Updating Workflows in our Projects : Help needed with Procedure

Question

Hello All

We use JIRA (with Agile) for executing our projects. We are on Jira version 7.4.2. This is a standalone installation.

We have identified that our workflows across the projects used by our teams are not consistent and we would like to standardise them. We have several concurrent connections.

What would be the procedure :

1. Should we take a backup of the PROD DB, clone a separate DB from PROD backup, make changes on PROD. In case of any errors point the JIRA installation to PROD DB?

2. There is a Backup JIRA option from System settings. Should we use this?

Please help and / or refer me to specific part of documentation

Alexey Matveev · Answer

It is written in the article why it is recommended. If these conditions are true for you, then use the native backup.

after you change your workflows you will need to publish them. If you deleted statuses then Jira will ask you to move issues which are in the deleted statuses to the new ones. After it the change will be over. If you are not going to delete statuses, then no change to the current issues needed.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

If you restore the database, you'll be rolling back everything to what it was before.

If you are just editing a workflow, then existing issues using it won't be changed - they do have a pointer that says "I'm using this workflow", but it just a pointer.

If you are changing to a new workflow (even if it is a copy of the current one), then existing issues will have their pointers changed to the new workflow, and they may have to be migrated too.  This happens if the new workflow does not include a status the old workflow did.  The issues need a valid status, which means you'll need to choose a new status for them from the new workflow.  (If you don't remove status, that's fine, the issues won't change)

Keshav Tadimeti · Answer

Hello Alexey

Thanks for your answers.

The JIra Back up for version 7.4 is here

https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver074/backing-up-data-881683990.html

It recommends native DB backup tools over the XML backup - something I had suspected initially.

So the steps seem to be :-

1. Take a DB backup of your DB (using the approach recommended by your DB vendor).

2. Change the workflow.

3. In case something goes wrong, restore the changed DB using the backup.

Now I have another question - what happens to the older issues that were managed using the old workflow. Nothing happens since they exist in a some status?