Jira 9 is here, and Custom Charts Is Here For It

The latest version of Jira Data Center is upon us, and there are some great reasons to upgrade.

Of course, whenever a new version comes out, the first thing on everyone’s mind is making sure their existing apps are compatible with it. Like, you know, their most valuable reporting tool, Custom Charts for Jira.

Well, folks, you can give your blood pressure a break. Custom Charts can now be installed in Jira 9.

Let’s dive into some other key benefits of Jira 9…

Automation for Jira now comes built into Jira Software Data Center

Automation for Jira has become a native feature of the Data Center version of Jira Software. This powerful app allows teams to automate actions and workflows using a simple rule builder, eliminating all kinds of manual and repetitive tasks.

The automation rules you can create are made up of 3 parts:

• Trigger: the automated process starts when a particular event happens, e.g. an issue is created or transitioned
• Conditions: these allow you to set criteria for when the rule applies, so that you can narrow its scope, e.g. your rule could apply only to bugs, or to issues of high priority
• Actions: a task such as editing an issue, sending out a notification, or creating a sub-task, which happens automatically after the trigger occurs and the conditions are met.

Example automation rule: when an issue is created (trigger) with its priority set to Highest (condition), a notification is sent to a team or team member (action).

Faster-loading Jira dashboards

This is one we’re particularly excited about here at Old Street, given how we’re superfans of the Jira dashboard. With Jira 9, Atlassian have introduced lazy loading on a number of inline gadgets. Instead of every gadget loading by default, only the ones you’re looking at in the viewport will load. This will make dashboards load much faster.

Of course, we already offer lazy loading with Custom Charts for Jira gadgets. These improvements mean that if you have a dashboard made up of both Custom Charts gadgets and native gadgets in Jira 9, the whole dashboard will load quicker than before.

Faster-loading Jira… period!

Other improvements make Jira issues load faster in Jira 9. Lazy loading has been added to attachment thumbnails in the issue view, and the way items in the Comments, History, Work Logs, and All tabs are displayed and organized has been optimized. This means issues with thousands of activity tab events and significant numbers of attachments will now load much faster.

In addition, viewing issues on boards is more responsive. Instead of searching every board in the system, Jira will search only boards that mention an issue’s project key and those viewed recently, so you get more meaningful results quicker.

Yay for faster Jira!

Issue transitions and statuses are now in the same menu

Before Jira 9, the transitions available from the issue’s current status appeared as buttons on the issue, the rest in the Workflow dropdown menu. The current status was displayed in the issue details section. Like in the image below:

Jira 9 combines all transition and status names into one single dropdown menu: the issue status menu.

So, the current status is now a menu label, instead of being displayed in the issue details section. The dropdown displays each transition in your workflow, as well as the status the issue moves to on transition. The option to “View workflow” is now at the bottom of this dropdown.

For example, the transition name might be “Stop Progress”, which would send the issue to the “Open” status. Or the transition might be “Withdraw”, moving the issue to “Done”. All this information is now in one place and can be checked with a single click, making it quicker and easier to understand what the options are.

Find out about other improvements that come with the Jira 9 release, and if you have any questions about Jira 9’s compatibility with Custom Charts for Jira, don’t hesitate to get in touch with our support team.