, published each release from 10.X.1 through 10.X.3.
• Enterprise Insights Release Notes: These articles contain release notes specific to Jira Align Enterprise Insights (EI).

We recommend subscribing to both the Main and Supplemental Release Notes sections to get weekly notifications on the latest Jira Align version.

What you need to do

To receive real-time release notes publication notifications, you'll need to create a Help Center account and follow the section or sections you want to receive notifications about. Please note, this will most likely be a different username and password than your Jira Align and Atlassian username and password. 

 To create an account (or reset your password if an account already exists), click the SIGN IN button on the Help Center (see the pink arrow).

Next, click the Sign up link, enter your name and email, and then click the Sign up button. You'll receive an email to finish setting up your account. If you receive a message that says a user has already signed up with the given email, click the Forgot my password link to reset your password.

Once logged in, from the Help Center home page, click the WHAT'S NEW section (bell icon).

Then click the header for the section you want to follow. Finally, click the FOLLOW button and then the New articles link.

That's it! As soon as we publish new release notes, you'll receive an email notification with a link!