Is there a recommendation for upgrade order of Atlassian products?

[Susan DiMaggio]

I currently have these Atlassian products:

Crowd 2.11, Confluence 5.9.4, Jira 7.0.10 and Bitbucket 4.4.2. 

It is now time to upgrade, and the users want these versions:

Crowd 3.0.2,  Confluence 6.5.1, Jira 7.6.1 and Bitbucket 5.5.4

Is there a recommended order for upgrading these products? I assume I start with crowd, but I am not sure about any dependencies the other products might have. 

thanks for any helpful hints.

[AnnWorley]

We don't have an official recommendation but I am inclined as you are, to upgrade Crowd first, if everything depends on Crowd to authenticate. Crowd 3.1.1 has been released, do your users have a reason they would rather have Crowd 3.0.2?

I asked a Jira engineer about Jira and Bitbucket and there is no preference for the sequence of upgrading the two of them. From Confluence 5.9.4 to 6.5.1 is a major upgrade because Collaborative editing was introduced in Confluence 6.0.

I strongly recommend trying the upgrades in a test environment first to avoid surprises in Production. Mirror Production as much as possible, for example, if the applications in Production have application links between them, link the test apps the same way.

I hunted down some docs that should help you get started:

Crowd

Upgrading Crowd

Crowd 3.1 Release Notes (in case they want the latest)

Crowd 3.0 Release Notes

Bitbucket

Install or upgrade Bitbucket Server

Bitbucket Server 5.5 release notes

Jira

Upgrading JIRA applications

JIRA Software 7.6.x upgrade notes

Confluence

Confluence 6.5 Upgrade Notes

Upgrading Confluence