What should be the best practice for addressing/removing very old issues in Jira?

Question

Hi,

We follow a practice of archiving projects not used for 6 months. Then keep the these projects archived for another considerable duration and finally remove them permanently after taking a longterm backup. This practice has been helpful for us to keep list of our projects in Jira checked.

But we have a huge list of active but very old projects also which have been growing.

My question is that how do we handle such projects which are growing and have a huge amount old issues. So for example we have around few hundered thousands issues which were last updated 2 years ago. I simply want to remove them. But it seems easy saying than done.

One thought is that take all the closed, resolved, rejected, duplicate etc. issues and address them first.

whenever I take this up with agile coaches, they get jittery about it. and ask me questions like, how can we restore the issues? will they be restored with same contents, description, history, comments etc? what if they have links and included in the sprints etc.

well ofcourse I can produce these scenarios and find the answers.

but what does the community suggest about this situation? is there any best practice that can be adopted?

-thanks

Andrew Laden · Answer

The DataCenter editions of jira (which you will have to start using in less then a year if you want support anyway) have a feature for Project Archiving.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/archiving-a-project-938847621.html

One option would be to create a "archive" version of the active project, with the same config etc. Move old tickets into that project, and then archive it.

Then every year or so, Unarchive it, move more tickets into it, and re-archive again.

That way nothing gets removed, links still work etc, but it gets out of your indexes and search results, which should improve performance.

There is also issue level archiving

https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/archiving-an-issue-968669980.html

Either of those should give you some options.

If you are looking for a more general "Best Practices" I think that is really organization dependent. I don't think there is a one-size-fits-all recommendation.

Aron Gombas _Midori_ · Answer

We are developing the Better PDF Exporter app which is frequently used for archiving purposes.

It fits that use case simply because it captures all the details of an issue (field values, change history, worklogs, comments,  etc.). Even attachments can be embedded in the PDF document exported from an issue!

So customers export their issues to PDF, put those to a doc management system (for searching purposes) or just a shared drive on GDrive/Dropbox/Sharepoint, then remove the issues from Jira.

It doesn't support "restore", of course, but it is very easy to do.