How do you manage the development of your Jira instance?

[Penn]

We are migrating legacy applications to our Jira instance which focuses mainly on business decisions. The initial project went well and we continue to add projects. Some projects interlink, others are standalone. The teams are getting feature requests for our Jira projects involving workflow changes, field tweaks, etc.

We leverage a large selection of plugins, including ScriptRunner, Better PDF Exporter, and Jira Workflow Toolbox. Sometimes the change requests require some tweaking and testing which if done correctly could adversely impact our production systems. 

We are challenged with the best practice for developing changes to production Jira projects. We can develop our solutions in our dev environment but then we still need to migrate changes to production. This is a manual process as well.

Overall, managing development requirements and change requests for Jira projects seems awkward and very unlike developing software. It is not the "Fork a branch -> Code -> Test -> Publish -> Merge Request". Instead, as far as I know, its "Build in dev -> Test -> Manually Migrate to Production." In single instance changes this isn't too bad but if I've got multiple changes in multiple projects, I have to remember each detailed change and make them in production.

Is there a better way?

tl;dr - Changes to production Jira projects are awkward and can cause issues. What's the best practice for developing changes in projects, workflows, plugins, scripts for Jira and pushing to production?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

There are a couple of things I would be doing here.

First, I usually have a Jira project to keep all the requests for new and changed apps, projects, fields and so-on.  In some cases, I even wrote scripts to do some parts of the requests automatically.

More important to this question though is that your user-story is exactly what lead Botron to write Configuration Manager, Pepe to write Project Configurator, and some others (that I haven't used or met the authors of, so struggle to name).  They needed to do config in dev/staging and then push it to production automatically.  

[Penn]

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist- Thank you! We've worked with Project Configurator. That helped when we were building new projects in DEV and pushing to PROD. I did not know about Configuration Manager and this might be exactly what we're looking for!