Worst Jira Admin Contest: Single Environment

[#1]

Mistake 4

It’s shocking, but many organizations don’t have a test environment! I didn’t have one when I first started out either. But I quickly saw how important it was to be able to experiment and learn without impacting production data. You need a place to see how your changes work with real-life scenarios.

Options for Cloud

Here are some test environment options for Cloud customers using the Atlassian hosted environment.

Sandbox

In Cloud: admin.atlassian.com > Products > Sandbox

There’s a sandbox option built into all Premium and Enterprise plans. This is an isolated environment where you can test and experiment without impacting production. The application has the same user limit as the production application it’s linked to. The sandbox application will has its own URL which is similar to the production URL.

Read more: https://support.atlassian.com/organization-administration/docs/manage-product-sandboxes

Dev Instance

If you’re an Atlassian Marketplace developer, you can sign up for a free development instance. Developer assets are subject to the Atlassian Developer Terms, which are additional to the regular terms of service. This licenses comes with a limited number of users for test purposes. For example, you can only have 1 JSM agent user and 5 Jira Software users.

Read more: https://developer.atlassian.com/platform/marketplace/getting-started

Free Version

There’s also a free version of Cloud. It’s like the paid version, except it includes less features. For example, it doesn’t include project or issue permissions. It won’t help you test those areas. That’s why I prefer the previous ideas.

Read more: https://www.atlassian.com/software/free

Other Ideas

Another option is to get a second application instance and pay for just a few users.

You can also start a new free trial. This might be helpful if you’re testing the features of a different Cloud plan and don’t wish to upgrade or downgrade production.

Finally, if you have no better option, create a test project in your production application.

Options for Data Center

Here are some test environment options for Data Center customers hosting their own software:

Per Atlassian: "Atlassian supplies "developer" licenses that can be used by existing commercial license holders who wish to deploy non-production installations of our software to use in QA/staging environments."

Read more: https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/get-a-developer-license-for-jira-server-744526918.html

my.atlassian.com

There’s also a 30-day free trial available. Visit my.atlassian.com and click the “New Trial License“ link.

If you have no better option, create a test project in prod.

Regardless of the method you choose, make sure you have a place to test your changes before you unleash them on your users! 

Always make sure your test environment settings match your production environment as much as possible. Don’t forget to include any reverse proxies, SSL, or load balancer settings.

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[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

@Rachel Wright Regarding "Options for Data Center": you do not need to use trial licenses for the staging instance, actually!

If you have a commercial license, you are eligible for a free "developer license"! That is valid until the expiration of the commercial license, so you don't have to obtain a new one in every 30 days, and it is designed for non-production, staging, testing purposes.

See: https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/get-a-developer-license-for-jira-server-744526918.html

[Rachel Wright]

Thanks so much for that info @Aron Gombas _Midori_ ! I'll add it above.

[Matt Doar]

This isn't just for Jira. Or even all the Atlassian products. This is for all services/tools that you manage. Without somewhere to play with the thing, how will you ever make the mistakes that are needed to learn?