Your crush from elementary school speaks to you. You once hoped that something would come of it, but she/he couldn’t make up your mind for so long that the feeling in you died… The memory of it came back over the years like a ghost, appeared in random interactions… until today. A love interest from the past has found you and wants to give it a try. Of course, we are talking about a forgotten feature request, submitted 19 years ago, the implementation of which is to show an empty field in the issue view. Altassian announced that it is coming back to this topic 🙂

However, cool your enthusiasm, for now the change is in the RFC phase. RFC, or Request for Comments, is the stage where Atlassian has proposed a change and is waiting for feedback from developers. Discussions are held within the Atlassian Developer Community. One of its members is Adam Labus – a Jira Developer and author of, among others, Extender for Jira plugin. I asked him how Atlassian treats RFCs and what we can expect.

The RFC proposed by Atlassian is an attempt to develop a new approach to communication and open discussion of ideas with the community of Developers/Partners. However, starting a new discussion, e.g. on the above topic, is just an invitation to the table of all willing people who want to speak, present their point of view or discuss business or technical aspects – writes Adam.

He also introduces us to the three principles that guide Atlassian.

1) we have no guarantee that a given idea will ever be implemented
2) the idea may have declared dates, e.g. for implementation, but you should not be attached to them in any way
3) Atlassian does not guarantee that the implementation of the idea itself will be in its full scope and that it will take into account all comments or ideas collected at the RFC stage.

Since the Atlassian idea itself is very fresh (it started at the end of January 2023), it’s hard for me to say clearly what effects we can expect. I believe that this is certainly a good step towards closer cooperation and more open communication with the community.
However, it is worth watching the topic mentioned in JiraForThePeople ( https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-2997), as this is the first RFC-processed feature submitted by Jira users themselves. I think it will verify whether this way of cooperation will be a great success or it will remain just a good field for discussion 😉

So let`s wait. Hopefully not another 19 years 😉