Taming an unruly JIRA

[Doug Reeder]

I've inherited a JIRA with that people have been poking at for seven years, with dozens of obsolete projects, workflows, etc. and thousands of tickets.  For example, I'm having trouble setting up a Kanban board, because too many issues get pulled in by default.  I've never administered JIRA before, so I'm groping my way through the complicated configuration and 'it depends' documentation.

Can anyone recommend a guide to paring down a JIRA that hasn't been managed well?

[Gil]

Hi,

I've got the same thing. I've inherited a 10 year old jira server with loads of convoluted workflows and rules. I took me 3 months to master it all with a bit of jira support and lots of google. Our project used 1 workflow for all issue types, which made it really hard to divide and conquer problems without affecting other issue types.

I had to migrate to the cloud instance and then start from there.

What helped me a lot was to set up a Test Project which was my sandbox.

I created workflows per issue types, screens per issue type and fields per issue type.

I presented the workflows to my team and asked feedback to make further tweaks.

Once we were ready, I changed the workflow scheme of the existing project to the newly created workflow, then changed the screen scheme and field scheme.

So my suggestion is to try everything on a test project.

I'm more than happy to assist you with the knowledge I've gathered so far.

[Doug Reeder]

A test project sounds like an excellent way to understand the options!

Are there any tools for closing all issues that haven't been touched in the last six months?

[Gil]

you can only use JQL to search for issues that didn't have a change. I'm not a JQL expert so I use google a lot and trial and error until I get it.

once you're able to filter the issues you want, you can then use option for bulk update. It's at the top right corner of the screen when you search for issues.

of course, you must have admin rights.