Converting a trello board to Jira Agile board

[Deleted user]

We've got many teams each with their own trello boards, at least a few dozen in total. Each of these boards has a unique workflow depending on the board. For example, our blog writers have a board with the columns 'ideas', 'researching', 'in progress', 'draft complete', 'ready for publication', 'published'. Its easy for them to create a new column in their workflow, just a couple of clicks.

However from what I can gather in JIRA Agile, I need to create new (global) issue statuses to represent each of these columns and then create a workflow using the new status's and then tie that workflow to the relevant issue type. This would mean creating hundreds of new issue status's and a huge amount of work to replicate the workflow of each board. In addition a team member cannot easily just add a new column 'issue status' from the board. What am I missing?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

You're not missing much really - you're going to need to replicate all that configuration.  Trello and JIRA Software are only similar on the surface, JIRA has a lot more power behind the scenes, but that requires a lot more config.

There is one big trick which is not immediately obvious though.

If you create a project for each board (I'm assuming that's the best way to map the existing data - it may not be - boards in JIRA can go across projects, so it may be that you actually want to reorganise along project lines instead of boards.  But that's a different conversation), then you can

1. Create the project as a Scrum or Kanban project so you get the initial board set up
2. Go into the board as a system administrator (i.e. not just "project admin") and change the board to use "simplified workflow"

That will let your users (project admins) set up the columns and status that they want for the board.  Even if you're not going to leave it that way, the interface for a board is a very simple way to build the workflows you're going to need to replicate - it's a heck of a lot faster than "add new workflow, add loads of status, add loads of transitions via the workflow editor"

[Deleted user]

Thats really helpful, I didn't know about the 'simplified workflow' option, that will definitely make a huge difference to this migration, thank you Nic!

[Nelson Chissano]

he simplest way is to import your trelo boards into Jira and later do some additional configuration if needed.