The renaming of Issues and making work as the new collective term for all items tracked in Jira

Back in September last year Atlassian announced the shift from the old term "Issue" to something more appropriate. This caused a lot of opinions and Atlassian put out a poll to see what word their vocal users liked the most. This was followed by an announcement in November 2024 where the term Work was announced to replace Issue. It is no understatement that people lost it a bit over this and when the rollout was announced in March 2024 the comments section lit up quite a bit.

The history of Issues in Jira

Let us first start with the background on why we even have a word like "issue" in Jira to begin with. This starts back in 2002 when Jira was first released. It was released as a bug tracker and when you are working with bugs, it makes sense to refer to the work you are doing as "issues". As Jira evolved, perhaps most noticeable with the purchase of GreenHopper in 2009. This was an Agile plugin developed by Pyxis Technologies that had release planning, task management and burn down charts.

This changed Jira from a bug tracker to a more useful product capable of tracking work rather than just bugs.

As Jira continued to evolve with new functionality and new ways to use Jira, the terminology did not change with it. Work that was done remained named Issues and over time this has strangely become normal terminology among the users that have been using Jira for a while. For new users however, the term has always been confusing and many of us that has been working with Jira for a while have heard people questioning why this term is used to describe work.

The big Jira shift - Teams '24

In 2024 at Teams '24 in Las Vegas Atlassian announced the biggest change in the history of Atlassian. One of the two founders, Scott Farquhar, stepped down as co-CEO of Atlassian and the other major announcement was a drastic change of Jira as a product. For more than two decades Jira has been closely connected to development, which as even in the name up until the big change in 2024.

On stage Mike Cannon-Brookes announced that Jira Software was dead. There were no more software product in the Atlassian product line, but instead a new product called just Jira was born. This new Jira seemed to be the same, but with new functionality such as Goals and Projects taken from Atlas, another Atlassian product and a complete merge of Jira Work Management, making the new Jira less of a development tool, but now a more capable multipurpose tool to fit many different ways of working.

Massive changes to navigation and functionality were announced, and it was clear that Atlassian was moving into a new era.

The New Jira and the new terminology

For a year we have watched Atlassian change their product line by merging products together to more powerful products, but also to change the language and the way we use the tools through massive changes to the User Interface of the products. We first got the ability to rename the abused and confusing Epic to anything we want globally in our instances. This fit perfectly with the ability to extend the work item hierarchies so we can build parent child relations above the old Epic level.

Now we are getting the next terminology change, and it makes perfect sense that a word associated with problems and faults no longer should be the default wording for work, which is now any form of work. In the vision I think Atlassian is working towards with a more generic tool that can be used for any number of situations, they needed to address this very old and very bad terminology issue.

It is not something I think they do in isolation, but as a part of a far bigger strategy to reposition Atlassian and their products, which started long before the big announcement in 2024.

Work as the new collective term for all items tracked in Jira

Work as a term for what you do in Jira makes perfect sense for most people. There are people that are not actually tracking work and for them this might be weird of course. Those people are very few though and considering that millions of users have been referring to work as an Issue for two decades, I think that is a tradeoff Atlassian has no problem making. While you could have made an argument for using other terms like Task, that does not fit the overall vision of Jira I think because it is a tool used to track work and if you have tasks that are not actually work, then maybe you are better off using another tool?

Or you can just ignore the term and do what everyone have been doing for the past 20 years when we referred to work as issues.

What is actually changing?

There is an impressive amount of confusion around this change, which is actually much smaller than most people think. In the comments in the announcements you can see that people don't even read the information, and they ask the same questions as has already been asked and answered multiple times.

So let us iron out what the changes actually mean.

In short, you can expect that everything will work just as it does today for all aspects of your Jira products. The change will be in language only and while that can absolutely confuse your users and make you a bit lost in the configurations before you get used to it, technically nothing will change.

For now.

People are upset about changing Issue to Work in Jira

It is both sad and a bit funny to see people's objections to this change as they are clear signs of personal preference and have little basis in actual logic. It reminds me a bit of the hypothetical experiment where a number of monkeys was conditioned over time to prevent anyone from climbing a stepladder to get the banana. If you have not seen it, you can see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkT0BtfOB-M

What most people in the comments are actually complaining about is that they don't want to change. Not that the change itself is wrong or bad, with any form of logic as to why, other than their own preference or what they are accustomed to. This is perfectly normal because humans do not respond well to change in any situation and when you change terminology in a working tool you use every day, then that have a pretty big impact. I think most of the people complaining are also suffering from stress so they don't really have time for new changes like this.

As this rolls out however I think people will realize that this change is not as big as they think. People still will call work items in their own way, and we will hear people telling others to "create a Jira" or "create a ticket" or some variations of those after this change anyway. Considering how many have complained that it more complicated to ask someone to create a "work" than an "issue" says a lot on how some people refer to their work in Jira.

I would suggest to start using the name of the work items you have actually created instead.

"Can you create an incident" or "Can you create a story" makes a lot more sense to me, plus you don't have to answer the follow-up question that you inevitably will get if you refer to the term and not the work "Which issue/Jira should I pick?". But, use whatever language you find to provide the best clarity of what to create and how to refer to your work.

As long as everyone understand each other, then you should be good.