Jira 6.4 is all about shipping with confidence so your team can enjoy a stress-free release every time they ship code. But before we dive into more Jira 6.4 goodness (did you hear about the new Jira Hipchat integration?), let’s take a quick trip down memory lane.
Jira 6.1 brought branch creation–a best practice that’s easy and efficient–into Jira. Jira 6.2 took branch creation one step further by introducing a development panel into Jira issues, providing rich context once a branch had been created. Next, Jira 6.3 brought speed and time saving via automatic issue transitions, keeping everyone up-to-date while eliminating the need for developers to switch back and forth from Jira and their development environment.
And now… drumroll please… In Jira 6.4 we’re taking another big step forward by introducing Release Hub, a single dashboard that brings real-time visibility and an up-to-date status of your team’s next release in one location that’s always at your fingertips. But that’s not all: Jira 6.4 is packed with lots of great new features. Let’s dig in!
Release with confidence by ensuring complete is complete
Shipping great software is stressful for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest hurdles software teams face is the inability to aggregate relevant deployment information about an upcoming release in one place. Checking for code completeness and true release readiness can be a time consuming, manual process–a process that can cause a lot of headaches for every member of the team (especially when it’s a few days to the release date!). To bring sanity back to your release process, Jira 6.4 introduces the all-new Release Hub: a single dashboard that is deeply integrated with all of the developer tools that your team already knows and loves.
Long status update meetings and constant shoulder tapping be gone; Jira 6.4 introduces a code-aware Jira that talks with developer tools to highlight unreviewed code, open reviews, unmerged pull requests, and failing builds, and reports all of this information to the Release Hub in real-time. By talking directly to your developer tools, Jira 6.4 saves your developers, development managers, and project owners precious time from chasing down release-readiness information. Moreover, the Release Hub keeps the entire team honest on the true status of a release. Sometimes an issue is closed and marked as complete, but if a code review was forgotten, then it will be proactively flagged by the Release Hub. Release readiness is tracked from the beginning of every project, so when the release date rolls around, you can rest assured that your code is ready for prime time.
Validate workflows in a click
Jira administrators rejoice: Jira 6.4 also introduces a new workflow validator. This tool helps troubleshoot and debug workflows in a single click by quickly scanning and identifying potential issues with any workflow. This includes automatically flagging statuses not connected to a workflow and highlighting invalid transitions, as well as exposing permission and validation errors. By identifying these errors, Jira administrators can quickly and easily fix a workflow before it slows down the team. No more head scratching or painstakingly long bug fix estimations for Jira administrators and developers.
Get started quickly
The Release Hub and workflow validator save developers time so that they can spend more time doing what they love and building great products. Jira 6.4 introduces one more feature to help team members save time: intuitive onboarding. The first time a new team member signs into Jira, he or she is walked through a brief tutorial on Jira basics. Once a new team member has a firm understanding of the basics, they can spend their time on what’s important: the project at hand!
New to Jira? Get up and running in a matter of minutes with a free Jira Cloud trial.
Ready to upgrade? Check out the full release notes and start seeing real results with Jira 6.4 today. Cloud customers: Congrats! You’ve been auto-upgraded to Jira 6.4!
Plus, join us for our free webinar: Journey to a stress-free release. You’ll learn:
- How to set up and maximize the new Release Hub in Jira 6.4
- Coding best practices to help you deliver world-class products
- Complete automation from build, code, to release
Hosted by Jason Wong, Principal Product Manager for Jira, and Megan Cook, Senior Product Manager for Developer Tools.