What are best practices and tools for versioning and promoting changes to a Jira Project definition

Question

We have DEV and PROD Jira servers so that we can test out changes to workflow, ui, custom fields, etc in DEV prior to promoting those changes to PROD.  For most other products that we use there are tools for promoting configuration changes from one environment to another (and adding them to onsite source control so we can diff and/or roll back).  I am struggling finding online resources on the best way to track changes to DEV and promote them to PROD.  Can anyone point me to examples and/or resources on the best practices for managing changes to Jira under appropriate change management best practices?

Benjamin Spead · Answer

Thank you @Pramodh M for the quick response!

I am all set in terms of the mechanics of tracking a request for a change through the implementation in DEV and then delivery and testing in PROD.  I would just like to not manually implement the change in both DEV and PROD.

We had tried to do this with Project Configurator previously but found the export/import to be somewhat fragile.  It may be that we were doing something incorrectly - I will take another look.

I take it from the fact that you're referring me to a plug-in that there is no native way to handle change progression between Jira instances?

If anyone can point me to real-world examples or discussion of using Project Configurator other than https://docs.adaptavist.com/pc/latest/get-started I would appreciate it.

Pramodh M · Answer

Hi @Benjamin Spead

Welcome to the community 🙂

Let me know what you think of this approach

Create a Project in Prod environment and track the changes in each issue from Dev to Prod for each of the changes.

Offcourse create a workflow for approval, status mentioning whether the changes are reflected in prod or cancelled. Point is you will have the changes or requests tracked in each issue

You can use this for audit as well

Or you could explore options from add-ons as well

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1211147/project-configurator-for-jira?hosting=datacenter&tab=overview

Thanks,

Pramodh