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 ;)
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 :)
Rebekka Heilmann (viadee)
IT Consultant
viadee Unternehmensberatung AG
Germany
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