Version control for JIRA configuration changes

[Jeremy Upright]

Is there a way to version control individual changes in JIRA configuration to be able to automate delployment to higher environments?  We are licensed for configuration manager add-on (or app) but we are struggling to get the value.

Our team operates like a scrum team; meaning we have a backlog and make enhancements/configuration changes in 2 week sprints.  We are also on a 3 week release cadence.  Currently our implementation plan looks something like this:

Initial development and testing during a sprint is done in the DEV environment.  Work in a sprint may be planned for different releases.  Once all work for a release is developed and tested in DEV we have to manually do the work in our Stage/UAT environment.  This can result in bugs/issues that did not exist in DEV.  We are licensed for the Configuration Manager add-on and are able to use this to deploy release level snapshots from Stage/UAT to Prod, but I'm looking for recommendations on how to enable a more "automated" (or less manual) way of deploying changes from DEV to the Stage/UAT environment.

Any thoughts, feedback, suggestions, recommendations would be extremely helpful!