JetBrains Space 2023 roadmap and 2022 retrospective

In 2022, JetBrains Space grew as a complete development platform, seeing improvements in a variety of areas. JetBrains introduced the on-premises version, guest members, and file storage. They also expanded Space’s extensibility options, offering greater customisation for teams, and implemented a variety of other features.

In this blog post, we will take a look back at our accomplishments from the past year and share our main areas of focus for the first half of 2023. We also invite you to check out the detailed roadmap to see what features JetBrains has planned and track their progress on each of the elements.

Explore the 2023 roadmap

Space 2022 retrospective

In 2022, the main focus was on making software development with Space more enjoyable, flexible, and efficient. Our team delivered over 40 standalone features and a lot of enhancements to existing functionality. Below you'll find an overview of the top priority features that were added to Space in 2022.

On-premises version – released

Space On-Premises was introduced and released in 2022 after being in Beta for 6 months. During this time, JetBrains gathered your feedback, stabilized the installation process, and added new features. It’s now publicly available for anyone to download and try for free. Let us know if you want to try it and we'll send you a link to the free trial.

Guest users – released

JetBrains has made it possible for you to work with people outside your company by adding guest users to Space. You can invite clients, freelancers, and other partners to collaborate on your project in one place while providing limited access to your company’s resources and data. However, based on your feedback, JetBrains found that there is a demand for guest users with more restricted access to your project in Space. With this in mind, JetBrains is now working on light guest accounts with a more limited set of permissions.

File storage – released

JetBrains has added a file storage feature to Space Documents, making it possible to upload personal files and all project-related artifacts like images, PDFs, and others. You can now share, preview, and download files from a single file storage space, and keep everything you need to work on your project in one place.

Marketplace – released

JetBrains has also introduced Space Marketplace, where you can find and use applications created by others or even share your own apps. Apps are the primary way to extend the functionality of Space, allowing you to tailor the platform to your team’s needs and incorporate more advanced workflows into your development process. Space Marketplace is in Beta, but JetBrains plans to continue its development and add more apps for public release.

New hosting regions - in development

JetBrains is seeing a lot of interest in Space from China and other countries from the APAC region. Adding new hosting regions is one of their infrastructure team’s main priorities. JetBrains is working on this feature and planning to deliver it in the first half of 2023.

Video calls - in development

In 2022, JetBrains made significant progress on video conferencing in Space and were able to open a private Beta for peer-to-peer and group calls. However, there is still much work to be done. So, they plan to continue actively developing audio and video calls, both for one-on-one and group conversations. JetBrains expect to open a public Beta for these features in the first half of 2023.

Simplifying Space- in development

JetBrains' goal is to simplify your Space experience without compromising functionality. So, they have made huge progress towards this goal by introducing the new project-centered navigation to help you focus on your work for a given project. And they plan to continue working to streamline your experience, so stay tuned for updates.

Integrations with TeamCity and YouTrack – in development

JetBrains has made good progress toward integrating TeamCity with Space. With the Safe Merge functionality, you can run automated checks in TeamCity and see the results in Space. They also managed to link Space commits with YouTrack issues.

JetBrains will continue working on these integrations, as they believe that we can dramatically improve the continuity of the user experience between the tools by providing a single solution to JetBrains users.

Localisation – postponed

Unfortunately, JetBrains did not make much progress in this area last year. They had to make the tough decision to postpone this project but will get back to it as soon as possible. JetBrains understands that localisation is important for many Space users, especially in certain regions. However, for the moment, JetBrains is focusing on making the platform more functional and improving features, performance, quality, and stability.

Space Q1–Q2 2023 main directions

The Space team adheres to the principle of dividing work into smaller chunks, which helps them stay flexible and quickly react to your feedback. With this in mind, they are limiting our roadmap to the next two quarters.

While JetBrains' priorities from 2022 remain a focus for 2023, they will continue to listen carefully to your feedback and adjust our plans accordingly. They invite you to explore their detailed Q1–Q2 2023 roadmap.

Delivering new features

JetBrains is working hard on implementing new software-development features and enhancing the existing ones in the areas of code reviews and Git hosting, CI/CD, packages, and dev environments.

Another priority is expanding Space’s extensibility options to meet the needs of different teams.

JetBrains understands that project management and collaboration features are essential parts of software development. With this in mind, JetBrains will continue enhancing Space issues, documents, and chats with video calls, search, and navigation.

To ensure a unified user experience, the JetBrains team is also working on improving the Space mobile apps for iOS and Android. Their priority is implementing support for features already available on desktops and browsers.

Space On-Premises

JetBrains is actively working to offer simplified Space On-Premises installation options beyond Kubernetes.

JetBrains will also provide deployment instructions for various environments, including the AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure public clouds, and instructions for using Docker-Compose as a production option for small teams.

Simplifying Space

To help you to get started with Space more easily, JetBrains working on migration paths from other tools and platforms, including issues, documents, and packages. They will also work on improving the entire platform’s onboarding experience.

Integrations with tools from JetBrains and other vendors

JetBrains will keep expanding and polishing the integrations with YouTrack and TeamCity. They intend to make it possible to link Space merge requests and deployments with YouTrack issues, provide better support for YouTrack notifications and add unfurls in Space chats, and improve the process for importing from issues YouTrack to Space.

JetBrains also aims to expand Space’s extensibility options to support integrations with tools from JetBrains and other vendors.

Space Q1–Q2 2023 features

Here’s a short overview of the features that are currently JetBrains' top priorities.

Git hosting and code reviews

JetBrains plans to implement hierarchical quality gates for flexible monorepo configurations, make it possible to review files and filter them by code owner, facilitate inviting teams as reviewers, and provide the options to manually mark files as read and track review progress based on files viewed.

Automation (CI/CD)

JetBrains is going to update the universal parameters engine, speed up the build process with cross-job caches, introduce the ability to build and publish file artifacts, and switch to a dedicated app for authorising automation jobs. They will also work to enhance deployment targets with a new UI and API and support custom fields.

Packages

To top off our project of adding options for migrating from remote repositories for the most popular package types, JetBrains plans to implement support for Cargo packages. Our priorities also include improving the Packages web UI, adding support for granular permissions, improving the availability of the service, and implementing global search functionality for packages.

Dev environments

JetBrains notes that their primary points of focus for dev environments are implementing dev environment support in Space On-Premises, adding the ability to pre-install IDE plugins, updating the warm-up list presentation and subscription mechanism, adding notifications, and allowing restricted access to dev environment configurations.

Extensibility

JetBrains plans to improve the SDK and introduce a synchronisation API to allow updates of specific entities in Space, for example, to monitor issues in a project. They also intend to introduce a customisable webhook payload and implement versioning for our HTTP API.

Mobile apps

JetBrains will add complete support for code reviews and merge requests, as well as introduce Space calls and the latest project and chat features into the Space mobile apps.

Issues

JetBrains is working on a global issue list and smart search functionality. they intend to provide time-tracking reports and a spreadsheet-style view with batch editing. JetBrains also has plans to improve the issue boards with manual backlogs, sprint improvements, and full-blown swimlanes.

Documents

JetBrains is aiming to simplify onboarding in Space Documents, introduce search and navigation improvements, implement a new text editor, and add support for granular permissions.

Chats

JetBrains is already working to improve notification settings and general performance. JetBrains also plans to add sticker and GIF support, as well as to improve the default functionality for postponed messages, and introduce an all-reactions view. JetBrains will continue our ongoing work on video calls, with the intention of opening the public Beta for them.

Full-text search and navigation

JetBrains is working on revamping quick navigation in Space. JetBrains aims to speed up and simplify navigation, improve the sorting and grouping of items in the menu, and add a redesigned filter system.

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