Rich Text Handling
Previously, when you synchronize an incident, task or requirement to/from Jira, all of the text formatting was lost. This is because Spira internally uses an HTML format to store its rich text, whereas Jira uses a variation of Markdown. Therefore in previous versions, we would need to convert the rich text to plain text to ensure it could be displayed correctly in the other tool.
With the new version, we use a more powerful HTML <--> Markdown conversion utility that lets us intelligently convert between HTML and Markdown. This means that when incidents, tasks and requirements are synchronized with Jira, we can keep the text formatting.
Better Association Handling
The previous version of the plugin would add hyperlinks between artifacts in Spira and the corresponding items in Jira. In addition, it could create links between issues in Jira based on the associations between those same incidents in Spira. In this new version, it will also add associations in Spira between requirements (for example, between Epics, Stories and Features that are linked in Jira) and associations between incidents and requirements (for items that were originally linked in Jira).
Automatic Handling of Timezones
The previous version of the plugin did not correctly handle the fact that the Jira API uses local time, and the Spira API uses UTC. This meant that dates in Jira (due date, start date, etc.) would not correctly show up in Spira (and vice-versa) because of the difference, and also that bidirectional updates could be flaky because of timezone differences. The new version of the plugin uses the Jira API to get the timezone offset from UTC and dynamically uses that to convert the dates.
Other Enhancements
In addition to these major enhancements, the latest version also allows the Jira plugin to bring over story points to new requirements correct.