Experience during upgrade to Jira 7.0.5 and Jira SD 3.0.5

Question

My experience from upgrading from JIRA 6.4.11 to 7.0.5. on our TEST environment can be described as complicated and very time consuming.
I have been running in various issues although we have a well maintained environment.
We are using JIRA, AGILE and also the Servicedesk. 
I had various errors and no access to the Servicedesk at all right after the upgrade. After a time consuming research I found the solution for the problem: the correct and valid license keys got messed up so I had to uninstall the license keys, reenter the same keys and had to restart the application.
In addition half of the purchased add-ons are incompatibel with the new version and the jenkins plugin, which is necessary for us had to be disabled because it caused a critical error: (com.atlassian.util.concurrent.LazyReference$InitializationException: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com/atlassian/jira/JiraDataType...) so that the agile boards were not accessible.
My biggest problem was the somehow muddy and for me unclear documentation and the migration hub did not provide any useful information for me as admin.

C R · Answer

Hello Phil,

thank you very much for your comment.

my problem was not in general Plugins compatibility, because I know very well all these issues from the past and that's not a problem. It was the first time for me that incompatible plugins really broke the access and that the new license model also lead to problems for the license key processing and no access to JIRA agile

I learned that the API had undergone significant and major changes and as I wrote before: my main problem was that the documentation was not clear and precise enough, from my perception. In the past, the documentation was always very well and detailed, however I noticed that this has changed.

Phill Fox · Answer

Hi @Celia Roser

Did you check the compatibility of all your plugins before you attempted to upgrade to 7.0.5 there is a lag between new versions being released by Atlassian and some plugins being updated to match.

For example a quick check on Marketplace.atlassian.com shows the Jenkins plugin is only supported up to version 6.4.12

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Prior to upgrading you should use the plugin compatibility check to see which version you are able to upgrade to with your current set of plugins and then decide whether to disable a plugin or only go to a lower than current version. See more details at https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/UPM/Checking+add-on+compatibility+with+application+updates

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