Topic for 2nd Atlassian Community Breakfast

Caterina Trainito February 11, 2020

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

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Dan Ivory _Orah Apps_
Marketplace Partner
Marketplace Partners provide apps and integrations available on the Atlassian Marketplace that extend the power of Atlassian products.
February 11, 2020

Hi @Caterina Trainito

I'm part of the Project Configurator team. That's great you have tried PC for deploying from staging to production!

If you have time, we'd be really interested to know more about your experience using PC for this. Is there an email address I could contact you on maybe? Mine is divory@adaptavist.com if you'd like to message me. 

Kind regards,

Dan

Jousef February 13, 2020

Hey @Caterina Trainito and Matthias!

This is a very interesting topic and exactly the problem why I see myself not utilizing the staging environment we have often enough. It's a chore to test it in staging, then rebuild it completely from scratch in production with the risk of doing something (even if it's just a small thing) wrong and with that, the whole purpose of testing it is eliminated.

I definitely need to look at those two tools you mentioned to see how this can make our lives easier and make our staging environment actually something that's being used for testing those kinds of project configuration changes.

Thank you for bringing this up! I'll try to dig a bit deeper into this topic and am hopefully prepared on our second breakfast meetup. :)

Best,
Jousef

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