Upgrading from Jira 3.4.1 to Jira Agile 6.4.11

Question

We are currently using a very old version of JIRA (3.4.1) for many years and would like to upgrade to a version that our holding company use 6.4.11 and would especially like to start managing your projects in an Agile way.

Firstly, it is possible to do so without loosing any historic information, especially attachments?

Secondly, if so, what is the exact procedure to do it?

MattS · Answer

Yeah, about one upgrade per major version of JIRA. The trick is knowing which ones are necessary

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

From experience, I would strongly recommend

* 3.4 -> 3.6 (there's massive changes in 3.6 and going past it in one hit caused me no end of problems every time it was tried)
* 3.6 -> 3.13  (If you have problems here, then make more steps - go through 3.8 and 3.10)
* 3.13 -> 4.4 (again, if you have issues, drop to 4.0 then 4.4)
* 4.4 -> 5.2 - this is actually the one step that can usually be skipped, 4.4 -> 6.4 often works.
* 5.2 -> 6.4

Chris Dunne · Answer

You would need to perform several upgrades moving from JIRA 3.x to JIRA 4.x to JIRA 5.x and then JIRA 6.x. In theory you should be able to go from JIRA 4 to JIRA 6 but it is not recommended.

This will take some time. You success will depend on the level of customization you have in JIRA 3, so you would need to look at things like add-ons you are using if any and make sure they have an upgrade path too.

I can't give you the exact procedure but if you go to the archives on the documentation site you'll find the old upgrade instructions for each version. You need to read these and the release notes carefully.

If you can you should try to perform the upgrade on a test instance first. Don't forget you will also need to upgrade your database and Java version.