In my case, I had multiple logback jars in my classpath and as a result it was creating a conflict. I removed the conflicting jar and it works as expected
This message is automatically generated by JIRA.
If you think it was sent incorrectly, please contact your JIRA administrators
For more information on JIRA, see: http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira
Looks like the appenderRef was indeed fixed in 1.1.1 :
https://github.com/qos-ch/logback/commit/21c5d359b949b0b9a392615ac6f0b659db415049
In my case, I had multiple logback jars in my classpath and as a result it was creating a conflict. I removed the conflicting jar and it works as expected