Jira Sandbox?

Question

I'm fairly new to administrating Jira and I want to create a new board to support my team.  This involves some trial and error, so I want a scratch version to play with first.  But I'd rather not rebuild from scratch once I'm happy with the results.  Is there a way to work on a board in a sandbox (not visible) before cutting it over to general use (visible)?  Can I create dummy users in the sandbox to experiement with how users will view the contents?

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Hello @Andrew Dowd

Sandboxes are available only if you are using the Premium subscription.

https://support.atlassian.com/organization-administration/docs/manage-product-sandboxes/

The visibility of an agile board is based on the visibility of the filter used by the board. You could create a filter that you do not share with anybody, and create a board from that filter, and the board would not be visible to others. When you wanted to make that board visible to others, you would change the Share settings for the filter.

However, if that filter is referencing an in use project, any changes you made to issues in your sandbox board would be reflected in the real issues.

If you need to manipulate issue data as part of your sandbox, then you should set up a new project that uses the same configuration as the original project, and base your filter on that new project.

With a new project you could also restrict the project visibility itself while you are experimenting.

And then when your experiments are done, you can change the filter used by the board so that the filter references the original project, and change the filter Shares to make it visible to the team.

With all of that occurring on your production Jira instance, the creation of dummy users is up to you. That depends on how you manage users in your environment.

Another alternative is to set up a second site as a trial. However there is no native method to copy a board configuration from a Jira product in one site to a Jira product in another site.