A feature that would be very helpful to us would be to have a way to indicate which releases are active, where this would mean that they are currently being worked on. Our workflow is that the team (developers, QA and documentation) are scheduled work to do for a number of forthcoming releases, but most day-to-day activities are meant to be on the current release.

If JIRA supported knowing that a release was 'active' there are a number of useful features that could be implemented:

1. Filters could be implemented to filter out non-active releases (e.g. 'current unresolved issues' would show only unresolved issues assigned to an 'active' release) - see JRA-6527.

2. JIRA could disallow resolving issues to an unreleased and not active release. Often an issue is assigned to a future release but the developer finds that they can fix it early. More often than not the user then resolves the issue as being fixed in this future release, rather than in the upcoming one.

3. When reporting an issue it would be helpful for the 'current' releases to be listed at the top. For a development team, most bugs are found in the release we are currently working on. This is especially true when QAing a candidate release. So it is very annoying that the reporter has to scroll through all of our released versions before getting to the first current release.

I can see that some of these features might need to be configurable as every team has a different workflow. But I think the feature itself would be generally useful.