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Evolving Jira terminology: ‘Projects’ will soon be ‘Spaces’

48 comments

Josh
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June 23, 2025

@Bill Sheboy this just in - Atlassian Decoder Ring will now be renamed Translation Table to be more accessible to teams of all types. :-P

Jokes aside, I like the change assuming that Atlassian preserves our JQL, automation rules, etc. and does provide some sort of way to easily understand the before and after terminology.

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Mathew Lederman
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June 23, 2025

Is there a summary of all the name changes going on somewhere? 

  • Jira Issues > Work Items
  • Products > Apps
  • Plug-Ins/Apps/Add-Ons > ?
  • Projects > Spaces
  • Any others that I'm missing?

And when do all of these changes start impacting our end users? As some others mentioned, when will the projects terminology in JQL change over to spaces?

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Rohitha Devi Pullepu
Contributor
June 23, 2025

This is a significant shift, and it's great to see Atlassian working to create a more unified and intuitive experience across products. That said, since "spaces" already have a strong association with Confluence, I’m curious how this change will impact user training and cross-product understanding.

Will there be clear visual labels to help users differentiate between Jira "Spaces" and Confluence "Spaces"? Looking forward to seeing how this evolves!

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Dave Liao
Contributor
June 23, 2025

For the record, I like this change, as I've had customers refer to Jira projects as Jira spaces (at multiple companies, with no rhyme or reason).

If such a change makes spaces a literal space for work (items) and pages, this should reduce the cognitive load for our users. And since there are usually more users than admins, I support this change. 😉 

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David Friedrich
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June 23, 2025

We've survived "issue" to "work item" so far, we'll get through this one too.

Personally, I think this change actually makes more sense.
Now I'm curious... what's the next big "change"? Anyone taking bets?

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James Rickards _SN_
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June 23, 2025

I honestly don't care how much re-work this is going to cost me in updating automations, filters, dashboards, and documentation if it means I don't need to explain the difference between Project and Project yet another time!

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__ Jimi Wikman
Community Champion
June 23, 2025

@David Friedrich Next up would be to align Releases/Versions and then Components as they are both Dev oriented.

I would not be surprised if we see the terms Scrum and Kanban be replaced with Iteration and Continuous delivery as well...

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Shilpa Airi
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
June 24, 2025

Thank you for your feedback and comments on the proposed changes. I would like to address the most frequently asked questions regarding JQLs, APIs, and automation rules here:

- APIs will continue to function as they currently do.
- JQLs will support the new terminology alongside the old one, so they will remain operational.
- Automation rules will not require any updates either.

Watch this space for further updates and information about this change. If you have any further questions, feel free to reach out!

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DD June 24, 2025

More friendly marketing I guess

Andrés Sabatini
Community Champion
June 24, 2025

I cannot fathom how this will improve anything. 

Even as I'm not against this change, I only see further problems to users switching the same words amongst different tools -well, now "apps"-

Jason Bowne
Contributor
June 24, 2025

Awesome!!!  Much needed clarity and alignment for those of us that are fairly new to Atlassian world and are using the suite of tools for everything in a department, not just a development team.  Now if we could get the concept of a 'parent sprint' ;)

Daria Kulikova_GitProtect_io
Community Champion
June 24, 2025

Great move! It seems that "spaces" bring a more flexible or collaborative feel to Jira. It might match better with the way cross-functional teams structure their work

Monika Rani
Community Champion
June 24, 2025

 

This is a much-needed update—I’ve been waiting for it for a long time. It was always difficult to explain the difference between a Jira project and an Atlassian project, as many people were confused by these two terms. With this change, things are clearer.

However, I think the introduction of Jira Space and Confluence Space might still cause some confusion for users, especially new ones. Clear documentation and onboarding guidance will be essential.

 

Sergej Grasmik
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June 25, 2025

Makes sense! Hope my groovy-scripts and automations will work like before for a long time!

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Monika Rani
Community Champion
June 25, 2025

As an Atlassian Champion- I have created this video https://youtu.be/JX8qzWYZ5zk so that people (specially my viewers/subscribers) can know about this update. 

Daniel Clubb
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June 25, 2025

Will this affect JQL queries in filters and automations for "project"? Will those all have to be re-written?

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DD June 25, 2025

@Daniel Clubb seems like .. found this already ... so it's a high chance that the old queries will be deprecated 

https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/confluence/rest/v1/api-group-space/#api-wiki-rest-api-space-post

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Bill Sheboy
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June 25, 2025

Hi @DD -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

The link you provided is for the Confluence REST API endpoint for Spaces, not for Jira.

Here is the Jira REST API v3 documentation, which still calls projects by their current name: https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/jira/platform/rest/v3/intro/

And here is the latest post in this thread from an Atlassian team member regarding changes to JQL: https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Jira-articles/Evolving-Jira-terminology-Projects-will-soon-be-Spaces/bc-p/3051517#M19402

Kind regards,
Bill

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DD June 26, 2025

@Bill Sheboy excellent and thanks.

roydbrayshay
Community Champion
June 26, 2025

Amazing and excellent, I can't wait until October!! If there's a way to be an early adopter, I'm in! 

The next thing on the list for a rename should be Epics in Jira... thoughts anyone?

David Friedrich _xalt_
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June 26, 2025

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David Friedrich
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June 26, 2025

@roydbrayshay 

The next thing on the list for a rename should be Epics in Jira... thoughts anyone?

Wow! 

Could you elaborate a bit more on that?
What exactly bothers you about the term Epic?

In my opinion, Epics and Stories are well-established terms that represent Agile like no others. They’re widely understood and have become a kind of common language. If you need "Initiative" or "Programm" instead or above, that is possible as you may know...

__ Jimi Wikman
Community Champion
June 26, 2025

@roydbrayshay you can rename them today if you like as the changes to Epics have been rolled out. I always rename them to Features ;)

@David Friedrich The term in itself is not a problem, the fact that it is used on multiple levels are. If you use the term Epic, then you are just saying a large thing, since Epic is not a defined object. So you have product Epics, Strategic Epics, Project Epics, Portfolio Epics....and so on.

The most common issue I face a lot is when people set up planning boards that they call Epic boards. Those Epics are very big, so when you then break them down, you will have features on Story levels and the actual work in sub-tasks. That causes problems since you are now blocking the developer to break down their work and all activities will be out of sync with other teams that uses Epics as feature and then stories as the work item.

Add a few dimensions to that and when you have programs breaking down projects as Epics, or large deliveries over multiple projects as Epics... Yeah, that is why we have work item hierarchies, but since many work in silos and down know how the rest of the organization works, this can get messy fast.

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