This event is postponed, because Berlin as of March 14th, has closed all public locations and prohibits events with more than 50+ people, excluding - for now - restaurants - if they can keep 1,5m distance between tables.
We will switch to virtual, stay tuned.
Hello everyone,
during the last (and first) Atlassian Community Breakfast (https://ace.atlassian.com/e/mbq8mp/) on January 30th, Hubert and Joerg approached us, because we asked them if we could use one of the Community meeting to get your input on a challenge that we are facing. They suggested that we post our question here to get the discussion started and then use the Second Breakfast (https://ace.atlassian.com/e/mg8kw9/) on March 26th to discuss this topic face to face.
So this is our question:
How do you solve the challenge of tool-supported deployment of Jira project configuration changes from staging/DEV instance to production instance?
We are an IT consulting company and are supporting customers in their development process using Jira.
Let us illustrate our challenge with a sample scenario (WLOG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Without_loss_of_generality):
- The customer has a Jira development system (DEV) that is a clone of the production system (PROD). Both are Jira server instances.
- We have full admin permissions on the instances (both Jira admin and Server admin).
- The DEV instance is used to try out changes to Jira configurations (schemes, workflows, …) in multiple projects.
- After the configuration changes have been tested on DEV, they must be deployed to PROD.
- This deployment should require minimum manual effort and copy the changes 1:1 without any errors.
Our question is, can we find a tool that can accomplish this?
We evaluated the Project Configurator from Adaptivist (https://www.adaptavist.com/atlassian-apps/project-configurator-for-jira/ ) and Botron’s Configuration Manager (https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1211611/configuration-manager-for-jira?hosting=server&tab=overview )
Our discussion points:
- Under which conditions is it feasible?
- What level of complexity do plugins add?
- How about a plain Vanilla Jira (without any non-Atlassian add-ons)?
- Which Plugins are officially supported by the tools, which are not?
- How complex are the workflows?
- How trivial or easy is it to test new configurations?
- How complex or difficult is it to get sufficient test coverage?
- Dependencies between projects?
- How many shared schemas (Screens, Workflows, Fields, ...) can be handled?
- Frequency of changes: one-time push of new projects vs. repeated pushes for each config update?
- Are there any other methods?
- Groovy scripts
- Java code
- Self-developed plugins
- REST API
- …
We are looking forward to your input here and discussing some of your answers in greater details during the second breakfast. Thank you for your support.
Matthias & Caterina
