The JCMA is a great tool and does a lot of things. However, is it trying to do too much and be all things to all people?
My scenario that gives rise to this thought:
In many cases, I don't want to move a given project as-is. I have several projects that are slated for a scorched earth migration. The intent is to make a new home for them, migrate the data, then move the data into them. Even for the cases where I want to keep the project as-is, there are so many things to fix, often with tedious effort, that it would be easier to build it from scratch in Cloud and... move data into it. That would also allow more pre and UAT testing BEFORE stuff gets cut over and have less cases of a problem creep through because I didn't catch it.
For the most part, especially on the scorched earth migrations, the only thing I want to retain is the data with the highest possible fidelity. The only reason I am using JCMA at all in these cases as that remains the only way to get the data there with the least possible data loss.
I suspect I am not the only person in this situation.
Given this preamble, maybe a JDMA with the following characteristics would be a Good Thing:
I can't help but think this would be rather easier to build and make/keep stable than a tool that is trying to do All the Things in an environment as complex as Jira. It's almost the same as the extant "move" or "clone" functions within Jira but knows how to put it somewhere else. If I had one of these, I could literally be halfway done my migration.
Case in point: Yesterday, I tried 5 times to get the beta JCMA that will migrate JSD to JSM to work. The 5th time was the final straw roadblock. In the time I mucked about with it, I could've built the required JSM project, tested it, and simply moved the data in. I would be done, not sitting here with a failed attempt at 1 of 7 JSM projects I need to migrate, and working on 2 of 7.
Even with JSW projects, using JCMA imposes the migration cycle of:
If there were a definitive JDMA the cycle would change to:
I do know there are sync tools that kind of do this but the two I tried had almost as many pitfalls to get working as JCMA does today and they aren't definitively migration tools.
Thoughts anyone?
That, @Dave Liao
To my tiny mind, the most important part of the whole migration effort is getting the DATA there with the highest possible fidelity.
Were a clean way to do THAT exist, the solo guy like me could chip away rebuilding function up top and move a project or group of projects at a time chosen to have a given group of humans not have to straddle both hosted and cloud for too long or even at all.
Conversely, if there was a rush, one could reach out to an Atlassian partner with the instructions, "See this here? Make that over there", have a team descend in for a ShipIt party, and then lay in the data on top of the new TESTED and VETTED environment in one fell swoop.