It's that time of year... A brief thought on Jira Cleanup

[#1]

We did it. In preparation of our Jira migration and also because it was much needed, we just finished our Jira Cleanup.

Since end of January we analysed, deleted, moved, scripted and updated our instance. There are many ressources and Apps that help you with these steps, provide scripts, How-To's and Tools. The Cleanup itself is tedious, but nothing the average Jira Admin can't do. We did it without the help of Tools, just with some Database scripts and manual compares.

The bigger challenge and much more time-consuming task was actually figuring out what to cleanup though. While conducting quantitive analysis per App or Script is the obvious step, we spent loads of time trying to figure out what the entities we'd like to clean up are used for.

Especially when it came to Workflows and Statuses, we had a wild mix of English / German, 10 different names for the same thing and sometimes simply workflows that have been added to but never cleaned up. However, as an Admin you can't simply delete what you wish without knowing the consequences. So I talked to each and every project Admin that used funny statuses in their project to consolidate similar statuses or remove those, that were only used in one project. I optimised their Boards and Workflows (regardless the statuses) on the way, which was a nice side effect.

So I guess my "brief thought" would be, not to forget to talk to your users before going nuts in the Jira Administration ;) 

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And last but not least something for our number nerds. (Talking to you @Kristján Mathiesen )

I've spent over 100 hours on Cleanup (and some other migration preparation) in the last two month and this is what we got out of it:

Entity	Before	After
Attachments	23084	15606
Comments	127859	88288
Custom Fields (not cleaned up yet)	167	168
Groups	619	138
Individually Archived Issues	0	0
Issue Types	36	21
Issues	68457	48804
Priorities	10	5
Projects	116	75
Resolutions	18	8
Screen Schemes	172	110
Screens	215	147
Statuses	136	43
Users	1070	400
Workflows	110	50
Filters	841	351
Boards	298	133
Dashboards	135	98

P.S. That's a learning we already had in our Confluence migration and are trying to keep in mind with the upcoming Jira migration :)

[Kristján Geir Mathiesen]

Well done, @Rebekka Heilmann (viadee) !

[Bill Sheboy]

Nice work, @Rebekka Heilmann (viadee) 

Did your team of admins also check for old / broken automation rules...or ones with incorrect scoping?  How about webhooks, email handlers, and addon apps (perhaps no longer used)?

Kind regards,
Bill

[Rebekka Heilmann (viadee)]

@Bill Sheboy luckily, there is only a very limited number of projects using advanced functions - my hopes are that I can change that with some training, once we're in Cloud and improve the users' experience :)

We checked Automation rules after the clean up as a lot of them broke anyway. I consolidated some and deleted others, but most are actually needed and useful. We have Scriptrunner but only use a tiny fraction of what it offers. Therefore there wasn't much to clean up on that dark side of Jira ;) 

We did repair as many filters and boards we could per database scripts as they all break when you rename/merge entities. That's the main reason why we did the clean up before migrating.

[Bill Sheboy]

Awesome! 

And with the migration to Cloud, get ready for "the gift that keeps on giving [admin headaches]": team-managed projects ;^)

[Yatish Madhav]

Nice @Rebekka Heilmann (viadee)  kudos to you on this!

We have been doing a clean up for the past 4 or 5 years, but struggling with the nicely bolded "talk to your users" part  ...

I wish i took note of the numbers of elements like you have at the start ... I have started doing this over the last few months and the below is what I can share and hope it gives others hope that a clean up calms many jira admin headaches :D