Do I have to migrate to Jira 7.0 first before going to 7.3?

Question

According to the last bullet on https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftware/jira-software-7-3-x-upgrade-notes-861251109.html, upgrading from JIRA pre-7.0 to JIRA 7.0 first is recommended, before going to JIRA 7.3.

However, in our case, we are thinking of getting new server hardware with a different OS, so this would actually be a migration of our JIRA instance to a new server. We can do the XML export, backup of attachments and indexes, and then copy the stuff over to the new box. In this scenario, do we still need to start with a 7.0 instance, or can we start with 7.3?

EDIT: We are on JIRA 6.4.12, with Agile 6.7.12, and ScriptRunner 4.1.3.4. We have a few other small add-ons, but not business-critical like ScriptRunner for us. We do not have ServiceDesk.

Niclas Sandstroem · Answer

The only loss is time really if you step through 7.0 but since your in such good condition and don't run JSD I would run to 7.3 directly. (Keep in mind the project admin changes for workflows if that comes with).

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

6.4.12 to Software 7.3 with latest Agile + Scriptrunner 4 is something I'd expect to work quite well actually.

Of course, I would test it first, and the fallback is definitely 6.4 -> 7.0, but one of my team did a 6.4 to 7.3 this weekend and it sailed through fine.  Only hiccup we had in testing was a bug in 7.3.0 that causes a performance issue in some cases, so we took it to 7.3.1 which fixed it.

The main problems we ran into on that one were that the API in 7 changes quite significantly - mostly around how users are coded for, but a lot of older deprecated api calls are also removed.  This means some scripts need updating during the upgrade (the extent of that depends on what you've written!), but the worst case is they simply stop working until they're fixed, not damaging data.

Mark Stern · Answer

We are on JIRA 6.4.12, with Agile 6.7.12, and ScriptRunner 4.1.3.4. We have a few other small add-ons, but not business-critical like ScriptRunner for us. We do not have ServiceDesk.

Appreciate the answers thus far. Perhaps it is safest to go to 7.0 first, and then upgrade from 7.0 to 7.3. Anything I lose by going through that route other than time and effort?